Layups: Sloan Conference Summaries
Posted by Neil Paine on March 10, 2011
I would have written a full summary of my trip to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference last week, but A) I've been sick this week, and B) the guys at TrueHoop had it covered so well that my efforts would be totally extraneous:
- MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference bullets (Tim Varner)
- Malcolm Gladwell and player development (Michael Schwartz)
- The "Data Holy Grail" (Brett Hainline)
- The problem with macho decisions in hoops (Zach Harper)
- Basketball brains diagnose the Heat (Tom Haberstroh)
- Sports and Labor panel addresses broader issue of NBA profit (Graydon Gordian)
- Is sports franchise ownership a hobby for the rich? (Harper)
- The duller side of the statistical cutting edge (Rob Mahoney)
- Sounding the whistle on referee analytics (Kevin Arnovitz)
- How much trouble is early foul trouble? (Brian Robb)
- Gut vs. data in NBA decision making (Sebastian Pruiti)
- Bullets from the basketball analysis panel (Scott Sereday)
- Brain mapping: the future of scouting (Beckley Mason)
- A championship four years in the making (Ryan DeGama)
- Mark Cuban hopes to lose and, lose badly, someday (Varner)
- Player evaluation and motion capture technology (Bret LaGree)
- Dynamic Efficiency, the Nash Equilibrium, and Kobe as an undershooter (Devin Kharpertian)
- Futurism and coaching (Mason)
- Social media and the business of sports (Schwartz)
- The heart of sports (Henry Abbott)
- Almost clever (Ethan Sherwood Strauss)
It was such a blast to meet those guys, btw. You haven't lived until you've been out partying with stat geeks until 2:30 AM.
I'd be remiss if I didn't also link to Kevin Pelton's recap at Basketball Prospectus:
Recapping Sloan: Two Key Issues
And don't forget Ben Morris' summary at Skeptical Sports Analysis. Or Deadspin's "Dispatches From Dorkapalooza".
Finally, you can read all of the tweets I sent out as I covered the panels live via the Basketball-Reference Twitter stream:
Basketball Reference (bball_ref) on Twitter
Let me know if I'm forgetting anybody's recap/summary, and I'll add them to the list.
March 10th, 2011 at 1:10 pm
Dave Johns also has a summary of some conference-related material (mostly the Matt Goldman skill curves/undershooting-vs-overshooting study) and the state of basketball analysis in general at Slate:
http://www.slate.com/id/2287339/