Welcome to the twelfth episode of The Nothing But Nylon Podcast. This show has been created to be an audio companion to Nylon Calculus with conversations from your favorite basketball analytics writers talking about their writing, research, and most of all, hoops. The intention is to make the conversation inclusive so that listeners of all analytic comfort levels will find something appealing.
Ben Taylor (@ElGee35), founder of Backpicks.com, dropped by the show to discuss his book, “Thinking Basketball,” which focuses on the way we think about basketball (often in the wrong way or using the wrong mental lens). We also discuss the importance of supporting casts and Ben’s new metric for measuring offensive creation using box-score data, the aptly named, Box Creation. Finally, we touch on the Kyrie Irving trade and both stake our claims as Kyrie optimists. Ben with a bit more data to back his claims.
Here are the links to the things discussed in the show.
1. Ben’s book, “Thinking Basketball” (seriously, if you’re listening to this show, buy this book, you’ll thank me later): https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Basketball-Ben-Taylor/dp/1532968175
2. “Supporting Casts are More Important Than Stars”: http://www.backpicks.com/2017/07/06/supporting-casts-are-more-important-than-stars/
3. “Measuring Creation with the Box Score”: https://fansided.com/2017/08/11/nylon-calculus-measuring-creation-box-score/
Make sure to follow Ben @ElGee35, follow me @NBACouchside, and follow the show @NBNylonPod. You can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. If you like the show, please leave us a review in iTunes!
Thanks for listening! As always, if you have questions or comments, or topics that you’d like to see us discuss in future episodes, let us know in the comments or by reaching out on Twitter.