Here's a take on the book and movie from Daryl Morey, GM of the Houston Rockets, who's attributed for the most part in bring sabermetrics to the NBA:<p><a href="http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7001767/moneyball-houston-rockets" rel="nofollow">http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/7001767/moneyball-housto...</a><p>Mark Cuban owns the Dallas Maverick and is heavily into data analysis as well: <a href="http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/state-of-sabermetrics-insights-from-the-2010-sloan-sports-analytics-confere/" rel="nofollow">http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/state-of-sabermetr...</a><p>It's a lot more interesting (and complex) in basketball than baseball in my opinion because it's more of a fluid sport where the actions of a player will directly affect those of the other nine.<p>Also I can't get over the fact that a movie about data will be shown this weekend in almost 4,000 theaters and will star one of the biggest movie stars in the world!
Paul DePodesta, the subject of the film Moneyball, actually spoke two days ago at the O'Reilly Strata (big data) conference in New York.<p><a href="http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/schedule/detail/21651" rel="nofollow">http://strataconf.com/summit2011/public/schedule/detail/2165...</a><p>So you can get his insights, straight from the horse's mouth, in a talk aimed at data geeks. For me, one of his main takeaway points was to question your assumptions. Always ask: "If we were to start again today, would we do things this way?" This exercise is used to tease out entrenched biases that you might not normally examine.<p>Because it was a keynote address, it should be publicly available on the O'Reilly youtube channel in the next few days, if not sooner: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia#g/c/2543D0F253DD85CE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/OreillyMedia#g/c/2543D0F253DD85C...</a>