Blogs

 
I added plain pages for all players in NBA and ABA history. No stats yet, just some basic information. Name (helpful), age, weight, birthdate and pro debut. A very special  thanks to databasebasketball.com for providing the majority of the data used to create the pages. You can browse by letter or you can use the site search.
We plan on expanding the pages to include something very different. All the pages will have year by year listings However, rather than just straight numbers, we will use our computer scout to grade the player performance for the season with an A-F system similar to the player pages.
In the meantime, the players pages can be scouted. A handy scout this player link appears on the player page. You'll then be taking to the scouting view where users can rate or write about the player. They can be complete detailed reports summarizing every little detail about the players game or as simple as an overall rating. The recent scouting reports will show up on the first page and users with accounts can have all reports show up on their profile page and have access to more tools like an HTML editor. Once a scouting report is added for a particular player, that player's page will also contain a summary view of all the posted up scouting reports. Take a look at Michael Jordan's player page for an example of his page updated with the scouting reports from two of our users (Ok its me). The player page also shows the average rating of all reviews for scoring, shooting, rebounding, passing, ballhandling, defense, intangibles and overall.
Once we get a few reports going we will add a view that summarizes all reports and allows sorting and filtering. All of this is of course in the baby stage and we have a lot more ideas on the way. I'm also going to add our own scouting reports as often as possible to the mix. Hope you find this of interest and am looking forward to some postups.

After breaking down 2 point shooting and attempting to find a minimum threshold where you wont hurt your team we will go ahead and approach 3 point shots in more or less a totally different way. That makes sense right? Well, I will start
out things about the same but then I will take a totally different approach.

I'll start it off similarly to 2 pointers with a player who takes 100 3 point shots. If he makes all of them he will produce 300 points or 200 points over average. If he misses them all he will produce 30 points (30 offensive rebound chances = 30 points) or 70 points below average. This adds up to either, three pointers made * 3 + (three pointers missed * .3) - three pointers or three pointers made * 2 - three pointers missed * .7

If we use this to determine our minimum efficiency threshold (the point where a player begins to create positive points or credits for his team) we come up with 26 percent 3 point shooting. It's pretty low but it was low on 2 point shooting as well and it is consistent with the model. Well its not what I will use. Our 3 point value is 2.5 points instead of 3 and I will spend the next several paragraphs trying some how to explain how we get this number.

If we use the NBA league average of 36.2 % and credit 3 points per made 3, our team gets about 1.28 points per possession (.28 net).

If we take the NBA league average of 48.4 % and credit 2 points per made 2, our team gets about 1.12 points per possession (.12 net)

If we take the NBA league average of 36.1 % and credit 2.5 points per made 3 to the shooter as our system does, gets our team about 1.10 points per possession.(.10 net)