For Kirk Goldsberry, nothing has changed. The NBA analyst known mostly for his hexagon-based shot charts wrote Sprawlball, a book promising to “capture the nature of this surreal time in the NBA” and presumably backing up his favorite catch phrase “the game has changed.” However, like the “traditional” big men he eulogizes throughout the book, he has not displayed much of an ability to adapt. The book is repetitive and the first six chapters (of seven total) all contain more or less the same content with only slight variations to his signature shot charts. It presents an air of objectivity like numbers often do, but as with most data, it contains bias and becomes an argument rather than a statement. In addition, it is full of false equivalences, hindsight bias, and misapplied context about the changes to the game that make it different from his ideal version of the sport, which is apparently the 2012-14 San Antonio Spurs and some teams from his youth.
It is a shame the book is so poorly executed because the game being played today is indeed different than what it was even 10 years ago, but Goldsberry spends the lion’s share of his words reiterating this in a doom and gloom manner without spending much time on what these changes may mean for the future. It prevents the book from accomplishing its goal of “taking us on a visual tour of the modern NBA”. The little time spent on the future is in the last chapter - easily the best and most interesting one - and yet even it is about how to change the rules so the game can look more like its past instead of what innovations may lie ahead. It is quite alright to not blindly sing the praises of the league and its product, but his criticisms ring hollow and seem founded solely on nostalgia.
The aesthetics of the book are underwhelming, despite back cover promises of celebration and beauty. The graphs are generally pleasing to look at, and the artwork is nice and breaks up the book well. Unfortunately these aren’t enough to lift up the text itself, which is full of attempts at jokes and phrases such as “analytically woke” that fall flat. Nobody talks about being “analytically woke”, and nobody should write it, either. Recycling the same argument for several players with random quips and jabs about how modern players are somehow lesser than their predecessors makes for a tiring read. It prevents the interesting ideas and the reasons behind why Goldsberry believes this from bubbling to the surface. He fails to provide a mental model for determining if today’s game is indeed worse, and the data he uses - shot locations - is only reliable at a player level since about the 2000 season and does not accurately describe the many elements of the game that precede each shot.
The charts themselves are often only slight variations of each other and tell a fraction of the story about how the shot charts were made by these players. Many readers already know that Stephen Curry turned into a three point shooting flamethrower in 2014-15 and then one-upped himself in 2015-16. They know LeBron lives at the rim, but had to add an outside shot to become fully formed in the modern game. It’s easy to show this from the data since these players have only played since shot location data became more reliable. The league level charts don’t dig any deeper, instead simply presenting the league-wide three point attempt rate and claiming that the recent uptick is horrendous, despite the steady increase of the stat since the three pointer came into existence. Goldsberry cites rule changes as a primary reason why this has happened, which is a good and accurate conclusion that is often overlooked, but assumes the rule changes and analytics are the only reasons behind the changes in the game. This is a great opportunity to poke deeper into how the changes are manifesting themselves in the broader game, but the author prefers jumping to another player and telling the same story again.
There are anecdotes about the modern NBA spread throughout the book, and several focus on the relationship between player salary and skill set, and how that has changed over time. Yet proper context is wholly missing from many of these, leaving the innocent reader to assume DeMarcus Cousins turned down strong multi-year deals in order to sign with Golden State in the summer of 2018, among other things. His favorite whipping boy is Ryan Anderson, who signed a four year, $64 million deal with Houston in the summer of 2016. Goldsberry does not provide adequate background facts to help explain why these things happened, such as Cousins suffering a notoriously difficult injury to recover from when he tore his Achilles earlier that year or that Anderson signed his deal when the cap spike occurred and many teams threw money around willy-nilly. The context does not completely explain some of these things or make them the correct decisions, but it helps the reader understand more of the situation and draw her own conclusions from it instead of following Goldsberry’s agenda.
This content gets in the way of the parts that are worthwhile and interesting, obscuring them in favor of trying to win style points. Considering the author spends a good chunk of the book maligning the current game, he could spend a chapter establishing how his preferred NBA is played. The reader gets hints it isn’t today or the early to mid 00s, which he (correctly?) labels ugly and unappealing. However, if not the 00s and not the 10s (with the exception of his beloved Spurs), then when? Are the 13-14 Spurs, mid to late 80s Celtics, and Jordan-era Bulls the only teams to ever play the game correctly? It amounts to cherry picking some of the greatest teams of all time who, coincidentally, nearly everyone agrees played beautiful styles of basketball. But most teams don’t have that level of talent, experience, coaching, youth, and resolve, and its hints at something that many “back in my day” takes do not address. What about the other 29 teams? What happened outside of the highlights? By neglecting how the rest of the teams may look in his personal NBA utopia, Goldsberry keeps it entirely in the realm of fantasy and nostalgia, despite the league living in a world of reality and competition.
Establishing this baseline would go a long way to providing a foundation for his perspectives and give the reader a reference point for later in the book. It presents a great situation to pick some of his proposed rule changes and dive deeper on how gameplay might look under those rules. Which players and skill sets would be emphasized over others? How would teams and players adapt and which inefficiencies might they find as they catch up to the rules? What might be the second order effects as coaches work to counter the first order ones? Would the rule changes disrupt the viewing experience or cause more outrage than there is currently?
These questions should be asked with any proposed rule change or adjustment to the game. Some of Goldsberry’s ideas are quite interesting and could create dialogue and potentially inspires others, even if they may not be winners themselves. His efforts to push the discussion along should be commended, even if they are not necessarily as complete as desired. Many of these discussions do not address the impact rule changes have had on the game and how often the league has tinkered with rules in the past, which he does fairly extensively.
He contends the league should look into ways to optimize play style, which they most assuredly already are, despite it being a very difficult topic to model through measurable data. This stance is maddening because Goldsberry essentially argues the league should not use analytics to glean insights into easier questions and instead hold off until they have answers to the most difficult questions, all while he uses data to answer one of the simplest questions out there. The inherent tension in this position runs throughout the book and would make it difficult to interpret, if that weren’t already accomplished with his verbose repetitiveness and attempts to hammer his stance home.
It obscures his valid points around how rule changes have continued to bend the game stylistically towards the perimeter, the potential effects of the trend, and how it might be offset in the future. The discussion of analytics is mostly reduced to how it has influenced shot selection and does not touch on how it’s confirmed ideas about offense and defense being intertwined, could be used by coaches within the huddle, affects how the draft is approached, or its (aesthetically questionable) impact on the trade off between offensive rebounding and transition defense. Analytics are not yet capable of handling some of Goldsberry’s questions, but that does not mean it cannot build towards the tougher questions through other, easier insights. Namely, that 3 > 2, which will never change.