The WholeHog Sports Reporter uses analytics to boost his basketball reporting.
Most sports reporters don't have the math background of Andrew Hutchinson, so those interested in advanced statistics must be self-taught. Scottie Bordelon, a WholeHog Sports writer, said his initial leap into sports analytics began when he and his college roommate split the cost for an annual KenPom account to chart games for back-and-forth betting purposes. “We loved getting on there and checking out what Arkansas’ numbers were, and every now and then we’d put some money on some basketball games or whatever, and you want everything that you can [use] to get an edge,” Bordelon said. He no longer bets, he took the information with him in his work. After he was hired by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette to cover high school sports, several coaches referred him to a service called Crossover. One year, he covered a Springdale Har-Ber High School basketball team that featured a quality point guard named Tylor Perry. Bordelon used Crossover to digitally analyze game footage and detail the spots on the court where the guard was shooting best.
Once he received a promotion to cover the Razorback beat, he started using KenPom as a regular resource. He also employs Hoop Lens, a program that charts the numbers and uses color coding to represent positive and negative trends. An excerpt on the website’s homepage states, “Modern analytics can seem like an alphabet soup of numbers disconnected from reality. But buried in these numbers are tools that can be used for self-assessment and scouting opponents." With the system Hoop Lens has in place, Bordelon can analyze how efficient a team is in a breakdown of individual players, two-player subsets, lineups, and styles. The information allows him to support certain claims in his writing that would otherwise be categorized by box-score numbers.