Lately I’ve been reading George Karl’s 101 Basketball Out-of-Bounds Drills. This is a virtually unavailable book from 1999: I only found it through the Borgesian library of the Internet’s darker channels. It’s not impossible to find, but if (work with me here) 100 of you went out and bought it, I feel like that would actually prevent the next 100 of you from trying to get it. But despite this, I think Karl’s book is worth talking about, if only as a lead-in to talking about halfcourt offense as a whole. After all, the book delivers exactly what its title promises, nothing more, nothing less — the whole thing is about 115 pages long, and about 14 of those pages are non-drill pages, if you catch my drift. And while each of these pages contains a “drill,” the drills are mostly full, workable descriptions of set plays with a couple extremely helpful diagrams per description. Continue reading →

For the Eastern Conference edition of our 1st quarter all-stars, click here.

A common refrain among those in my twitter feed, for anyone watching, has been that this season makes no sense whatsoever. I have to agree. The season has been unfathomably odd so far. I was going to do a freeform piece on the subject, but quickly realized there was a simpler way to go. Given that All-Star voting has begun, why not give you my first-quarter All-Stars? After all, we’re already voting. And the game is in about a month. It’s closer than you think, in other words. I’m not really doing statistical rankings here — these are based on a combination of their stats (mostly documented here so we can look back later), what I’ve seen from watching them, and where the conference stands. It’s a long look, so let’s get to it. Keep in mind we’ll be going with the infuriating All-Star positional designations; that is, guards, forwards, and centers. Four guards, four forwards, two centers, and two wildcard slots. Go.  Continue reading →

Hey, everybody! This is the fourth edition of the STEVE NASH Power Rankings. The object of these Power Rankings is rather simple — STEVE NASH is my statistical model for making team projections the season, and STEVE gave us some results about teams’ SRS projections before the season. So — during the season — we’ve been updating these SRS predictions to reflect the week’s results. Our new results are a rather simple re-weighting of STEVE’s projections and the actual results of the season. These new results are then run through a Gibbs sampler to predict playoff probabilities, projected records, and other various stats. I apply the mean-regressed HCA estimates from Evan of The City to these new projections to calculate predicted home wins and road wins remaining in the season and add them to the team’s current record. Keep in mind (once again) these are completely and utterly automated — there’s no human input on these rankings, at all. So don’t lynch me, Wizards fans. Without further ado, here are the rankings as of the close of all games played on January 25th. Continue reading →