FanPost

Charting the success of Kawhi Leonard

Baseball has always been a game of numbers. What seems like thousands of statistics and metrics are tracked, measured and quantified. Billy Beane is probably the most famous sports statistician, and introduced the term "Moneyball" into our modern vernacular. Then Brad Pitt played him in the movie.

In 1990, Beane resigned from baseball and began a three-year stint as a baseball scout with the A's. In 1993, Bean was promoted to assistant general manager, and in October 1997, Beane became general manager. Soon after, he became interested in an area of baseball research called sabermetrics, in which statistics are used for decision-making in terms of trades, rosters and the like, instead of players' star status or recent success. Beane embraced this methodology with vigor, and his stance was both successful and controversial enough to inspire a book, Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which was published in 2003. A film based on the book was released in 2011 to critical acclaim, with Brad Pitt playing the role of Billy Beane.

So, like millions of other red blooded American men, I'd love to have Brad Pitt play me in my movie "SARR" when it's written and the screenplay is produced. In order to do that I realized I needed to take things more seriously and really pay close attention to the finer points of the NBA game.

It's important to understand the finer points because basketball is a game of numbers as well. It is measured by +/- numbers and per 36's and hundreds of other stats that will make your head spin. Trust me, they make my head spin every time I sit next to Paul Garcia at a game and he shows me the thousands of ways the game is being analyzed when I'm content to just look at the scoreboard.

With all of that in mind, and my decision to really become a basketball numbers geek, I created this graph to show how dominant Kawhi Leonard has been recently.

Please let me know if it's too far in the weeds and I'll try to break it down for you.

Securedownload

This is fan-created content on PoundingtheRock.com. The opinion here is not necessarily shared by the editorial staff at Pounding the Rock.