Use in Basketball
American sports executive Daryl Morey was the first to adapt James' Pythagorean expectation to professional basketball while a researcher at STATS, Inc.. He found that using 13.91 for the exponents provided an acceptable model for predicting won-lost percentages:
Daryl's "Modified Pythagorean Theorem" was first published in STATS Basketball Scoreboard, 1993-94.
Noted basketball analyst Dean Oliver also applied James' Pythagorean theory to professional basketball. The result was similar.
Another noted basketball statistician, John Hollinger, uses a similar Pythagorean formula except with 16.5 as the exponent.
Read more about this topic: Pythagorean Expectation
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)