Appreciating Shane Battier As a New Way to Think About Basketball

While I detest Duke, I have always had an appreciation for Shane Battier. In a sense, he is the anti-Dukie. What I mean by that is that while players from Duke tend to be vastly over-rated, Battier is consistently under-rated. He's the kind of player - like Chuck Hayes or Tayshaun Prince - who should have been coached by Tubby Smith.

Anyway, while this article by Michael Lewis of the New York Times pretends to be about Shane Battier, it is really about a new way of thinking about basketball. And, as you might guess from my posts here on the sport, I strongly endorse that new way of thinking about basketball.

Or, perhaps it isn't a new way of thinking about basketball as it is a new way of thinking about the statistics that purport to measure player performance in basketball. The traditional box-score statistics tend to reward selfishness over selflessness. This article does a great job of digging into why that is, and what is now being done about it. A great read for anyone who really cares about basketball.