Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA — Kirk Goldsberry
By: Jason Park
Tags: Sports, Basketball, Book Review, NBA, Books

Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA — Kirk Goldsberry

A compelling narrative of the NBA’s recent past, troubling present, and possible future

(Click here to buy on Amazon)

Early in my college years, I read Michael Lewis’ Moneyball. I was never the same. And I mean that literally. There are only a few books that changed my intellectual life, and Moneyball was one of them. My love of baseball combined with my tendency toward analytics made me seek out other books to look at baseball in a different way (Baseball Between the Numbers and Jonah Keri’s The Extra 2%). That analytic approach soon extended to other arenas such as crime and even my readings in politics and history (s/o Bill James’ great Popular Crime, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog-then-website, and John Fea’s Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?). The common thread through all of this is a tendency to disregard previous narratives and look at the facts of a case. It became my passion across all disciplines.

As my love of basketball began to grow, I kept looking for something to read that filled this Moneyball space for the NBA, but there was nothing. For years, there was a dearth of book-level analysis of the “Morey-ball” era of the NBA (so called because Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey has taken analytics much farther than anyone else in his team-building and philosophy). I know the literature wasn’t there, because I was looking for it. Michael Lewis almost wrote the book himself, but that became the terrific first chapter of The Undoing Project, where Lewis examines Morey and his impact on basketball. (The Undoing Project as a whole is about psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, psychologists who uncovered a lot of the principles that Lewis was analyzing in Moneyball. This book is amazing and could not be more in my wheelhouse.)

Well, now there is a Moneyball for basketball. Kirk Goldsberry’s Sprawlball is a portrait of the NBA in this new era, and it is just terrific. By saying it is Moneyball for basketball, I don’t mean that it has the deep investigative reporting and style that characterizes Michael Lewis. And I’m glad that’s not what Goldsberry was going for. I also don’t mean that Sprawlball is an unflinching praise song for the analytical era and what it is doing to the game, as Moneyball was for baseball. What I do mean is that Sprawlball is a worthy successor to all the books (not just Moneyball) in the analytic genre which Michael Lewis and Bill James led.

What is Sprawlball about? In the words of Goldsberry (a necessary Twitter follow): “It’s about this s***, man.”:

It’s about the disappearance of the midrange shot for the exact reason you see in that image: it’s not efficient. It’s about how 3-pointers have become more and more prevalent and big guys have suffered. And it’s about how to fix it.

But that’s getting ahead of myself, because before his extended take on rule changes in the NBA Goldsberry spends almost 200 pages in a wonderful examination of the current game: its beauty and excitement but also its repetitiveness and predictability. He does this in both in graphic form (his trademark shot charts and other graphic representations are essential to this book, as well as the illustrations by Aaron Dana) and in narrative form. The narrative takes shape with each chapter highlighting a player at a different position (a subtle buck against the trend of position-less basketball) starting at point guard with Steph Curry and his transformation of the game, then analyzing the impacts of James Harden and Lebron James. Goldsberry then turns to how this new game has impacted big men by examining the evolution of Kevin Love (and the domination of the “stretch 4”) then the dueling philosophies of “centers” Anthony Davis and Draymond Green.

The best image of the entire book, and not just because I’m a biased Spurs fan. (Credit to Aaron Dana)

It is only after this deep discussion of the game that Goldsberry dives into possible fixes. Only after he has made a compelling case that, although basketball is still beautiful and fun and compelling, we’re not even as far down this analytical road as the numbers say we should be. That means that if you like the status quo, you should be a proponent of changes to the rules as well. Because there will be an even more drastic move towards the 3-pointer at the expense of everything else for years to come. Goldsberry makes that clear. And while I won’t give away any of his possible fixes, they are highly compelling.

Goldsberry is true to the spirit of the analytical revolution while also being critical of where it leads when sports don’t evolve with the analytics. Baseball is just now realizing this, as its on-field product has suffered since the analytical revolution. Basketball may find itself in an even worse position without changes to its court structure and/or rules. Goldsberry illustrates (literally and figuratively) this concept wonderfully, and that’s why his book is a necessary buy for any NBA nerd or even non-nerdy fans out there.