Box Score
BasketballAn objective approach to basketball analysis through the simplicity of the "Box Score" TM
History
Box Score Basketball was born in the late 1980's as the result of spirited debates between other basketball fans and myself. We would argue about who was better between Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. We would debate who played better defense between the Detroit Pistons and the Utah Jazz. The resources we used were usually from the "Box Score" -- which statistically summarized basketball games in a nice format and were printed in the sports pages across the country. We would also use cumulative statistics, sometimes printed on a weekly basis in the USA Today or the Sporting News.But the questions we asked could not be answered with only the numbers available to us. What drove my curiosity the most was comparing someone who played on a slow pace team (at the time the Detroit Pistons and Utah Jazz played very slow paced styles) with someone who played on team who played at a faster pace -- and such players would actually have more opportunities to get points and rebounds thus "increasing" their statistical numbers.
Thus the motivation for me was to evaluate and compare NBA teams and players at a deeper level than what was presented by the media. Already being familiar with Bill James (Baseball and Sabermetrics) and having Craig Wright (Employed by Texas Rangers as Sabermetrician) and John Leonard (APBA legendary number cruncher) as good friends enabled me to develop statistical methods to further evaluate NBA teams and players. The results of all the work enabled me to develop an early version (prior to what is now defined as "fantasy" basketball, a title I have refused to adopt) of a competitive game I titled "Box Score Basketball".
What Box Score Basketball became was similar to today's "fantasy" basketball in that fans of professional basketball could compete with each other by drafting up their own teams of NBA players. I encouraged 9 other friends to come together and test their wits with each other. I used an algorithm similar to the NBA later developed; the statistic called "efficiency". But what I also included were Game Pace Multipliers that would be used to normalize all NBA players based on the team they played for (and that team's specific "pace" of play, which would result in the statistics that player would acquire).
Prior to each month the Box Score Basketball owners would submit their starting 5 (point guard, shooting guard, small forward, power forward, and center) and their 3 bench players (ball handler, rebounder, scorer). I compiled the NBA player stats on a monthly basis and each month ran team reports. What was unique to my system (which I have yet to see in any of today's "fantasy" games) is a program that would accumulate all of your own personal team's minutes and then "stop" once your team had the required minutes for the games in that month. For example, if I was compiling stats from January, I determined the average games played by each team in the NBA and then multiply that number (14 for example) by 5 (5 players on the court at on time) and then by 48 (48 minutes in an NBA game). Then my program would "crunch" each owner's teams, one by one and then stop adding up the Box Score "points" (from the algorithm) once the minutes reached the max. That way every team in our "league" would all have the same number of total player minutes (this was crucial! in today's "fantasy" games you actually get penalized if a player misses a game. Using this method, then your next guy would automatically be added in to make up for the missing minutes in case of injuries or a player being pulled out of a 4th quarter because his team was way ahead.
Finally, this entire system was developed and analyzed further for a senior project in 1989 at Texas A&M with Dr. Bill Fuerst as my advisor. I earned credits towards my Management Information Systems degree, which required plenty of computer programming. Box Score Basketball then went on hiatus after I decided to pursue further education in Physics & Astronomy (at UT Austin and Texas State) and followed that with landing a teaching position at Cal State San Marcos (Astronomy and Physics) as well as teaching Calculus and Physics at a college prep high school. It is my current goal to now dive back into Box Score Basketball and approach from a more scientific angle. My goal is to do statistical analysis that will enable NBA fans to gain a deeper understanding in the process of evaluating NBA players and teams. With this, I hope to re-launch Box Score Basketball as a competitive game. But for now, my main goal is analyzing teams and players by using only the box score and the cumulative statistics available. For analysis of statistics beyond the "box score" and the cumulative stats that are readily available, I highly recommend visiting 82games.com, an exceptional site for studying the NBA.
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copyright © 2006, 2007
Greg W. Lowe
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