Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
The Golden State Warriors are one of the most dominant NBA teams in history with their star player, Steph Curry, regarded as one of the best shooters of all time.
But that wasn't always the case. In fact, when you look back to the 2006–07 season, the team held the record for the most consecutive seasons without a playoff appearance, and even as recently as five years ago, they were one of the worst teams in the NBA. But that all changed starting after the 2013/2014 season when they won 51 games. The next year, they won it all.
So what happened? Veteran sports writer
believes part of it is due to the team's embrace of the Oakland A's analytics system.
His new book is called "Betaball: How Silicon Valley and Science Built One of the Greatest Basketball Teams in History." Here's Erik reading the opening section of his book, courtesy of Simon and Schuster.
https://soundcloud.com/stephen-95/betaball
Malinowski joined Take Two host A Martinez, who asked when and why the Warriors began to embrace data:
At that time, the Warriors were a horribly dreadful franchise. They had missed the playoffs in 16 of the 17 preceding seasons, but this new ownership group came in and they decided to rebuild it in the form of a Silicon Valley startup. And that comes from Joe Lacob. The main co-owner was a longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist and decided that this would be a pretty good case study ...
Malinowski explained what kind of answers you can get, in terms of basketball decisions, from looking at data:
You can analyze how many dribbles a player is taking per possession in a game ... you can literally analyze how fast are they running on the court, so if you can do that you can do things like measure things like energy and fatigue