Featured
The Pace-and-Space Revolution: How the Three-Pointer Rewired the NBA, by the Numbers
In two decades the three-pointer went from a luxury to the center of gravity of NBA offense. Here's the rewiring, charted season by season.
Numbers over noise · Est. 2026
The NBA, read through the data.
Original, data-driven NBA analysis — explainers, tutorials, and deep-dives built on public data I pull and chart myself. No invented stats, no hot takes without a table behind them.
29Launch articles
6Categories
100%Sourced stats
0Made-up numbers
Fresh off the spreadsheet
Latest articles
Why Individual Defense Is So Hard to Measure
Offense is easy to count; defense fights back. Why the best defensive plays never hit the box score, and what steals, tracking data, and RAPM can and can't see.
7 min read
PER, Explained: What Hollinger's All-in-One Metric Gets Right and Wrong
Player Efficiency Rating squeezes a season into one pace-adjusted number set to a league average of 15. What it nails, and the blind spots that built BPM and EPM.
7 min read
Hack-a-Shaq: The Math Behind Fouling on Purpose — and How the NBA Fought Back
Fouling a bad free-throw shooter on purpose was cold, rational math. The break-even logic behind Hack-a-Shaq, and the 2016 rule that finally curbed it.
7 min read
Rebound Rate Explained: Why Total Rebounds Lie
Total rebounds reward minutes and pace, not skill. Rebound rate asks the better question — what share of available misses a player actually grabbed.
7 min read
Assist Percentage and the Limits of the Assist
The assist is the most subjective stat in the box score. How assist percentage reframes playmaking — and what even it still can't see.
7 min read
Build a Team Four Factors Dashboard in a Spreadsheet
No code required. Pull four numbers per team and build a dashboard that explains why teams win — Dean Oliver's Four Factors, in a spreadsheet.
7 min read
Find your lane
Browse by category
Six beats, one standard: every claim traces back to a number, and every number traces back to a source.
10 articles
Stat Explainers
Plain-English breakdowns of the box-score and advanced metrics that actually matter — what each stat measures, the formula behind it, and where it misleads you.
5 articlesTutorials
Hands-on guides for pulling, cleaning, and visualizing basketball data yourself — from your first nba_api call to a finished shot chart.
2 articlesData Deep-Dives
Long-form investigations that start with a question and follow the numbers wherever they lead. No takes without a table behind them.
5 articlesBasketball History
The league's past, re-examined through modern statistics — record-setting seasons, rule changes, and trades revisited with the benefit of hindsight.
3 articlesPlayer & Team Analysis
Frameworks and case studies for evaluating players and teams: spotting real improvement, reading stat profiles, and separating signal from noise.
4 articlesMethodology & Projections
How forecasting and win-probability models are built, why they disagree, and what the data really says about predicting basketball.