Dean Oliver Book Report

Introduction Dean Oliver’s book Basketball on Paper (2004) analyzes the skills and tactics that go into winning a basketball game. Oliver mentions four different stats that he believes are the driving factor to win a basketball game. In his book, Oliver gave each of those stats a weight, the weight was how important he thought that particular statistic was. Therefore, using this information to follow his footsteps with our own tweak on it, instead of using advanced stats we are using stats that have been kept track of for a long time. The four stats we choose are Field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounds, and 3 point percentage. Field goal percentage is how many shots made divided by how many shots attempted. Together as a group we gave this statistic a weight of thirty five percent. Turnover percentage is the estimate of turnovers per one hundred possessions, we assigned this a twenty five percent. Offensive rebounds is the act of retrieving a missed shot from your own …show more content…
It is the action of putting a player’s number of offensive rebounds in that of the rebounds possible while they were in action on the court. We weighed this at twenty percent. It is shown that teams who get more offensive rebounds are more likely to miss, thus not correlating with more wins. However, due to the missing, they are more likely to lose more.

3-Point Percentage (3P%) 3-point percent is calculated by the effective field goal percentage, but this only accounts for shots made behind the 3-point line. We weighted this at twenty percent as well. Through our findings, we were surprised to find that the teams with the highest 3-point percentage do not score more points on average. An example we used was the Houston Rockets. They are the second highest 3-point percentage team in the league, but average the 14th most points overall.