Shortly after the inception of The Nylon Calculus, founding Editor Ian Levy started to put together what he termed an “analytics glossary.” In his words at the time:
"One of our missions here at Nylon Calculus is to help make basketball analytics accessible to anyone with interest. A big part of that mission is building a comprehensive and reliable Glossary. The plan is to make this glossary different from some of the others around the internet in two ways. The first is that it will be top-to-bottom comprehensive and sequential. The thing that is often lost in discussions about basketball analytics is that each new statistic or technique is usually an adjustment to a previous model, trying to account for some hole or something that isn’t measured well in existing statistics. All basketball statistics have a lineage of mathematical models and we want to make sure that anyone with the time and interest can peruse the entire family tree. The second thing that I believe will set our glossary apart is that we want to do more than define the statistics. For each we would also like to explain a little about what it says and what it doesn’t say—what purpose it serves in our analytic discussion."
This was a good plan, but also, how shall I say, aggressive. We didn’t quite make it.
However, we haven’t given up the ghost. The long term goal of creating a sort of living syllabus for an “Introduction to Basketball Analytics” course still exists, and we’ve rechristened the series “Nylon Calculus 101.”[1. New topics will hopefully continue to arise over time as the overall level of knowledge about the game improves. If the day ever comes where nothing knew is being learned, it’s time for us to go home and get a real hobby!]
What we’re not going to do, necessarily, is be as sequential as Ian originally planned. The topics are going to be filled in as we go, though last season did give us a good start with items such as The Basic Box Score, Basic Shooting Statistics and Basic Box Score Adjustments.
In the coming weeks, expect to see more articles we hope can serve as both resources for general knowledge and as building blocks for your own investigations. Already in the works, are introductions to the SportVU system and a discussion of what goes into and how to interpret various shooting and efficiency statistics.
As this is intended to be a community resource, suggestions and requests for articles are welcome and in fact encouraged. Don’t hesitate to get in touch via Twitter, Facebook or via email at TheNylonCalculus at gmail dot com.