He Stats! He Scores!

Warriors center Erick Dampier, left off the NBA All-Star team this year, offers a good case study in the Beech method. By most conventional measures he is a valuable component of the Warriors' lineup; by some measures, he should have been an All-Star; by Beech's, though, he is trade bait. Sometimes, Dampier's stat lines miss the story. In the Warriors' recent 97-90 upset of Minnesota, Beech's numbers show, Dampier didn't have anywhere near the kind of impact his personal statistics in the box score -- 21 points and 19 rebounds -- would indicate. In fact, it's possible he even hurt the team in his 41 minutes on the floor, meaning that the game was won in the seven minutes he was toweling off on the bench: His plus-minus for the game was -4 -- Golden State outscored the Timberwolves by 11 when Dampier was on the bench. "He definitely has some kind of negative influence on the other players," says Beech, who wasn't surprised when Dampier's name recently came up in a trade rumor.

Beech says he's found some resistance within the league to this sort of measurement, but thinks his numbers hold up. "There's a sense that it's a little unfair, perhaps, to lump guys in with their teammates -- that you don't want to judge [Orlando star] Tracy McGrady by the rest of his teammates right now, because he doesn't have any good teammates," he says. "But if you actually go to his numbers, yeah, he is a big positive influence on his teammates. The numbers seem to work, to my mind. If they explore them a little bit, they'll find that."

The NBA -- which for years didn't even track things like minutes played, blocked shots, offensive and defensive rebounds, steals, turnovers -- generally has been slow to embrace the work of people like Beech. It's a league still run on gut feeling, and the "brains" feel left out. "I don't think they know we exist," says John Hollinger, who recently published his second Pro Basketball Prospectus, a book of statistical analysis. "They think this stuff is half a notch above witchcraft." Adds a slightly more put-upon colleague: "It's like anybody else who knows something. You know Galileo? Did this guy know what he was doing? And what happened to Galileo? They killed him." Beech has made some inroads into the NBA culture: He speaks with assistants and scouts, not to mention Dallas' maverick owner, Mark Cuban, who complimented Beech's work. Beech also supplies statistics for Hall of Famer Rick Barry's KNBR radio show.

Hollinger estimates that basketball research is at least 20 years behind baseball research, which is understandable. The two have evolved in entirely different ways. Baseball statheads found the sport's holy grail -- on-base percentage, the determining factor in how many runs a team will score -- and much of the research spun off from there. It's a measure of how far baseball research has come that it has its own common noun: sabermetrics, derived from the acronym for the Society for American Baseball Research. Now even Bill James, supreme objectivist, is apparently confident enough in his stature as a baseball thinker that he has added a subjective element to his new player ratings.

But basketball has no holy grail. In his recent book, Basketball on Paper, Dean Oliver writes: "[T]he ideal player rating statistic is just not possible." Unless, he goes on, "you can simulate a player with all possible combinations of coaches, and all possible combinations of strategies against all possible combinations of opposing teams ...."

For a brief moment, in the mid-'90s, the sport actually moved forward in the field of statistical analysis, with a data-mining program called Advanced Scout, developed by Inderpal Bhandari at IBM, then an NBA sponsor. "I wanted to develop a data-mining program that exemplified the use of data mining as a mechanism to enable ordinary people, average decision-makers, to deal with this tremendous glut of data," says Bhandari, now CEO of a New York-based data-mining company called Virtual Gold. "Basketball coaches fit that mold very well."

Working with Tom Sterner, then an Orlando Magic assistant coach and now the Warriors' top assistant, Bhandari created a program that could dig through reams of statistics and unearth patterns that stray from the norm. Soon much of the league was using, and trusting, Advanced Scout. Both Sterner and Bhandari tell the story of the Miami-Orlando series in the 1997 playoffs. The Magic trailed 2-0 in the five-game series, having lost the two games by a combined 52 points. Desperate, the coaches turned to Advanced Scout, which found that Orlando actually outscored the Heat when backup point guard Darrell Armstrong was on the floor. Armstrong was given a more central role -- 21 points and eight assists in Game 3; 12 points and nine rebounds in Game 4 -- and the Magic fell just short of winning the series.