I’ve been a subscriber to Ben Falk’s excellent Cleaning the Glass blog for well over a year now. He’s a former front office analyst for the Sixers and Blazers that started this site with deep analyses on all aspects of basketball, with an eye for statistics and detail.

This is a great piece on what he’s doing with the site, moving from a purely subscription-based blog with a stats site alongside it to flipping that around: a stats and analytics portal with a splash of analysis writing. His work is excellent and worth checking out if you’re interested in deeply understanding the tactics of basketball. I’ve voraciously consumed everything Ben (and his occasional contributors) have written while being a subscriber.

One way I’ve felt this clearly: the pull between working on the stats site and writing. The stats site has been embraced by everyone from fans to NBA front offices to writers from some of the biggest media outlets to coaches to podcasters to agents. And yet there’s still so much more I can do with it. While writing consistently, though, my time is just too limited to keep building it out at the pace it deserves. But splitting my time doesn’t work well either: I can’t be both the best writer I can be and the best web developer I can be simultaneously.

After a lot of careful thought, then, I’ve decided to change things around here a bit. I’m no longer going to write articles for subscribers. Instead, I’m going to spend the majority of my time making Cleaning the Glass Stats the best site for advanced basketball stats on the web, making it as understandable and easy to use as possible.

I hope his next push into building something unique for basketball stats data works out well and will continue to follow all of his work.