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Kirk Goldsberry (born 1977) is a basketball writer. He was the vice president for strategic research for the San Antonio Spurs, currently lead analyst for Team USA Basketball, and a visiting researcher at the Harvard Institute of Quantitative Social Sciences. He is best known for his sports writing and for pioneering the hexagonal shot chart in basketball analytics, and for being one of the leaders of the recent advanced metrics movement in basketball. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and two young girls.

Personal Life

Kirk Goldsberry was born in 1977 in State College, PA. He has lived with his wife in California, Michigan, Massachusetts, and Texas.

Academia

Following graduate school, Goldsberry served as an assistant professor of Geography at Michigan State (2007-2013) and a visiting professor at Harvard (2011-2013). At Harvard, Goldsberry designed and co-taught the first Geography course offered since Harvard eliminated Geography in the 1940s. While at Harvard, Goldsberry aimed to direct a program with more substantial learning directed to spatial reasoning. In 2012, Goldsberry presented his first basketball research at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which focused on the need for new “spatial and visual analytics” in basketball. He had a top two finish. Within the paper, Goldsberry introduced a new method for making shot charts using NBA shooting data. Goldsberry qualified his research by pointing out how maps can help make big chunks of data simpler, easier to identify and quantify trends.

Currently, Goldsberry serves as a Management Lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin.

Social Media

Goldsberry frequently posts on Instagram and Twitter, where he shares charts that depict player shooting by zone using player tracking data from the NBA. ""

In this research, Goldsberry aimed to quantify shooting efficiency using visual and spatial analysis.

Player Heat Maps

Goldsberry began plotting NBA shot attempts around 2007, and while teaching at Harvard, began to produce heat maps which depicted NBA players efficiency from different zones, accurate down to the square-foot. Goldsberry's initial methodology for making the maps involved sectioning the half-court area into 1,284 distinct shooting cells. In this research, Goldsberry aimed to quantify shooting efficiency using visual and spatial analysis.

Return to Writing

In 2019, Goldsberry published SprawlBall: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA, which focuses on the inefficiency of shots in basketball taken between the restricted circle and the three-point line. The book examines concepts such as how field goal percentage decreases from farther distances, but because of the three point line, shot value goes up. In addition, it describes how Stephen Curry was able to increase his scoring production and efficiency by taking less shots in the midrange, and making unassisted three pointers at a rate and production never seen before.