NBA Preview: Revenge of the Nerds

The upcoming NBA season promises to provide plenty of great story lines and notable moments. Tons to consider as teams reported to camp this past week. Will the Lakers successfully integrate Artest and repeat? Can Shaq help get Lebron a ring? Are the Celtics Big Four too old to make a finals push? What effect will a referee strike have on the league?

Perhaps one of the most significant developments, but least apparent to the average fan, is the impact new methods of player evaluation/game preparation and management are having on NBA front offices and coaching staffs. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis documented how the adoption of complex statistical analysis and probability theory led to to a revolution in baseball player personnel evaluation, enabling cash-strapped franchises, such as the Oakland As, to construct rosters which could compete with those big money clubs. Efficiency was the name of the game for teams likes the Oakland As, who under Paul Depodesta and Billy Beane, enjoyed great success for a fraction what it cost perennial big spenders like the New York Yankees. More recently, Lewis used Shane Battier as the subject of a NY Times Magazine piece to explore about how similar quantitative techniques for analyzing and assigning value to player performance have begun to infiltrate the NBA.

Will the application of fancy equations and technical modeling to rebounds, assists, blocked shots, field goal percentage and whatever other categories capture player output, result in traditional evaluation frameworks becoming obsolete? Will those scouts and general management types who have developed an expert knowledge of player assessment, accumulated after many years of both playing and observing games, soon become expendable with increased demand among franchises for box-score obsessed math geeks (many who can’t make a layup) who obsessively feed reams of data into high powered computers in search of highest adjusted +/-?

Keep your eye on teams like the Houston Rockets and Dallas Maverick this year, pioneers of the new school super-crunching methods, to see what kind of actual outcomes their sophisticated data manipulation produces. As the season wears on, perhaps we can discern some divergence among teams using quants equipped with fashionable statistical methods versus those organizations less enthralled with such technical hocus pocus, but instead still prefer to trust the insights and feedback of the grizzled old-school scout working analog, relying on more subjective criteria, (in some cases little more than a feel for the game based on experience and exposure acquired over decades) in order to project NBA player prospects.

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