Bo Hamburger
Years ago
New hoops book unleashes word 'macrophenomenal'
If Mrs Hamburger is reading, I may have found my Xmas present for this year: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac.
There's a good review here. If you're like me and never heard of the word 'macrophenomenal', let alone it used in the context of analysing today's NBA stars, here's a brief summary from said review:
It isolates a handful of the current NBA's most intriguing stylists (Kobe, LeBron, Yao Ming) and subjects them to a sustained flurry of unorthodox methodology. Each player is assigned a free-associative "spirit animal": Stephon Marbury is a prairie vole, Rasheed Wallace an Egyptian mongoose, and Chris Paul a Mindoro stripe-faced fruit bat.
Unusual data sets are plotted on baroque charts and graphs: We learn, for example, that Gilbert Arenas's three-point percentage counterintuitively improves the farther he is from the basket.
