Why we're building KnowingBall
Every NBA fan has been in that bar argument where someone throws out a stat as fact, and it’s just too tedious to check. “No rookie has ever shot 40% from three on high volume!” The truth usually exists somewhere in the numbers, but getting to it means hopping between sites, exporting tables, and sorting spreadsheets, which you likely won’t be doing on your third pint.
KnowingBall is our attempt to make that process much simpler, so you can keep your friend in line when they start with their BS ;)
The idea
Three pages: Players, Teams and Lineups. On each one, you’ll be able to mix and match whatever you care about, set a range on any stat, and sort by any of them.
The data you’ll be able to navigate covers a lot of ground:
- Box-score stats: scoring, shooting, rebounding, playmaking, defense, plus-minus, and the advanced numbers built on top of them.
- Bio and draft info: age, height, weight, position, experience and draft history.
- Combine measurements: the athletic and physical testing players went through before entering the league.
- Salaries: what players are paid, and what a lineup costs on the floor together.
- Standings and context: wins, records, and how teams and players perform against stronger or weaker opponents.
- Lineups: how combinations of teammates do when they share the floor.
You’ll be able to look at full seasons or just recent stretches, regular season or playoffs, and go back through many seasons of history.
Where we are
We started in September 2026, and the work so far has been all about the data. We feed from the official NBA stats source, then cook those numbers ahead of time so that fans’ questions turn into searches that come back almost instantly, no matter how many filters you stack.
There’s nothing to click on yet, but the foundation is in place.
What’s next
The next big piece is the part you’ll actually see: the search pages. There are a lot of stats to choose from, and the challenge is making all of them reachable without the page turning into an airplane cockpit. We’ll share how we approach that here.
The road to launch
- Q1 2027: KnowingBall goes live. All three pages launch with the full search, filtering and sorting experience.
- Q2 2027: predictive analysis. We’re building our own model, trained specifically on basketball data and personalized to what each fan cares about. It isn’t a general-purpose AI chatbot that knows a little about everything; it’s a model built to do one thing well: understand the game.
Until then, this devlog is where we’ll post progress, design decisions, and the occasional interesting stat we find along the way.
Tell us what you’d search for
If there’s a question you’ve always wanted to ask the numbers, tell us what to build. Every suggestion gets read, and the best ones will shape what’s on the page at launch.
You can follow along on X at @knowingballdata and on LinkedIn, or add the devlog to your feed reader.