Harvey Pollack: The Man Who Invented Basketball Statistics
Pennsylvania
Every time an NBA broadcast flashes a stat line of points, rebounds, assists, and turnovers, it reflects work done by one man in Philadelphia. Harvey Pollack joined the Philadelphia Warriors as statistician in nineteen forty-six and spent nearly seven decades tracking the game. He essentially invented the modern basketball box score, creating the categories that coaches, scouts, and fans now treat as basic facts.
His nickname was Super Stat. He produced an annual statistical guide that was studied league-wide. A Temple University graduate, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in two thousand two.
Pollack kept working into his nineties and died in two thousand fifteen at age ninety-three. The game he helped make legible is still played a few blocks from where this marker stands.
