R, March Madness, and the Statistics of Basketball

Back in February, Mark Cuban announced on his blog that the Dallas Mavericks use a "player lineup and evaluation system" based on statistical analysis (generating some controversy, as it turned out). A New York Times Magazine article a week later reveals that the Rockets have a similar system in place. Ars Technica suggests that the analyses were heavily supplemented by data from high-tech stats packages like the open source program "R". It wouldn't be at all surprising: R has been used to analyze March Madness bracketology before, so it makes sense that it would be used to analyze the performance of individual players, too.