Thursday, January 6, 2022

Book Review: The Midrange Theory by Seth Partnow

 




Fun fact: This blog was originally used for me to put non-team specific sports posts.  And so it's only appropriate that I manage to review a sports book on this blog....although I suppose it's hilarious that the first such book I review covers Basketball, rather than hockey or baseball.  But so it is, and that book is The Midrange Theory, written by former Milwaukee Bucks Director of Basketball Research Seth Partnow* (now writing for the Athletic).  

*Disclaimer: I've met Seth at at least one Hockey/Sports Analytics Conference and he's a cool dude both in person and on twitter.  No that doesn't affect my review.  

The Midrange Theory is Partnow's explanation of the evolution of Basketball over the last few years, when "analytics" is said to have taken over the game, and the game evolved into a more 3 point and seemingly offense-friendly style.  Coming into this book, I was not exactly super knowledgeable about basketball analytics - where to find various stats I don't really know, but I did understand a lot of the concepts that have guided the game.  So I was curious to see how much I would learn from this book, or whether it would be for people either less knowledgeable than me or more so. The result....is a bit of a mixed bag, although this will very much be a good read for anyone who is a basketball fan who is pretty much unfamiliar with any analytics stuff whatsoever.  

 When writing/reading a book based upon any type of sports analytics, the book can be directed towards several different types of readers.  You can have a book directed entirely at people without any knowledge of how analytical thinkers look at the sport and explain things at an intro level - Baseball Prospectus' classic baseball tome "Baseball Between the Numbers" is a good example of this, or even Michael Lewis' Moneyball, which barely even requires you to know baseball at all.  Or you can have a book directed at people who are decently knowledgeable, take on a bunch of classic questions, and explore them in depth such that the book can be a reference guide for someone even after they become more informed - for an example of this in baseball, there's Tom Tango, Mitchell Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin's "The Book".

The Midrange theory is very much aimed at beginners, so to be honest, even if you're like me and are only familiar with the concepts of basketball analytics and not the metrics, there will be very little new or interesting to you for most of the book - really until chapter 10, 159 pages (of 259 pages including the appendix) in.  Partnow's prose is very readable and will be very understandable for beginning readers, and is accompanied also by frequent footnotes, which explain things a bit more basically so as to not take away from Partnow's narrative.  Honestly, these footnotes are often pretty worthless, featuring an occasional joke that's funny, but otherwise often featuring explanations so basic (one footnote explains that a team gets into the bonus at the 5th foul drawn, which any NBA fan will know) or unnecessary (the billion footnotes directing someone to refer back to a future or even worse, a previous chapter) it's hard to understand why anyone thought they should be included.  

Still beginning readers will enjoy and learn a lot from this book, especially about what basketball analytics IS and how it affects the game now (spoilers: It is not simply the idea that teams should shoot more 3s) and how it affects the evaluation of players throughout the NBA.  The book deals with concepts of offense and defense, concepts about evaluation of players against the cap (although it does not contain much of an explanation of the intricacies about how the cap actually works, which feels like something that would've been a nice add in an appendix at least), the metrics that have been developed to better evaluation of players, as well as how teams have gone beyond the box score with tracking data to come up with better numbers.  For the most part, Partnow does a really great job going through all the concepts both basic and mid-advanced so that readers may not be able to understand how various statistics are actually calculated, but will understand what they are doing and what they mean. 

And the best part of this book, which might make it appealing even for intermediate scholars of the game, are the final few chapters, which deal with some more advanced concepts and on the actual working of analytics by Team Front Offices throughout the League, whether that be at the NBA Draft, or during the year.*  The book ends with a good speculation on where analytics might try to take the game in the future, which is fascinating in its own right to think about. 

*Partnow is careful in the beginning chapters to mention how Players are people and shouldn't just be considered as unthinking "assets", but inevitably in the narrative in these final chapters falls into that trap (noticeable particularly when it talks about teams making mistakes on extending draft steals who aren't stars, but ignores the emotional and fan-interests in such players which might factor into such decisions).*

Really the biggest problem with this book isn't the footnotes or that it's too basic for me, but rather the Appendix, which attempts to explain NBA statistics from a really basic level, and winds up explaining for the most part just everything that was already explained in prior chapters.  It doesn't really add anything.  Meanwhile, the book often cites in footnotes or in the main text sources to find various stats and concepts, but there's no single page list of where to find various resources, which would've made a lot of sense as a part of the Appendix.  Beginning readers wanting to find where the various stats in question are available will have to remember where Partnow first cited them to figure out where to go, which kind of sucks.  

Overall though, The Midrange Theory is a good book for that basic basketball fan who enjoys the game but doesn't really know or understand how things have changed due to analytics and basketball research, or only knows the term "analytics" from the writings of old crotchety sportswriters.  There are a lot of those people, and I plan to buy the book for one myself.  But if you're like me and you already had read Partnow before and had read even a little bit about basketball statistics, most of this book is gonna be a bit too basic for you.     
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