How statistical analytics has changed sports.

• Author: Dizikes, Peter
• Position: Athletic Arena

WHEN STEPHEN CURRY of the Golden State Warriors launches another salvo of mind-blowing three-point shots, he is not just creating highlights for sports news shows. He also is playing the percentages. After all, Curry made almost 50% of his three-pointers during the regular season. The Warriors are the defending National Basketball Association champions, and followed up their 2015 title-winning performance by posting the league's best regular-season record in league history during the 2015-16 campaign--their 73-9 record was one victory better than the Michael Jordon-led Chicago Bulls of 199596. The Warriors also led the league in three-point shooting percentage.

Thus, the Warriors' winning edge: being a top three-point shooting team is more efficient than being a top two-point shooting team, an argument basketball analysts have been making for years. Now the game of basketball, embracing three-point shooting like never before, has caught up with its theorists.

Those theorists include Daryl Morey, genera] manager of the Houston Rockets, the only team that shoots three-pointers more frequently than the Warriors. Outside shooting helped boost the Rockets to the NBA's Western Conference finals last season, where they lost to the Warriors, who also bested Houston in the first round of this season's playoffs. Morey is cofounder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the sports world's signature showcase for empiricism. The 10th annual SSAC, held March 11-12 at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, drew 3,900 attendees from 32 countries, most of whom love using numbers to question conventional sports wisdom.

"Good analysis is about asking questions and questioning assumptions," said panelist Nate Silver, founder of the analytics site FiveThirtyEight.com, who was a baseball analyst before adding political forecasting to his job description.

One way to look at sports analytics is as a series of battles over the right way to understand sports. You might call these the games within the games, and they were fully on display at this year's SSAC.

Sports analytics thrives in part because of the ethos that sports are best understood from the outside. Much of the groundbreaking work in sports analytics has come from avid fans not beholden to tradition. The personification of this is baseball analyst Bill James, who in the 1980s gained a national following for his annual Baseball Abstract books. James is one of...