http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sp ... oblem.html
Basically they are dead on, which is something because 1) I had no idea they were so tuned in, and 2) i had no idea people thought it was important enough to mention in a general rag like Slate.
Oliver and his cohorts on the message board wrestled with these questions and countless others, logging on at all hours to debate the relative merits of Allen Iverson or how best to calculate a new metric called usage rate. Long before Moneyball author Michael Lewis wrote a New York Times Magazine cover story on the topic, the board wondered why Shane Battier had such a positive impact on his teams despite not appearing to be all that good at basketball. The message board was a veritable think tank. “You could tell that this was a place where there was going to be a serious level of discussion about NBA statistics,” says Kevin Pelton, who would become one of the original writers for Basketball Prospectus. “It was literally the only place in the world it was happening.”
The NBA establishment quickly took notice. Oliver, who published the seminal Basketball on Paper in 2003, seven months after Moneyball hit stores, was hired full time by the Seattle Supersonics in 2004. Another frequenter of the board, John Hollinger, was hired the following year by ESPN—and recently became a vice president of basketball operations for the Memphis Grizzlies. Hollinger’s ESPN gig was filled by Pelton, who, after making his name at Basketball Prospectus did a consulting stint with the Indiana Pacers’ front office. Roland Beech, who created the popular website 82games, was hired by the Dallas Mavericks in 2009 as director of basketball analytics. (His boss, Mark Cuban, is regularly one of the biggest names at the Sloan conference.)
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As soon as each statistician joined an NBA squad, sharing in public became off-limits—and so, gradually, the think tank closed shop. What were the teams paying for, after all, if their new stat gurus were just posting their ideas online for the other 29 franchises to read? This has had a paradoxical result: Because NBA teams embraced advanced stats so quickly, progress on basketball analytics has actually slowed down. The top minds are now all working in silos, not only unable to collaborate but actually competing against each other.
