The Whip of the God of Basketball

For the whole day, Leon locked himself in the room. For lunch, he called the front desk to deliver the food. After eating, he lay down on the bed and took a nap to recover the energy he had spent staying up late last night.

Then he got busy again, evaluating all the rookies who were drafted according to his standards.

He carefully read the data of each rookie, hoping to find something helpful.

This made Leon feel like he was back in the work of an actuary fiddling with numbers in the past, but no matter how he fiddled with these data, he couldn't form a clear evaluation of them in his mind.

The reason is simple, these data are too crude.

"Scores, rebounds, assists, blocks, steals, turnovers... some look good, some are mediocre, but the scouting reports say the opposite. It seems that the data does not fully reflect their performance. However, this is not the data There is a problem in itself, but the data here is not enough, not comprehensive enough, not objective enough..." Leon thought in his heart.

Different rookies come from different teams, have different coaches and teammates, and also have different games and opponents. The same data may reflect completely different levels of players.

Although Leon is not proficient in basketball, he is proficient in numbers. He knows that when a set of data describes things that are contrary to human sensory intuition, in a few cases it is because human intuition is unreliable, but in most cases it is because of data. Not complete.

Obviously, the report that only lists the basic data of the rookies is far from meeting Leon's needs. Leon's purpose is very clear. Since he still lacks a perceptual understanding of basketball in terms of experience and intuition, then use these cold data. Come to lay an objective and solid foundation for yourself.

Thinking of this, Leon called Weissland and asked him if he had more comprehensive data.

"Comprehensive data? How comprehensive?" Weissland asked on the phone. As the technical director of the Celtics, his main task this year is to build a player database for the Celtics. Veterans who are about to retire are all within Weisland's collection.

"Every rookie's every game in college, all the data, all." Leon emphasized.

"All... well, I do have the data of almost every rookie's game in college, but it hasn't been sorted out yet. If you want to see it, I can send it to you."

Weissland didn't know what Leon wanted to do, and after hanging up the phone, he brought his laptop and a CD to Leon's room.

As soon as he entered the room, Weisland saw stacks of player information on the bed, as well as a lot of manuscript paper. Leon wrote many formulas on these manuscript paper.

"What the hell is written on paper?" Weissland felt his head was getting bigger when he looked at these formulas. Although he majored in computers at the University of Colorado and had a very good foundation in mathematics, it was obvious that Leon was The formula written on the paper is not the direction of his main study.

"It's just some simple statistical formulas. Your stingy boss didn't even equip me with a computer. Fortunately, I'm also quite used to calculating with a pen, which allows me to get closer to the essence of numbers." Leon bit his mouth He pointed at the pencil and said, this is the pencil on the message board beside the bed, and he has already written that he is bald.

"Okay, hand over the information I want." Leon continued.

Weisland took out the CD, Leon really wanted to say "Long time no see" when he saw this round guy, then Weisland inserted him into the laptop, which stored a lot of Excel files, each containing data for every game played by a dozen players in college.

Leon opened these files one by one, looked at the detailed data inside, and couldn't help asking: "How did you do it? Every data of every person is recorded, and it can form a world."

Hearing Leon's words, Weissland raised his eyebrows and said proudly: "Every university will record the data performance of their players. It took me a lot of effort to get the data recorded on paper. Then put them into statistics and put them into tables. I don’t know what they are used for now, but I think they will be useful one day.”

"No, not one day, but today." Leon said firmly.

…………………

While Leon was bored in the room working hard on a bunch of data, Pitino was talking and laughing with Chicago Tribune reporter KC Johnson in the coffee shop opposite the Athletic Association Hotel.

KC-Johnson is just an unknown little reporter in the Chicago basketball news circle, but he will be the pillar of the Chicago basketball news circle in the future.

This year, he's back in basketball journalism after a less-than-successful transition to NHL reporting, and he's cherished every opportunity to get news in his first year from scratch.

So, even though Rick Pitino has faded away and has become a sour carrot head that not many reporters are willing to pay attention to, Johnson still thinks he can get some from the controversial and blamed Celtics coach. unusual information.

Because KC-Johnson is not interested in Pitino, but the Boston Celtics. This reporter with a keen sense of smell can smell the coming rain from the Celtics.

In the interview, Johnson intentionally or unintentionally steered the topic towards the Celtics' internal construction and management changes, hoping to get some news from Pitino, especially the importance of Auerbach's return to management. dynamic.

Pitino, on the other hand, played Tai Chi, often mentioning the problems of the management without leaving a trace. Immediately afterwards, the conversation changed and the topic was brought back to the draft.

But KC-Johnson really has no interest in this year's draft. The outside world generally believes that this is a small draft year, and there are no super rookies worthy of attention.

The two talked like this, bragging about each other for more than two hours. In the end, Pitino didn't have any thoughts. Although he hoped that this interview would disrupt the draft market, think carefully. , This rookie really has nothing to chew on, and instantly lost the mood to continue playing tricks.

At the end of the interview, Pitino suddenly said to Johnson: "The main change of the team is that after losing Bennett, we have a new scout."

"Scout? Who?" Johnson felt that he had a chance when Pitino let go, and immediately asked, hoping to hear the name of a great person.

"You won't know him. His name is Fox Leon, a... very good guy, a team scout recommended by Auerbach, and I think he will play a key role in the Celtics draft. ’” Pitino said solemnly.

For scouts, Johnson is not interested. Fans will always only pay attention to stars, coaches and excellent managers.

What Johnson is interested in is the attributive "Auerbach's recommendation". Firstly, it means that Auerbach has started to re-join the Celtics management. recommend.

However, Johnson had never heard of the name Fox Leon. He never remembered such a number one figure in the basketball circle.

Johnson still wanted to know more information, but Pitino said goodbye to him, ending the interview, but before leaving, Pitino added: "You can interview him at the rookie training camp tomorrow. I think he is really good. There are bound to be a lot of amazing perspectives.”

…………………

Long before entering the NBA circle, as an avid basketball fan, Weissland realized that there were geniuses in this world; after coming to the NBA, his idea was further confirmed, and sports geniuses are everywhere here.

But this time, in Room 4016 of the Athletics Association Hotel, he realized that there might be another math wizard in the NBA circle.

"I have already calculated, whether it is points, rebounds, steals or blocks, assists, there is a significant correlation with the team's victory or defeat, whether it is t-test or independent sample t-test, or correlation analysis, all support this Viewpoint. Then, if we comprehensively consider the influence of each player's points, rebounds, assists, blocks and steals on the team's victory, I used a stepwise regression analysis, and I can see that different players, in different aspects, contributed to the victory It is different. After that, I try to use the principal cause analysis to filter all the data and filter out the part where each player contributes the most to the team. In this way, I can see where the outstanding value of each player is ... from here I can see that the empirical analysis of some scouting reports may not be reliable, such as Michael Reed... Of course, I am not sure... And the data is still not rich enough, I think not only their The data also needs the data of teammates and opponents. Also, the classification of data is not enough, and the description of player performance by pure technical statistics is not perfect. I think the dimension of description needs to be increased.” Leon squeezed him in his hands. The conclusion from the afternoon's work, and tell Weissland about its general content.

Leon seemed very excited. After traveling to this time and space, he has been very calm, even cold. But when he came into contact with numbers, the pieces of data, like the body fragrance of a woman, constantly stimulated Leon.

At the same time, it also stimulated Weissland.

Weissland is not ignorant of statistics. He understands many of the concepts Leon said, but the problem is that these data are usually directly calculated by a computer. He has never seen a guy holding a The pen paints and draws on the draft paper, and calculates these complicated test results that are calculated to the last four digits of the decimal point.

Leon was the first one he had ever seen, using a pen to do root and logarithm calculations.

As for the variables such as the average, sum, or variance, which are handled by the four arithmetic operations, Leon reads them for a while and writes the results directly on paper.

"Are you the little prince of mathematics?" Weissland stared at Leon for a while, and finally asked.

Leon just shook his head, still keeping his eyes on the pile of numbers, he said: "No, I just have a special talent in observation and calculation ability, I am sloppy in logical thinking, and I am not good at abstraction that is most needed in mathematics. In terms of thinking and construction ability, I am only at the level of junior high school students compared with real mathematics geniuses. Therefore, I am better at statistics and technical calculations, and I am not a little prince of mathematics... I think in terms of scoring, we need to disassemble. Points and details must be added to the team's total score, the opponent's score for weighting, and..."

After talking, Leon entered his digital world again, but Weisland felt vaguely that this guy might bring something different to the basketball world.