How Low Can the Philadelphia 76ers Go?
I felt as if I were looking in on a strange social-science experiment: Throw together a group of marginal, overmatched professional athletes and give them a shot at their lifelong dream. The results were both inspiring and heartbreaking. The Sixers dove headlong for loose balls. They habitually fell far behind at the start of games — 15 points, 20 points, more — but kept fighting long after most veteran teams would have quit. They went on long scoring runs, then fell just short of winning. They are one of the youngest teams in the history of the league, almost all of them in their early 20s. When management scheduled family events around the holidays, few of the players brought their wives, girlfriends or children. They brought their mothers.
.. While a basketball box score records the number of times a player steals the ball from the opponents, advanced analytics will also track how many plays he disrupts by deflecting passes or even just getting an offensive player to change directions. The aim is to use large amounts of this kind of data to get a truer picture of a player’s real worth.