The NBA Geek is a website devoted to smart, data-driven analysis of the teams and players of the NBA. It is very much a work-in-progress. Most of the statistical analysis used by the NBA Geek is inspired by the Wages of Wins blog of Professor David Berri as well as the two books The Wages of Wins by Berri, Schmidt, and Brook, and Stumbling on Wins by Berri and Schmidt. Both the books and the blogs emphasize quite a few points about performance in basketball:

• Most pundits think that points per game is the most important metric, and the NBA labor market seems to reflect this, as points per game is highly correlated with salaries. However, points per games is not significantly correlated with wins. Despite this, even when scoring totals come at the expense of scoring efficiency, players who shoot poorly-but-frequently are often paid high salaries, and considered by both casual and hardcore fans as well as NBA analysts to be "productive" players.
• The NBA labor market and most NBA analysts undervalue rebounds. Although rebounds do correlate with salary in the NBA, the effect is not strong. (But don't get me started on the argument that we overvalue rebounds. Rebounds have a significant effect on Wins Produced numbers, but it turns out shooting efficiency is even more important.
• The NBA labor market appears to be indifferent to turnovers, field goal efficiency, and steals, even though both of these have strong correlations with #winning (I couldn't quite resist hashtagging that).
• In other words, as just about every coach from Junior Varsity up to the NBA level will tell you, winning basketball games tends to be heavily influenced by such factors as taking high-percentage shots and getting control of (and keeping control of) the ball. Yet most analysts, and indeed most NBA General Managers, tend to ignore most of these factors when evaluating talent, and concentrate solely on scoring totals.

There's a lot more information in the FAQ, but I strongly encourage you to read the books.

Let's get one thing out in the open right away: any "expertise" I may claim in basketball has little to do with firsthand knowledge of dominating opponents on the court personally. There's a reason this site isn't called The NBA Jock. I've played and been involved with basketball more or less my entire life, but I was a bench warmer in school, a pickup player in college, and a rec-league player as an adult. I spent many years as a coach of Women's, Men's, and Youth basketball teams, with moderate success, but I tend to agree with most of the members of the Wages of Wins Network that the primary skills in coaching are not about Xs and Os, but rather about managing personalities and evaluating talent well enough to correctly allocate minutes (to paraphrase Jerry Sloan, you play the guys who are very good at "going after and getting the damn ball").

In my day job, I'm a software developer, and developing and maintaining this site is a fun exercise for me that keeps my coding skills sharp. I'm a bit of an amateur economist, and I've always believed that sound analysis will find you answers in many areas of life, and basketball is one of them. I don't believe one needs to have been a winning basketball player in order to know what makes a winning basketball player. And if we're honest, you probably don't either. I don't think I've ever met a fan who felt he couldn't second-guess the coach of his favorite team. And how many times have you heard someone say "The best players don't always make the best coaches"?

For the most point I'll try to stick to what stories of interest I encounter in the mainstream media, but I'll be upfront about one thing: I've always been a Minnesota Timberwolves fan. For the most part, this is a point of shame, but there are moments when it brings me great pleasure. I'm sure one of the recurring points of satisfaction for this website is going to be that every time I say that Kevin Love is the best power forward in the game, I'll get to bask in the vitriolic comments of people telling me how clueless I am. And believe me, if Love ever gets traded and a) Kevin Love's stats remain consistent on his new team and b) his new team starts winning a lot, I will rub it in your faces, so be careful :)

Turns out the About page hasn't been updated in a while. If you are reading now, you might be thinking "WTF, of course Love is the best power forward." Of course, when I wrote this in early 2010, that statement was controversial. I'll leave it up here because I do not hate saying "I told you so."

Ah, commenting on the internet. There's only a couple things I have to say about comments on this website:

• While swearing itself is fine (I've been accused of using the F-word as an adverb too much: "He's really fucking good at basketball!"), if you swear AT one another or at me, I'll delete your comment. Yes, this includes indirect swearing, like "I can't fucking believe you wrote that." If you try to get around the "No swearing at one another" rule on a technicality, I'll still delete your comment. Which brings me to my next point.
• Do not use the word "GAY" as a negative adjective or adverb. This gets its own bullet point cause that really drives me nuts. If you say, "He's gay," you better mean that he likes to have sex with men (and because there's nothing wrong with that, we're cool with calling homosexual men "gay"). What we are not cool with is any implication that being "gay" is bad, and therefore saying something is "gay" means it's bad. I'm not extremely politically correct, but this one gets under my skin because I've been hanging out on the Internet with a bunch of kids for too long. It amazes me how teenagers have adopted this stupid convention. It's one of the few areas that where I agree completely with NBA Pundits:

• If you insult each other or me, I'll delete your comment even if you aren't swearing. If you use racial slurs, gender attacks, ethnic stereotypes, etc, I'll delete your comment. And this brings me to my last point:
• I am the sole arbitrator of what constitutes an offensive comment. You may rant and rage all you'd like that I only removed your comment because you disagreed with me (and not because you called me a tool), but there is no higher power to appeal to, sorry.