As you may notice, I haven’t been posting here at NBAPlaybook the past couple of days (don’t worry, I will recap the weekend’s events at some point).  The reason why is because I am at MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference here in Boston.  It is a two day event, and one of my favorite panels of day one was the last one of the day looking at how coaches make decisions.  Do they use their gut, or do they use data?

Bringing this back to basketball, both R.C. Buford and Del Harris (who were both a part of this panel), were in agreement when it came to making decisions based on preparation and data vs. gut feeling. For Buford, he tends to shy away from gut decisions because it makes it harder to take a step back and analyze those decisions after the fact. If you get the decision wrong, you don’t know why, but maybe more importantly, if you get it correct, you don’t know how to duplicate it.

Head on over to TrueHoop to check out the rest