Zen has a great look at the Celtics recent slide from astonishing to merely average (4-4 as of the write-up) noting the five reasins why they are struggling the most right now

1 - Too much passing
2 - No back-up point guard
3 - Over-reliance on Ray Allen
4 - Inconsistent substitution pattern
5 - Too much isolation late

He’s got a paragraph on each at the link take a read and give your own thoughts on why a team on pace for history fell back to earth.

Its been called Moneyball, but really it is just Billy Bean (and others) applying statistics to the economics of sports to find where there are mistakes in other teams talent evaluation and to exploit those for your own team’s advantage. Beane has been doing this successfully for the Oakland Athletics for some time now, leading the team through the losses of MVPs and Cy Young contenders and still competing for the playoffs in most every year. Even as he tears down the 2008 club the fans of his team are convinced that they will win in the long run.

Beane is now entering a new era and new sport - Soccer or Football as the other 6.3 Billion people call it. He is applying his talents to MLS’ San Jose Earthquakes and statistical analysis of the Beautiful Game. I figure if this works for him, he just raised his value on the open market to tens of millions as Man U, Barca, Real Madrid and others are worth billions and have hundreds of millions of fans.

Welcome to the world’s game Billy, I’ll be able to hate you when I follow both of my passions in 2009 - Seattle’s expansion year.

What kind of impact will Beane have in MLS? That is yet to be seen, but you can start speculating now.