Jon Bois finds the thrill of victory—and the poetry of defeat—in the numbers.

The Ken Burns of YouTube

Jon Bois makes documentaries about athletes named Bob, baseball brawls, and the worst team in N.B.A. history. Why are they so moving?

By Spike Carter

The most original filmmaker working in the United States today isn’t a Safdie, an Eggers, or an Aster, nor any of their A24-backed contemporaries. It’s an auteur who makes documentaries not on 35-mm. film but with the decidedly uncinematic Google Earth. His films don’t premiere at Cannes but on YouTube.

If you crossed Ken Burns with Adam Curtis and raised the result on a 56K modem, you might get a documentarian like Jon Bois, the 43-year-old, Brooklyn-based sportswriter and creative director at SB Nation. His métier is statistics, but his real talent is finding something unexpectedly moving beneath the statistical overkill of American sports.