As you have noticed, I have spent the majority of my time over the previous two months focused on rankings for the NBA, NFL and NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball. There have been two reasons for this. First, with March Madness looming, I particularly enjoy making my own Bracketology and comparing to the likes of CBS Sports, Yahoo! Sports, ESPN, Joe Lunardi (Temple University), and others. For instance, I managed to correctly predict 65 of the 68 March Madness entrants last year; including UCLA’s inclusion (much to the chagrin of other competitors).

The second reason is that I have been in the process of writing a book on basketball defenses; ranging from high school to NBA. The focus is on player metrics and spatio-temporal analysis.

While the word mathematics is in the title, it’s not a textbook. It’s rather a description of styles of defense with a coaching philosophy aided with sports analytics. The result turns into a description of analysis based on intuition and experience, supported by analytics when intuitive description is too vague to describe the actual breakdown of a play.

Currently I have every section outlined with material already built for 11 of the sections. The introduction is being edited. The aim is to have a releasable version by the end of summer 2016.

If you are interested in a sample, please feel free to send me a message or follow me on Twitter: @Squared2020