What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Why Smart People Are Vulnerable to Putting Tribe Before Truth - “Afforded a choice, low-curiosity individuals opt for familiar evidence consistent with what they already believe; high-curiosity citizens, in contrast, prefer to explore novel findings, even if that information implies that their group’s position is wrong. Consuming a richer diet of information, high-curiosity citizens predictably form less one-sided and hence less polarized views. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: I Don’t Want to Shoot You, Brother Did a Rave Review Really Shut Down Portland Burger Bar Stanich’s? Maybe It Was the Owner’s Legal Troubles - Turns out that “I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It.” story from a few weeks ago was missing some important details. How Instagram hides behind Facebook – and rakes in billions - With all the negative press around Facebook people seem to forget they own Instagram. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: You Are Not So Smart Podcast - Not A Scientist - You often hear politicians say “I’m not a scientist but …” as a way to get around saying something ignorant. Why do we never hear them do the same about economics, tax policy or many other topics where they aren’t knowledgeable? The easiest way to get people to go against the established science is to come up with an explanation that is really simple (that’s probably wrong) that gets an emotional response. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: How to Teach Artificial Intelligence Some Common Sense You Realize The Olympics Don’t Have To Exist, Right? I Found the Best Burger Place in America. And Then I Killed It. Thinking Fast and Slow - I read this book several years ago and just read it again. One thing I did notice this time through was some of the studies mentioned in the book are ones that I have read about being not reproducible. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Artificial Intelligence Hits the Barrier of Meaning - “Imagine, for example, an airport security system that won’t let you board your flight because your face is confused with that of a criminal, or a self-driving car that, because of unusual lighting conditions, fails to notice that you are about to cross the street.” Many Analysts, One Data Set: Making Transparent How Variations in Analytic Choices Affect Results - “Crowdsourcing data analysis, a strategy in which numerous research teams are recruited to simultaneously investigate the same research question, makes transparent how defensible, yet subjective, analytic choices influence research results” [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: This Is How We Radicalized The World Why big companies squander brilliant ideas - “Disruption describes what happens when firms fail because they keep making the kinds of choices that made them successful.” “Dominant organisations are prone to stumble when the new technology requires a new organisational structure. An innovation might be radical but, if it fits the structure that already existed, an incumbent firm has a good chance of carrying its lead from the old world to the new. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: No, A.I. Won’t Solve the Fake News Problem Older People Are Worse Than Young People at Telling Fact from Opinion - It’s scary how few people could correctly identify all the statements as facts or opinions. Apps Installed On Millions Of Android Phones Tracked User Behavior To Execute A Multimillion-Dollar Ad Fraud Scheme - Ad fraud is very underreported topic. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: For the good of all humankind, make your city more walkable When courtroom science goes wrong — and how stats can fix it - A really well done comic. Statscan may be dull, but it’s a vital institution - “For decades, Statistics Canada has been taken for granted. As the country and the world became bigger and more complex, the agency was underfunded and could not keep up. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Why Any Backdoor Would Be a Threat to Online Security - “We’re not being asked to choose between security and privacy. We’re being asked to choose between less security and more security.” Risky Business Feature: Named source in “The Big Hack” has doubts about the story - I find it interesting how many security people have doubts about this story. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies What Happened to the Houston Astros’ Hacker? Fake Toughness Versus the Real Thing Why Employers Should Stop Giving Away Snacks - “This policy is also unfair. If you have two employees who each earn the same salary, the one that consumes more free food will be effectively getting paid more. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Why I’m done with Chrome - “Where Facebook will routinely change privacy settings and apologize later, Google has upheld clear privacy policies that it doesn’t routinely change. Sure, when it collects, it collects gobs of data, but in the cases where Google explicitly makes user security and privacy promises — it tends to keep them. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Real Problem With Baseball - “It’s a huge error that companies make all the time — they mistake nostalgia for a business model.” As a casual baseball fan, I can relate to a lot of stuff in here. I find it hard to find a baseball game on TV where the commentators don’t complain about the current state of the game and only mention outdated stats in their analysis. [Read More]

Separating First and Second Chance Scoring in the NBA

With the decline of offensive rebounding in recent years we can assume this means second chance scoring is declining as well. Since offensive efficiency is on the rise, this means that efficiency excluding second chance points must be increasing to an even larger degree. I decided to split up second chance points from other points to look at trends in recent years. For lack of a better term I have called these first chance points, where first chance points and second chance points sum up to total points. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Lessons hidden in sports betting markets - A good series of posts from recently hired NFL Director of Data and Analytics Michael Lopez. Ego is the Enemy - Although I found some of the stories were cherry-picked or confirmation bias, there are still some good lessons here on how ego can hurt your success. [Read More]

Lessons From Creating and Maintaining a Basketball Stats Website

When I started building pbpstats.com I didn’t really have a plan for it. My main goal was just to use it as a way to learn something new while building a site that would make it easy to look up stats that weren’t easily accessible. There was a chance it would never be more than a local web app that was only used by me. As I started adding more and more to the site, I realized that I should probably get a domain name and deploy it so others could use it. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity - An overview of research into the impact of increasing political polarization. It mostly focuses on the role of sorting, the increasing alignment between party and ideology. “The increasingly clear partisan cues have been reinforced by an increasingly diverse set of media sources, many of which are overtly partisan and/or misleading. [Read More]

Play-by-Play Based Shot Quality Model

Not all shots are equal. While you get 2 points for both a breakaway dunk and a tightly guarded, off-balance 20 foot jumper, the dunk is the more valuable shot because it is going to be made nearly every time. Multiple people have created shot quality models to estimate the probability a shot is made based on various factors. You can read about some of them here and here . The better public models all used the no longer public SportVU shot logs. [Read More]

What I Read or Listened to This Week

Here is some non-basketball content I read or listened to this week that I found interesting: The Shift: The Next Evolution in Baseball Thinking - Good read on thinking about baseball strategy while also remembering the players are human. For example, when measuring the impact of a manager, just being able to keep your team motivated and focused each day during the regular season grind is probably more valuable than all the bullpen usage decisions you make all season. [Read More]