Archive of posts with tag 'Basketball'

Sam Hinkie's Resignation Letter →

August 30, 2022 • #

This resignation letter from former Philadephia 76ers GM Sam Hinkie is full of gems. Here are a couple.

On contrarianism in a short-sighted league when you’re always under the microscope:

To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs. What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty pat, and you’re stuck just hoping for good things to happen, rather than developing a strategy for how to make them happen.

On traditions, conventional wisdom, and the limits of advanced statistics in basketball:

Maybe someday the information teams have at their disposal won’t require scouring the globe watching talented players and teams. That day has not arrived, and my Marriott Rewards points prove it from all the Courtyards I sleep in from November to March. There is so much about projecting players that we still capture best by seeing it in person and sharing (and debating) those observations with our colleagues. What kind of teammate is he? How does he play under pressure? How broken is his shot? Can he fight over a screen? Does he respond to coaching? How hard will he work to improve? And maybe the key one: will he sacrifice—his minutes, his touches, his shots, his energy, his body—for the ultimate team game that rewards sacrifice? That information, as imperfect and subjective as it may be, comes to light most readily in gyms and by watching an absolute torrent of video.

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Weekend Reading: NBA Bubble, Digital Homesteads, and Amateurs vs. Professionals

October 10, 2020 • #

🏀 What I Learned Inside the NBA Bubble

A good piece giving an inside look of what life is like for a journalist inside the bubble.

I’ve missed most of the playoffs this year during this strange time for sports. It’s been impressive that the NBA could pull this off and still put together a compelling end to the season when everyone assumed that it’d be an asterisk-ridden result with players and teams lost to COVID. It’s turned out to be incredibly well executed. The finals have nearly the same energy that I remember from recent seasons. As of writing, the Heat have pulled back to 2 games to 3 against the Lakers.

🌾 Homesteading the Twittersphere

Alex Danco on scarcity and gift culture:

Status is clearly scarce, and in a gift culture like the free software community – or on Finance Twitter – the way you earn status is by putting in real effort, and then giving away the fruits of that effort.

Of course, the effort you put in has to actually be valuable, and recognized as such by your peer group. So the optimal thing for you to do, whether you’re an open source software developer or a Twitter armchair analyst, is to figure out your specialty zone that’s simultaneously useful, but unique – and then homestead it. Establish and cultivate it, like a garden or a plot of land, that you’re tending for the communal benefit of everyone. People come to associate that little plot of land with you specifically, and think of you whenever they go near it.

🏆 The Difference Between Amateurs and Professionals

A solid list from Farnam Street:

Amateurs think they are good at everything. Professionals understand their circles of competence.

Amateurs see feedback and coaching as someone criticizing them as a person. Professionals know they have weak spots and seek out thoughtful criticism.

Amateurs focus on being right. Professionals focus on getting the best outcome.

Amateurs make decisions in committees so there is no one person responsible if things go wrong. Professionals make decisions as individuals and accept responsibility.

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Success and Failure →

June 13, 2019 • #

I’ve been a subscriber to Ben Falk’s excellent Cleaning the Glass blog for well over a year now. He’s a former front office analyst for the Sixers and Blazers that started this site with deep analyses on all aspects of basketball, with an eye for statistics and detail.

This is a great piece on what he’s doing with the site, moving from a purely subscription-based blog with a stats site alongside it to flipping that around: a stats and analytics portal with a splash of analysis writing. His work is excellent and worth checking out if you’re interested in deeply understanding the tactics of basketball. I’ve voraciously consumed everything Ben (and his occasional contributors) have written while being a subscriber.

One way I’ve felt this clearly: the pull between working on the stats site and writing. The stats site has been embraced by everyone from fans to NBA front offices to writers from some of the biggest media outlets to coaches to podcasters to agents. And yet there’s still so much more I can do with it. While writing consistently, though, my time is just too limited to keep building it out at the pace it deserves. But splitting my time doesn’t work well either: I can’t be both the best writer I can be and the best web developer I can be simultaneously.

After a lot of careful thought, then, I’ve decided to change things around here a bit. I’m no longer going to write articles for subscribers. Instead, I’m going to spend the majority of my time making Cleaning the Glass Stats the best site for advanced basketball stats on the web, making it as understandable and easy to use as possible.

I hope his next push into building something unique for basketball stats data works out well and will continue to follow all of his work.

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Conference Finals

May 14, 2019 • #

The conference finals are set — Golden State and Portland in the west, Milwaukee and Toronto in the east. A great couple of matchups both likely to go deep. At halftime right now in Oakland, Portland’s keeping it close.

The east series will be a fun one, with Giannis and Kawhi going at it, each with spectacular playoffs going so far.

In other basketball news, earlier this evening New Orleans came away with the number 1 overall draft pick. With the Anthony Davis drama of a few months ago, and rumors of some sort of trade deal in the summer possibly happening, it’s almost like this was staged to really ramp up that drama. With AD, Jrue Holiday, and (probably) Zion Williamson together, it’d be a hard decision not to make a run for it next season with that setup and see what happens.

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Weekend Reading: Human Leverage, Alan Kay, and Mapping the NBA

May 4, 2019 • #

🏋🏽‍♀️ Finding the Point of Human Leverage

Automation is penetrating every industry, but still heavily reliant on human behavior and feedback to make it effective. In this piece, Benedict Evans talks about identifying the point in a workflow where the optimum point of leverage sits for human interaction:

This means that a lot of the system design is around finding the right points of leverage to apply people to an automated system. Do you capture activity that’s already happening? Google began by using the links that already existed. Do you have to stimulate activity in order to capture the value within it? Facebook had to create behaviors before it could use them. Can you apply your own people to some point of extreme leverage? This is Apple Music’s approach, with manually curated playlists matched automatically to tens of millions of users. Or do you have to pay people to do ‘all’ of it?

🎓 Lunch with Alan Kay: How to Become Educated Enough to Invent the Future

This is a great account of an extended conversation with computer scientist Alan Kay. It’s amazing how certain brains can be on such a higher level than the rest of us.

For the few computer idealists among us, we are so lucky to have the legacy left to us by Vannevar Bush, J.C.R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Perlis, John McCarthy, Edsger Dijkstra, John Backus, Ivan Sutherland, and Alan Kay. And those are just some of the names I personally know – I am now ashamed I don’t know more of our history. It’s hard to imagine now because they were so effective, but so much of our world’s computing prosperity today is due to these people. They imagined the computer as a personal device, a communications device, a device to lift off the burden of tedious mental tabulations. Douglas Engelbart imagined a tool that would aid humanity in dealing with the increasingly-complex problems it faces around the world. We’ve only seem a glimpse of that vision, but we need it now more than ever.

So practically, what does this mean for me? Alan also said at lunch that one problem young people make is “having goals.” It’s too early to have goals that “consume one’s horizons,” because young people don’t even know what they don’t know. I think this kind of epistemic modesty is a great idea. I can probably benefit from shifting the focus from my overly-specific goals to “more meta” goals, such as becoming “educated” in a broader sense than I previously thought was possible. The more perspectives I can acquire, the better I’ll be at not fooling myself, and the more I’ll be able to appreciate the richness of the world.

🏀 Kirk Goldsberry and His NBA Maps

Kirk Goldsberry’s new book Sprawlball looks fascinating, covering his work on basketball analytics and his famous hexbinned shot charts showing how the game has changed in recent years. But most folks that have followed his ESPN career probably don’t know about his background in geography and mapmaking:

At its heart, “SprawlBall” is a book of maps. It’s a geography book.

During his junior year at Penn State, Goldsberry took an introduction to cartography class on little more than a whim. “I remember the census data and this software [Graphic Information Systems] that basically links databases to maps,” he said. It was this perfect balance of art and science, and I devoted the next 15 years of my life to it.”

He switched his major, got a cartography degree and then moved to Washington to make flood maps for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. After a stint working for a software mapping company in Maine, Goldsberry got his master’s and PhD at UC Santa Barbara, focused on the intersection of computer graphics data visualization and cartography.

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NBA Playoffs

April 19, 2019 • #

This post is a bit late since the playoffs started last Sunday. This is the best time of year for sports where you’ve got the NBA in the postseason, MLB in full swing, Stanley Cup, PGA majors, and the final stretches of the Premier League and Champions League. So much to watch.

The NBA is especially dense for me, as a fan with no team allegiance. I try to watch as much as I can. But in these first couple rounds there are far too many games to catch all of. Must-watch series for me in round 1:

OKC / Blazers
Rockets / Jazz
Sixers / Nets
Bucks / Pistons

If it goes the way it looks like it will, there’ll be a 2018 Western Conference Final rematch in round 2.

Round 2 is shaping up to have some great matchups. As I type this I’m watching Portland and OKC in game three in Oklahoma. Competitive in the third quarter with Damian Lillard (possibly my favorite NBA player) heating up.

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Adam Silver at the MIT Sloan Conference

March 10, 2019 • #

A fantastic one-on-one conversation between NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Bill Simmons from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

Adam Silver is one of the most thoughtful, enthusiastic, and interesting guys in sports leadership. He clearly cares immensely about promoting the health of the league and players. This conversation ranges through mental health, NBA trade deadlines, G League, tampering, and more.

At least 3 or 4 times he references European soccer features as having potential in the NBA — relegation (a long shot), player academies, and my favorite idea, a mid-season tournament. The FA and League Cups in England are great models you could use. But it’d take time to build enough tradition to give weight to the tournament trophy itself.

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NBA Season at the Halfway Point

January 9, 2019 • #

We’re right at the middle of the season, and this one’s been an exciting one so far. A couple teams at the top expected, a few others blew up out of nowhere. The Bucks in the east, Nuggets in the west, PG carrying OKC, Harden’s crazy streak the past month, Giannis’s nightly consistency, Embiid’s dominance. So many fun threads to follow.

I’m thoroughly enjoying League Pass again this year. I probably watch an average of 5-6 games a week, and sometimes more if there are good matchups and I have time. Between YouTube TV for the national broadcasts and League Pass for the others, I can watch anything. Unless there are specific noteworthy matchups, I’ll usually favor watching the Pelicans (Anthony Davis!), Bucks, Blazers, Raptors, or Sixers. I’d love to see the Bucks go deep into the playoffs. And of course the Lakers defying gravity and having LeBron carry them late into the post-season would be electric.

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Weekend Reading: Exploring Zanzibar, Singapore of the Future, & Watching Basketball

December 1, 2018 • #

🇹🇿 Exploring Zanzibar with Mapillary

A fun travel post from the Mapillary team after FOSS4G in Dar es Salaam. A drive around Zanzibar collecting images for OpenStreetMap mapping. Also check out part 2 of the journey.

🇸🇬 City of the Future: Singapore

Singapore is an interesting experiment: a benevolent authoritarian government, small population, and limited geography to leverage and nurture. This documentary is a bit of a commercial for their plans for the future. Still some fun ideas that (if successful) other megacities could use to maintain quality of life with population growth.

🏀 How to Watch Basketball

This was a great explainer. I’ve only been seriously watching basketball a couple of years, and I was starting to figure out some of these techniques myself. It’s interesting to see how coaches and professional analysts approach watching a game.

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Podcasts for the New NBA Season

October 28, 2018 • #

The NBA season spun up a couple of weeks ago. With that, NBA Twitter and the NBA podcast scene is back in full force. Here are the feeds I try to keep up with:

The Ringer NBA Show is every weekday with a rotating cast of hosts, so you can always count on deep dives of nearly every game. And NBA Desktop is a must-watch each week. Hilarious.

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Browse the full archive →

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