Stats are only part of the story here, and each team is treated as just that: a past that can be poked, prodded, and recalled, and a future that stats can help bring into focus. You can read Pro Basketball Prospectus cover-to-cover without even glancing at the numbers, and still come away refreshed and ready for 2010-11. Or, if you want to be one of the smartest guys in the room, someone whose opinions about the game aren’t based solely on conventional wisdom and human fallibility, you can take a crash course in the numbers. They aren’t there to contradict or limit your love of the game; if anything, the added clarity, and new pockets of detail, will give you that much more to talk about.
Pro Basketball Prospectus can tell you that someone like Shane Battier is a valuable contributor. That’s the drab part, and the image that the stats revolution really doesn’t deserve. Bringing to light what an underrated defender Brandon Jennings is? If you saw that coming, well, congratulations. Sometimes, I think that not even the author of PBP did.
