In 2011’s Moneyball, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane and his assistant, Peter Brand, use a sabermetric analysis method to evaluate underrated players to cobble together a competitive Major League Baseball team on a shoestring budget. The film somewhat faithfully captures the beginning of baseball’s analytics boom, during which numbers and formulas unseated much of the settled wisdom about what makes a successful team. As Brand, who is largely based on Bill James devotee Paul DePodesta, tells Beane’s character: “Baseball thinking is medieval. They are asking all the wrong questions.”

If baseball’s analytics boom began with that 2002 Oakland A’s season, basketball’s began just a bit later and can be tied to the rise and dominance of the Stephen Curry-led Golden State Warriors in the 2010s. For baseball and Moneyball, the “right question” focused on getting on base: Get on base more, score more runs. In basketball, the equation was even more simple: 3 points are more than 2.