"Sports Economists: Always Wrong About Everything"
The headline is an exaggeration--slightly--but the article is a great read, a combination of insightful analysis and biting humor: "Sports Economists: Always Wrong About Everything."
It is important to understand that intelligent critics of sports economists are not Luddites who hate numbers and who do not understand statistical analysis; we are analytically-minded people who are frustrated with people who--through some combination of ignorance and bias--twist numbers to fit a preconceived narrative.
The author of the article cited above tears to shreds a lot of nonsense from a variety of sources, but he has a laser focus on Dave Berri, who I wrote about over a decade ago and then forgot about until I stumbled onto an article describing how Forbes fired him in 2018 for submitting work that was "misleading," "sloppy," "polemic," and "just bad reporting."
I long ago grew tired of reading Berri's nonsensical basketball rants, and I scarcely paid any attention to what he said about other sports, but apparently he is versatile enough to provide horrible analysis about more than just basketball. You should read the above article for all of the gory details, but here is the devastating conclusion (the Birnbaum cited is Phil Birnbaum, whose excellent work I have cited before as well):
When you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Berri's
hammer is regression analysis, and he goes about hitting everything he
can find with it until he finds something that seems vaguely nail-like
from a certain angle. Then he proclaims a group of extremely well-paid
subject matter experts dumb. When challenged about this, he says things like "regressions are nice, but not always understood by everyone." He calls the protestors dumb.
This is more than a logical fallacy: it's a worldview. In a post on a cricket study by another set of authors,
Birnbaum points out the assumption built into a lot of economics
studies. It, like most of Berri's work, runs a regression on some data
and reports back that something fails to be statistically significant:
The authors chose the null hypothesis that the managers'
adjustment of HFA [home field advantage] is zero. They then fail to
reject the hypothesis.
But, what if they chose a contradictory null hypothesis -- that
managers' HFA *irrationality* was zero? That is, what if the null
hypothesis was that managers fully understood what HFA meant and
adjusted their expectations accordingly? The authors would have included
a "managers are dumb" dummy variable. The equations would have still
come up with 4% for a road player and 10% for a home player -- and it
would turn out that the significance of the "managers are dumb" variable
would not be significant. Two different and contradictory null
hypotheses, both which would be rejected by the data. The authors chose
to test one, but not the other.
Basically, the test the authors chose is not powerful enough to
distinguish the two hypotheses (manager dumb, manager not dumb) with
statistical significance.
But if you look at the actual equation, which shows that home players
are twice as likely to be dropped than road players for equal levels of
underperformance -- it certainly looks like "not dumb" is a lot more
likely than "dumb".
The goalie example is the most illuminating here: by adjusting the
parameters of your study you can arrive at radically different
conclusions. I'm not sure if Berri is intentionally skewing his results
to get shiny Moneyball answers, but given how dumb his justifications
are for the NFL study that's the kinder interpretation. Running around
saying that we don't know that the average sixth rounder isn't
John Elway waiting to happen because they can't get on the field is
obtuseness that almost has to be intentional. On the other hand, he does
blithely state he's "not sure there is much to clarify"
about his assertion that NFL general managers are on par with
stock-picking monkeys when it comes to identifying quarterbacks, so he
may be that genuinely clueless. (The Lions tried a stock-picking monkey.
It didn't work out.)
It is very important to emphasize that Berri's critics are not people who reject statistical analysis; we are people who reject flawed statistical analysis.
Labels: "advanced basketball statistics", Dave Berri, Phil Birnbaum
posted by David Friedman @ 4:42 AM
What Happened to Dave Berri?
Dave Berri is a name that I have not thought about in quite some time. More than a decade ago, I wrote a few articles debunking his flawed and tendentious NBA analysis; he declared, among other things, that Allen Iverson was a barely above average NBA player, that Dennis Rodman was more productive on a per minute basis than Michael Jordan, and that Andrew Bynum was more valuable to the Lakers than Kobe Bryant.
Later, during the 2011 NBA lockout, Berri--who is an economist by training--incorrectly asserted that the NBA's owners behave like socialists and he displayed a lack of understanding of how a sports league functions; in contrast, I correctly predicted that the lockout would be long, and I correctly anticipated the broad parameters of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement: the second longest work stoppage in league history did not end until, as I put it, "the players finally accepted the reality that the NBA's broken business model had to be fundamentally changed." Up to that point, the players had been receiving nearly 60% of the league's revenues even though many teams were losing money; once the players realized that such an arrangement is not feasible in the long run, the owners and players agreed to terms.
After Henry Abbott disappeared from ESPN--thus depriving Berri of one of his main media promoters--Berri's name came up much less often. Berri stopped posting at his main blog in 2011, he then started a new blog, and he stopped posting at the new blog in late 2015. Apparently, he got a gig as a writer for Forbes, but that proved to be short-lived, and I somehow missed the news of how his tenure there ended in disgrace in 2018: Forbes cuts ties with sports business columnist, deletes piece about WNBA player salaries.
Forbes' editors explained the decision to fire Berri by stating that the final article Berri submitted to Forbes was "misleading," "sloppy," "polemic," and "just bad reporting." Forbes also released this statement: "The
article was removed because it failed to meet Forbes' strict editorial
standards for accuracy and fairness. Specifically, the contributor intentionally omitted facts
and context from an authoritative source that would have undermined his
thesis. As a result, David Berri was removed as a Forbes contributor."
This does not surprise me, because I have firsthand experience with Berri engaging in similar behavior.
In Why Would LeBron James Become Captain of the Gotham Titanic? I wrote:
Last year, many Knicks' fans--and even some national commentators--were
thrilled at the prospect that D'Antoni and his fabled "seven seconds or
less" offensive system would improve the Knicks so much that LeBron
James could be the final piece that would make the Knicks a championship
contender. However, by the latter portion of the season, I pointed out that D'Antoni's Knicks were clearly heading in the wrong direction;
they were lousy defensively and on the boards and--most ominously--both
of those trends steadily worsened throughout the season. Despite all of
the buzz about D'Antoni, his Knicks finished 32-50 in 2008-09, one game
worse than the Knicks finished in Thomas' first season as their coach
(2006-07).
After I told the truth about the Knicks' plight,
diehard Knicks fan Mike Kurylo wrote a barely comprehensible screed in
response, misspelling my name and betraying complete ignorance not only
about NBA basketball but also about basic journalistic methods (he
suggested that I spelled out "fourth" instead of writing "4th" because
of some diabolical psychological plot to "visually" mislead readers when
the reality is that it is standard practice to spell out ordinal
numbers less than 10th). I refuted Kurylo's nonsense,
concluding "Mike K. declares that I 'cherry picked' numbers in a
'dishonest' attempt to tell a biased story but the reality is that I
simply cited the relevant numbers regarding the 2007, 2008 and 2009
Knicks, indicated that the D'Antoni Knicks have yet to surpass the level
that the Thomas Knicks reached in 2007 and suggested that the Knicks
need to make personnel and philosophical changes in order to become a
good team."
"Stat guru" Dave Berri also jumped into the mix,
incorrectly suggesting that my article compared the 2009 Knicks to the
2005 Knicks--a lie that distorts the meaning of what I wrote and that
Berri refuses to retract--and offering up his usual numbers-based rhetoric to suggest that the Knicks are in fact moving in the right direction.
I posted a comment on Berri's now-discontinued website asking him to correct his mischaracterization of what I wrote, but he never issued a correction or retraction.
Here is the conclusion of my analysis of the 2009 Knicks: "How will the Knicks be able
to justify to their fans the suffering of the 2009 and 2010 seasons if
the Knicks do not sign an elite player in the summer of 2010? Moreover,
even if the Knicks bring in an elite player they still would struggle to
win more than 45 games without doing a major restructuring of the rest
of their roster and a complete overhaul of their all-offense,
no-defense/rebounding philosophy."
After I asserted that the Knicks were not improving and would not be able to sign a top tier free agent, the Knicks went 29-53 in 2009-10. The Knicks failed in their attempt to lure LeBron James to come to New York and instead signed injury-prone free agent Amare Stoudemire, who was only healthy and productive in the first of his five seasons with the Knicks. The Knicks went 42-40 in 2010-11 before losing in the first round of the playoffs. D'Antoni resigned after the Knicks started 18-24 in 2011-12.
Bottom line:
(1) I was correct that the Knicks were not headed in the right direction under D'Antoni, and I was right that the Knicks were foolish if they thought that LeBron James was going to become captain of the Gotham Titanic.
(2) Media assertions/hopes that D'Antoni would turn the Knicks around were wrong; Berri misrepresented what I wrote, and then he agreed with incorrect analysis about the team's prospects while rejecting the analysis that I provided that proved to be correct.
Labels: "advanced basketball statistics", 2011 NBA lockout, Dave Berri, Forbes, journalism, New York Knicks
posted by David Friedman @ 3:47 AM
