One of my first pieces with Pounding the Rock five years ago was entitled How a Coach Reads a Box Score. In that piece, I wrote the following:
“Since I stopped coaching, I have continued to closely examine box scores after games. What I look for are not the fairly useless statistics that many national basketball announcers focus on. Mark Twain famously referred to “lies, damned lies, and statistics” [Editor’s note: Twain’s put his list in order of increasing evil - jrw]. That applies to basketball too.”
The box score from the Spurs – Rockets thriller Tuesday night proves my point, although if that box score had been the centerpiece of my post five years ago, the title might have been “Box Scores Are Fun!