PLEASE FEEL FREE... to let me know if you find any mistake in any post of mine. I have an 8 hour a day jobs with the Star. My ability to produce this blog depends on hours 9, 10, 11 and 12 each day. I'm not just writing some opinion that can be argued all day long, I'm producing (or reproducing) thousands of statistics. Unfortunately, I don't have a room full of editors at 3AM to catch any mistakes. I have myself. I'm extremely committed to accuracy, but nobody is perfect. Therefore, I depend on you. Thanks.
I could probably multiply four times four by the time I was four. I have been a “stats freak” my whole life, with no apologies to the anti-geek crowd. Growing up poor, I would tear up small pieces of paper and put them in a shoe box. Each piece would have something on it such as “double” or “stolen base” or “pop up”. I would play baseball games using that system – keeping score and accumulating stats. Of course, I did the same thing for Big-8 basketball and NFL football.
In the early to mid 1980’s I became familiar with Bill James and enjoyed his work. I consider him the father of creative sports statistics. I’m not sure he used the term “creative” to describe his writings, but I have used the term extensively. There are “raw” statistics and “creative” statistics. There are thousands of ways to make a “raw” statistic into a far more entertaining and enlightening “creative” statistic, but the endeavor always boils down to one of two methods – either by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing one or more raw statistics into one creative stat or by examining a raw stat within the context of a unique or usual category. That’s where I come in.
I wrote three books in the late 1980’s called – Martin Manley’s Basketball Heaven (Doubleday). Undoubtedly my ability to get published was aided by the fact that Bill put his agent in touch with me. She had a proven winner already and that clearly gave me a leg up. The contract ended when a number of copycat books came onto the market in 1990.
Basketball Heaven’s legacy was the single most important stat that I developed and built the books upon – Efficiency Rating (EFF). I called it Production Rating, but it is the same formula. I spent dozens of pages explaining the rational for it as a comprehensive stat in my books. In fact, I pushed the NBA for many years to adopt this rating as a simple, easy-to-compute, stat which would encompass all the meaningful statistics within a game or season. Finally, a few years ago, they made it an official statistic and it can be found on their web-site as well as numerous others sites. http://www.nba.com/statistics/efficiency.html The formula is as follows: [(Pts+Reb+Ast+Blk+Stl) – (Missed FG+Missed FT+TO)] / Games Played. See how EFF compares to far more complicated formulas.
I also wrote for numerous magazines – such as Basketball Digest, Beckett Basketball, Sports Card Collector and others. Almost all of my sports related writing has been with respect to basketball because that was the underserved niche. However, I have as much interest (statistically) in baseball (Royals) and football (Chiefs) as I do basketball, though basketball is my favorite sport.
I should also say that, although I went to Washburn (Topeka), I grew up a Kansas University sports fan. You can’t be a KU fan without being primarily a basketball fan. By winning the NCAA championship last season, KU appears to be fully recovered from the loss of Roy Williams five years ago. I will be doing lots of statistical analysis on KU for this blog.
I look at statistics as the purest form of information. If you understand how to interpret them, you don’t need long wordy explanations of what you are reading. Charts, tables, lists, graphs, and for this purpose… box scores, are all overwhelmingly superior to a bunch of words in my opinion. I consider stats as the holy grail of information and words as a necessary evil to make sure the reader understands what they are looking at.