Customer Reviews

Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First of all, I am the author, so the 5-star rating is admittedly biased, but also honest as I wrote the book under the influence of award-winning books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel," "Good to Great," and "Ender's Game." Now that it's 3 years after Basketball on Paper went to press, a couple years after the description here was written, and a year or more after the book got me a job in the NBA, I wanted to add an updated description.

I wrote the book in the hopes of presenting a scientific _method_ for approaching basketball. By "method", I mean that it doesn't present a magical all-encompassing rating for players, but rather a _structure_ for basketball as genetics provided a structure for understanding life and biology. The possession-based concept introduced early in the book allows you to evaluate strategy, the chemistry of a team, and, yes, who are better players. It doesn't matter whether it's the NBA, WNBA, college, high school, or the international game -- the methods apply and I've applied them. The book focused on the NBA and WNBA because that was where the statistics were most readily available going back more than a year or two. That is changing and I have already seen foreign leagues incorporating my work into their game.

This structure does introduce formulas, nothing more complicated than the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that I learned through baseball cards when I was 10 years old. For coaches who want to avoid these, I actually recommend reading the last chapter first because it summarizes the conclusions of the previous chapters. For people interested in player evaluation, the book has numerous lists of player stats, how many wins and losses they contributed, and how they did it. This includes players as far back as Bill Russell, but as recent as Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, and Allen Iverson.

For baseball fans, I should say that Bill James' work on Win Shares in baseball paralleled mine in basketball, though we did take slightly different approaches. Bill has even said of the book, "Excellent writing. There are a lot of math guys who just rush from the numbers to the conclusion. . .they'll tell you that Shaq is a real good player but his team would win a couple more games a year if he could hit a free throw. Dean is more than that; he's really struggling to understand the actual problem, rather than the statistical after-image of it. I learn a lot by reading him." I am happy to say that experts in statistical evaluation of baseball (like Bill), football (like Aaron Schatz and Ben Alamar of Pro Football Prospectus), and basketball are all communicating about the common goals we have for doing scientific evaluation of team sports, where analogies to business team environments and global politics abound.

I realized as I wrote the book that there were a million projects that I could do from what is in the book. Those projects have come about and grown even before I joined the Seattle Supersonics in October of 2004. Evaluating strategy has grown so much from the basics in this book. Player evaluation, especially as they move from one league to another, has evolved. And, with the experiment of the 2004-05 season, I got to show how the work significantly helps coaching a team. That season, I joined the Sonics with a fixed roster that was universally picked for last in their division. I worked with the coaches, management, and players to provide a different perspective to their own backgrounds, one that complemented their own expertises. At the end of the season, we won our division, we upset the experts by winning our first round series, and we gave the ultimate NBA champions one of their toughest playoff battles. I felt that we should have won the championship -- perhaps naive, but also a measure of the belief I had in not only the work in Basketball on Paper, but also in the ability of the staff and players I worked with.

Now that I do work in the NBA and apply new tricks of the trade, I can't really write another book sharing my secrets. But Basketball on Paper contains the framework, the basic insights, and a lot of the numbers for understanding a lot more about the beautiful game.

I have been using the formulas and ideas presented in Dean Oliver's book for the past three years. I was never a math fan, but my spreadsheets for calculating basketball statistics are the most complicated I have ever created and it was this book that started my obsession. The book inspired me with a fascination over a new way to look at the game and the players that bring it to life. Mr. Oliver's work was just a starting point and over the past few years I have added other formulas and other mathematical approaches to looking at the game, but I would not have gotten anywhere without this book. It is an essential tool in my toolbox for evaluating and enjoying the game of basketball.

Oliver's work shows a maturity that has been lacking from many basketball evaluation books--John Hollinger's "Basketball Prospectus" being another exception. Not only are players evaluated statistically but their roles on their teams are considered in context in relationship to their numbers. If you want to gain an understanding of basketball as perhaps you've never had before, and are willing to accept the ambiguous nature of numbers themselves, this is the book for you!

I thought it was an excellent book. The author was clearly very knowledgeable both as a basketball player and as a quantitative analyst. Probably this dual identity is also what allowed him to communicate the findings so well to non-analysts while preserving enough of the meat of the analysis for pure analysts to see where it would all lead to.

Best book on sports statistics that I've read.

This is a great book for people who are both numbers geeks and basketball geeks. I wish that there was more of a focus on college basketball, but that's just me. The author even replied to a couple of my questions regarding some of the formulas via email. Highly recommended for a basketball fan intrigued by statistics and indexes.

While Oliver's methods and approaches are all applied to the NBA game in this book, they nevertheless can be applied in whole to the collegiate game. After reading "Basketball on Paper" over the last year and watching the 2009-2010 college basketball season, I can truly say that this book has revolutionized how I view a basketball game -- all for the better.

Without giving away key premises, Oliver truly dives deep into the fundamentals of how a basketball game works to determine tools to evaluate how teams and players do just past the final score. Typical cliches are challenged -- some proven, some shown to be irrelevant -- as he puts a statistical and logical argument behind why the proposed approaches are superior. And I agree with his results. After focusing on them over the past year, I can truly say that this book has helped me further understand how and why a team wins just behind the final score. Diving into the box score alone can reveal hidden gems that you might not have thought about otherwise. If you're a stat nut, a basketball fanatic, or some sort of a combination of the two, this book is a definite must read.

Considering that this is one of the greatest books I've ever read, I'd say it is worthy of a five star rating.

If you are a numbers geek, want to write a paper that evaluates some area of basketball, or are looking to develop a way to evaluate what your team/ players contribute to the game, this book is for you. There an interesting chapter on the "best players ever"; but for the most part Dean Oliver does exactly what the title says; he gives us tools for performance analysis at a level of understanding and sophistication that only he can provide.

Gives great insight into technical methods of analyzing teams and players for a whole season and individual games. You may need some math background

The author self rated his own book, this distorts the Amazon rating scale.

I'm giving it a 1 to balance him out, but I think teh book is ok. I'd give it 3.5 - 4 stars.

It doesnt have any discussion of newer methods of player evaluation. I'd like to see at least a general discussion of what statistics teams use.