Seth Partnow is one of the best basketball journalists around, an expert in sports analytics. I’ve seen some of his work in the past and have heard him quite a few times as a guest on my favourite basketball podcasts. Liking this book was always a given for me. I pre-ordered it as soon as I heard him talk about it on a podcast and positively binged it. It checks probably the most two important boxes for me : basketball and statistics.

For someone who has read over twenty books about basketball, it is a bit surprising that it took this long for me to review one here. And if you think reviewing a basketball book seems niche for a reading blog, it gets even better. Not only this is a book about a sport, it’s a book about statistical analysis, its history and its impact at the professional level. It’s very niche.

If that sounds like it might be too technical or impenetrable for the casual basketball fan, it’s honestly not. Seth Partnow manages to make complex subjects much more palatable and easy to absorb. I was sometimes surprised at how easy it was to understand some obscure-sounding analytics jargon. He maintains a very strong connection between the data and what is actually happening on the basketball court. That is quite an important aspect, because while the average fan is more stat-savvy than he was a decade ago, there is still a more traditional demographic that feels quite strongly that analytics are over-rated and can never truly encapsulate the sport of basketball.

To that end, the author goes into details about the actual uses and limitations of basketball statistics. For the non-sport, non-statistics fan, you can cut the story short and simply state that there are actually great ways to use and integrate statistics, but that they’re limited. For a basketball nerd, though, you need to go deeper and see why exactly makes basketball, especially professional basketball (way too much is at stake there), even harder to pin down. Putting it plainly, there are just too many variables at play, and adjusting whatever you want to measure for every conceivable circumstances (who is on the floor, the pace of the game, player fatigue, etc.) is a really hard task. Plus, nobody but a handful of masochists will want to compare dozens of different variables, weigh their relative impact and come out with a usable assessment.

Statisticians have tried to make the whole thing more palatable by trying to use an all-in-one number to make a quick, albeit flawed, comparison between two or more players. The author presents quite a few of them and how they have evolved and been used over the past decades. Many of them are great and support what basketball-watchers call the “eye test”, but they can be skewed one way or another.

One aspect of basketball that is notoriously hard to put into numbers is defense. Good/Great defense often don’t even show up on the usual stat sheets, and lucky or circumstantial defensive highlights are blown out of proportion. It is getting much better with time and we now have more appropriate numbers to identify what exactly makes a defensive player elite.

One of the last chapters concern the NBA draft, this televised spectacle where college and international players are chosen by the teams to join their ranks. As you might know, the draft is a heavily debated subject among NBA fans. If it’s hard to appropriately quantify an actual player’s contribution as he’s playing, you can imagine how impossible projecting a very young man’s future as a professional player. Even more so when you take into consideration that the college game, the international game and the NBA are three distinctly different versions of basketball on so many levels.

It’s really hard to write an opinion of such a book without coloring it with my own perspective and experience around basketball statistics, but I guess this tells you how much I enjoyed such a specific and “nerdy” book. Seth Partnow’s writing flows really well and his deep understanding of the analytics and of basketball as a sport shines through. If you like basketball and the NBA, it’s a must-read for certain.