APBRmetrics

Greetings Everyone:

My name is John Carrier; I am a high school coach from the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area of Minnesota (USA). Over the last two years I have become VERY excited in the idea of Sabermetrics. Obviously like most I watched moneyball, dabbled in it a little myself, and figured out the math is over my head. So because I didn't want to give it up, I contacted the University of Minnesota statistics department and found some graduate students who were willing to help me out. But I feel like I am on a treasure hunt and don't know where to go. I've been reading a lot about what others do, but I don't know where to start. Any advice? Formulas to start with, what i want to be looking for, etc? I jsut feel like I am on a treasure hunt with no map and no clue what I am looking for.

Thank you for your time,


John Carrier

_Basketball on Paper_, by Dean Oliver. And then "A Starting Point for Analyzing Basketball Statistics" by Kubtako, Oliver, Pelton, and Rosenbaum in the _Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports_, 2007 volume 3 issue 3.

Second the rec on DeanO's book. That's where I started.

Here's my "advanced stats primer":

http://www.d3coder.com/thecity/advanced-stats-primer/

A rather more abstract suggestion, as those books already suggested are the standard literature, but it's worth delving through Feynman's lectures on The Character of Physical Law, as these lectures really set the tone for how scientific research and model building should be attacked: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charac ... ysical_Law - audio and written versions are freely available online if you google.

As a high school coach, just getting the basics for your team would be helpful--calculating basic advanced stats like TS%, USG%, BLK%, STL%, ORB%, DRB%, AST% and the like would be a very good start.

Once you have those, you can get more of a feel for synergies between players by looking at how each lineup performed, in terms of point differential, RB%, and similar things.

As coach, stats like PER and Win Shares are probably not that useful--those are more for the front office and fans. You'd still be interested in rough measures of how good the players are (so as to play the better players), but I'd guess you'd be more interested in style of play, fit, and things like that....

A stat like TS% and USG% could help you see how your players are fitting on offense, who is really shouldering the load, and who (with a high TS% but low USG%) might need more looks if possible.

Also, although I don't visit them I know there are websites, blogs, groups, etc. for basketball coaches, just as we have this apbrmetrics site for people into basketball stats and analysis. I would guess that some of those coaching websites concentrate on or at least address these quantitative analytic issues. (If not, boy there's an opportunity for someone to create a ground-breaking website.) I have zero links to offer, but every once in a while I'll follow a link to a story and it'll turn out to be on a site that's clearly oriented towards coaches.