Basketball Stats: They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

by divia • 17 years ago

134 30 17 years ago

gregstoll• 17 years ago

It seems like you should be able to quantify defense by keeping track of the points scored by the guy you're covering...

Glad to see my hometown team developing new basketball statistics :-)

fallentimes• 17 years ago

But that doesn't account for who else is on the court with you or against you or for when a team plays zone defense.

Also, help defense makes a huge difference - just ask Marcus Camby :).

xenophanes• 17 years ago

> It seems like you should be able to quantify defense by keeping track of the points scored by the guy you're covering...

You'd need to watch deviations from the average points the guy scores. Otherwise whoever is guarding the enemy star player looks bad.

albertni• 17 years ago

This sounds good in theory but there are a TON of variables that would be really hard to encapsulate. I'm not saying it can't be done, but (good) defense in basketball is extremely team-oriented. Positioning, rotations, double teams (and the rotations that accompany them), etc., not to mention zone defense.

To give a more concrete example, a team with a great defensive center gives the guards flexibility to play tighter man to man, because they can more readily afford to let the guy they're guarding get by them (thanks to their "backup", the center). This has the additional consequence of implying that they give up less room on jump shots.

Another thing to consider is steals. A steal is really big because it obviously prevents the opponent from scoring, and frequently leads to fast break opportunities. However, it's misleading to simply look at the number of steals a player gets. Some players get steals within the "flow of the game", whereas others get them through gambling (I don't have a quantitative source for this, but anyone who's watched Larry Hughes play knows what I'm talking about) for steals, meaning that whenever they fail to get the steal, they also end up way out of position, often leading to an easy score for the opponent.

The list of variables goes on and on....

jwesley2• 17 years ago

I think the point of the article is that straight statistics like that are not always accurate. For example, what if a player allows the person he is guarding to score more points on average, but during the time is he is on floor, the opposing team tends to score fewer points. This is easily possible if the player is a great help defender who tends to stray from his own man to help his teammates.

tjstankus• 17 years ago

My favorite Cameron Crazies chant ever: "Whose your Daddy? Battier."

unexpected• 17 years ago

dude, nothing topped speedo guy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpHB6W_r9ag

maximilian• 17 years ago

The oddest thing about that video is that his wife was dating speedo guy's brother, and then dumped his brother for him.

ecuzzillo• 17 years ago

By Michael Lewis.

jessewmc• 17 years ago

What does this post mean?

patio11• 17 years ago

Michael Lewis is a non-fiction author. Most relevant to this thread, his name is instantly recognizable among people who are interested in the intersection of baseball and statistics, because he wrote Moneyball. The basic idea is that historically the market for talent in baseball has severely mispriced talent because it overpays for attributes that do not win ballgames. Thus, if one knew what actually won ballgames, one could thwomp the competition while spending much less money. And, sure enough, someone did just that.

For the rest of the story, I recommend the book. I have no interest in sports whatsoever but one of my stats geek friends does, and he accords it a place of honor in his bookshelf.

mechanical_fish• 17 years ago

That the linked article is by Michael Lewis. A very important data point, since I would probably read Michael Lewis if he just reprinted the phone directory. He would find some way to make those numbers compelling.

jwesley2• 17 years ago

Great article. As a basketball player in my youth, I always struggled with the dynamic of selfishness and selflessness inherent in the game and this was best attempt I've seen at explaining it. There really are so many way a player can help his team that do not improve, and even decrease, his stats. The use of statistical methods to identify this, like Moneyball did for baseball, is fascinating.

omnivore• 17 years ago

Read it a few hours ago and really enjoyed it. The recognition of all of these teams that there are ways to build a team beyond the conventional is smart thinking, even if doesn't always result in titles out of the box..

maxniederhofer• 17 years ago

That article was really well-rounded.

I think over the next decade we're in for a huge shortage of analysts and statisticians in almost all fields of life. Availability of data is ever increasing. The benefits from using it more effectively than competitors are immense. In almost all of the startup businesses in our portfolio (venture capital firm), we've now hired number-crunching guys who do nothing but metrics and we're seeing the results.

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

shortage? nah. now those finance majors who were making millions on juggling mutual funds can get a real job and contribute to society rather than living off unearned commissions. (if your mutual fund does worse than the economy as a whole you don't deserve reward, you are worse than random input)

ericwan2• 17 years ago

Well if they can't even do better than the S&P 500. Let's not hope that they'd do much to society analyzing other data. ;)

ericwan2• 17 years ago

First things came to my mind being that schools would use these data to determine admission. What kind of applicants will yield the best pay off? (endowment?) Same for companies hiring employees.

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

Interesting idea. One of the things I found interesting about Moneyball is that the Oakland A's were willing to pay premiums to role players, and older (presumably on their way down) veterans.

blackthought286• 17 years ago

the player that is not a star but helps his team wins championships is James Posey. Every team needs a guy that does the dirt work and nobody is more effective at doing that right now than Posey. Coming off of the bench he played a huge part in both Miami Heat and Celtics championships. He plays great defense and is also an offensive threat from the outside.

josefresco• 17 years ago

By that logic, every team that wins championships also needs at least two superstars. The Heat had two, the Celtics had 3.

While I love Posey (Celtics fan here), it takes a foundation of superstar talent first to even have a chance.

Many people take for granted the 20-30 points, that the team scoring leader puts up every night, and start to look elsewhere for that magic winning element. Without the consistent play of the scorer (and the attention that draws from defense) guys like Posey would be exploited by a good team.

dburger• 17 years ago

I'm a hacker that used to play juco basketball - this article is extremely on target.

I'm surprised this article didn't mention Dean Oliver or this book: http://www.amazon.com/Basketball-Paper-Rules-Performance-Ana...

pwk• 17 years ago

Fun article. I loved Moneyball, and enjoyed other stuff Michael Lewis has written. I'm glad he's looking at basketball, since that's really the only sport I actually follow a bit, mostly through a blog dedicated to sports stats that happens to focus mostly on basketball: http://dberri.wordpress.com/.

The author (Dave Berri) is an economist who's done some work on connecting team success to the actions of individual players through stats. A major theme is that many players try to maximize their paydays by over-emphasizing scoring, and that this is actually reasonably sensible on their part because decision makers in basketball currently overvalue scoring, and pay accordingly. It does look like that's slowly changing, at least according to this article.

prakash• 17 years ago

I wish they had based this article on Shawn Marion...

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

Interesting article. I think that hockey is going to be the next fertile field for this kind of analysis.

gravitycop• 17 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22teaching+to+the+test%22

By the way, some committee leaders think it's a great idea: http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/823

says Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's state superintendent of schools, in a recent article in the American School Boards Journal. "If you're teaching to the test [...] then we don't see anything wrong with that."

Basketball Stats: They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for

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