Daniel Brooks

I'm an Indiana kid, so basketball was basically the local language. But there's a difference between loving a team and understanding why it covers or fails to, and the gap between those two things is what eventually pulled me toward the numbers. I started tracking results not as a fan but as someone trying to figure out where the betting market kept getting a team wrong. My process leans on the things that actually move a game: tempo, how efficiently a team scores and defends per possession, rest and back-to-backs, and the specific personnel clashes a box score never captures. Win-loss records barely register with me. What I care about is shot creation and shot prevention, and how a rotation reshapes when a key player sits — which is exactly why I spend so much of my energy on over/under totals. Seven seasons in, the discipline I value most is patience. Any single night can be a coin toss thanks to a cold shooting stretch or a late scratch, and reacting to noise is the fastest way to go broke. I keep my logic visible so readers aren't taking my word for it — they can poke holes in the reasoning themselves. — Daniel Brooks