With an introduction on the context and on the terms it would use in the rest of the article, a bit like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034987 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37034996.

Okay, but for people who DO know about basketball, this would make the article laborious.

If you write something you assume some base level of reader knowledge. As you say, if you go back to first principles for everything, 1.) You now have 1,000 words of boilerplate that will make the average reader turn the page very quickly and 2.) It probably still won't work for someone with zero knowledge and probably not much more interest.