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Surprisingly enjoyable article about Houston Rockets player Shane Battier, a sort of counterfactual probability-driven basketball nerd:
"The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport.
...
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group.
...
Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests."
Originally from NYT > Most E-Mailed by reBlogged to on Feb 14, 2009, 8:36AM