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E-PrinceTwenty years ago, no one except for a small group of statisticians cared or had heard about OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging), the statistic commonly considered the best measure of a baseball player’s offensive abilities. Batting average, home runs ...(back to the article)
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Ever heard of Daryl Morey? He's the current GM of the Houston Rockets, formerly of MIT. Big quantitative analysis guy. The Rockets are only one of several NBA teams that have already started this shift towards a more quantitative understanding of the game.
Ever heard of Brad Stevens? Head coach of the Butler team that narrowly lost the NCAA finals to Duke tonight. He's one of the coaches starting to bring advanced statistics into college basketball.
Your knowledge of sabermetrics in baseball isn't bad, and I can't really speak to developments in other sports to know whether you've accurately depicted them or not. Basketball, however, is quite a bit further along than you've claimed here.
Great article by Princeton's own (and Moneyball author) Michael Lewis on the Rockets:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Ba...
This article was originally published by Bill Simmons:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page...
it's already happening in hockey too:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/hockey/ho...
teams are finally realizing that traditional stats are almost meaningless and are starting to switch to with-or-without-you methods of evaluating players' contributions. hockey might be the toughest sport to do that for because players are generally playing with the same linemates whereas in basketball it's more of a rotation.
Wow. What an extremely poor article that was. I can only assume you were inspired by Bill Simmons' recent article on his favorite baseball statistics and you failed epically at criticizing it. Want to try again?