preview

Assessing The Performance Of A Team

Good Essays

For many years decisions by coaches and managers had been decided by what they would call their “gut” feeling. Coaches would make draft picks based on how they felt and would change their game plans based on what they thought was best. Nowadays front offices and coaches like to use analytics. Analytics takes a teams and individual players stats, and analyzes them to evaluate the performance of a team or individual. Doing this can better your chance of success in todays sports(Porreca). The use of analyzing statistics in sports is a fairly new concept, however statistics in sports have been kept for a little over 50 years. The idea to use analytics is so new that in 2005, only a couple of NBA teams had used high levels of statistical analysis to track players and tactics (Porreca). The first use of analyzing statistics to make decisions for a team was done by Billy Beane the Oakland Athletics’ General Manager in baseball during the year 2001. Beane developed a theory now known as the “Moneyball Theory” which uses “the analysis of statistics to evaluate the performance of a team and its individual players.” (Porreca) Beane’s theory was that a team that had a higher on base percentage was more likely to score and win more games. He thought that the more you get on base the more likely you are to score runs, thus winning more often(Steinberg 1). Beane also looked at additional statistics that showed college baseball players were better prepared for the professionals, so Beane

Get Access