Is there a way to use stats in basketball like you can in baseball? There's a movement to sabermetricize (is that a word?) big-time hoops.

Not until recently, however, did a community analogous to baseball's SABR evolve, when the Association for Professional Basketball Research was founded in 1997. Today, the APBRmetricians -- who are clearly better with numbers than acronyms -- tend to agree on certain truths. For example, a team's efficiency is best measured per possession, not per game (a running team may rack up points but still be an inefficient offensive team), and the one inscrutable player stat is how a team fares when someone is on the court versus when he is off it, because this ties back to point differential. And point differential, obviously, is the end goal.

Unlike baseball, however, in which pitchers and hitters create individual matchups, every action on a basketball court is influenced by nine other players, not to mention a coach. For this reason, there is no "holy grail" in basketball equivalent to baseball's on-base percentage. Instead, the APBR community looks at factors like adjusted plus/minus, eFG percentage, rebounding rates, shot-charting and defensive "stops."