Wayne Winston's name has been in the news recently, largely for his predictions about the coming NBA season. His predictions are based around his adjusted plus-minus statistics, some of which are open access, some of which come from his proprietary asociation with the Dallas Mavericks.
Part of the media attention he's been getting is timed with the release of his book "Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball and Football", in which he sums up a number of methods for making data-driven decisions for building a professional sports team, as well as making decisions in-game.
First, what I like about the book: it's a good primer for the non-expert in technical workings. Winston gives a number of recipes for the methods he details through Excel spreadsheets, meaning that beginners can get their hands dirty immediately, something that as a teacher I wholeheartedly recommend; I can accept the choice of Excel as the language of choice for its universality (and that OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet can do it as well.)
Second, Winston's bibliography actually summarizes a bit about each of the academic papers he's citing, which is a nice introduction to the literature for the non-expert.
The biggest problem with the book from my point of view is that it's not the book I expected from its title; I was hoping that a consultant with the Mavericks would have a little more to say about how sports teams actually consider and weigh the evidence on a personal level, and how they consider the statistical evidence alongside personal experience.
Sure, I have lots of other gripes: the Acronym Soup that plagues a lot of the statistics in sports community (hockey especially); Winston's overuse of words like "brilliant" and "wonderful" when describing the authors and movies he likes, which I find overly grating (and redundant); the overabundance of tables (with too many significant figures) and poor-quality graphs (see Page 49, DICE, for an example; I blame Excel and Winston's graphics editor); and not least, the title Mathletics, which as catchy as it is, suffers from an unfortunate namespace overload.
All in all, I would recommend this book to the non-expert, as a handy overview of the state of analysis in sports these days, as well as asking the right kinds of questions that sports analysts should ask.
Part of the media attention he's been getting is timed with the release of his book "Mathletics: How Gamblers, Managers and Sports Enthusiasts Use Mathematics in Baseball, Basketball and Football", in which he sums up a number of methods for making data-driven decisions for building a professional sports team, as well as making decisions in-game.
First, what I like about the book: it's a good primer for the non-expert in technical workings. Winston gives a number of recipes for the methods he details through Excel spreadsheets, meaning that beginners can get their hands dirty immediately, something that as a teacher I wholeheartedly recommend; I can accept the choice of Excel as the language of choice for its universality (and that OpenOffice.org Spreadsheet can do it as well.)
Second, Winston's bibliography actually summarizes a bit about each of the academic papers he's citing, which is a nice introduction to the literature for the non-expert.
The biggest problem with the book from my point of view is that it's not the book I expected from its title; I was hoping that a consultant with the Mavericks would have a little more to say about how sports teams actually consider and weigh the evidence on a personal level, and how they consider the statistical evidence alongside personal experience.
Sure, I have lots of other gripes: the Acronym Soup that plagues a lot of the statistics in sports community (hockey especially); Winston's overuse of words like "brilliant" and "wonderful" when describing the authors and movies he likes, which I find overly grating (and redundant); the overabundance of tables (with too many significant figures) and poor-quality graphs (see Page 49, DICE, for an example; I blame Excel and Winston's graphics editor); and not least, the title Mathletics, which as catchy as it is, suffers from an unfortunate namespace overload.
All in all, I would recommend this book to the non-expert, as a handy overview of the state of analysis in sports these days, as well as asking the right kinds of questions that sports analysts should ask.