"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
What if ESPN's Main Basketball Blogger Wrote About the Chicago Bulls the Way that He Writes About the L.A. Lakers?
The following article is satirical but all of the cited box score statistics are true (they are deliberately taken out of context but the raw numbers are accurate). Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Hopefully, most readers understand the nature of satire but in case you don't and/or are new to this site, here is a serious, detailed analysis of how Derrick Rose and other elite NBA players perform: Selecting NBA Award Winners: The Battle of Stats Versus Storylines Versus Logical Analysis.
Derrick Rose Refuses to Trust his Teammatesby Aenry Habbott
Before I started the False Bucket website I had a variety of different jobs and I met people from all different walks of life. One time on my lunch break I went to Starbucks and I was standing in line behind an elderly, somewhat shabbily dressed gentleman. He looked like he had not had anything to eat or drink for days. He ordered a coffee and a sandwich but then realized that he was a dollar short. I gave him a dollar and he smiled at me. I felt good all day and I will never forget how good it felt to help someone.
What does this have to do with basketball?
Basketball is part of the tapestry of life. On the court five people must work together in harmony, just like we all should work together in harmony to make the world a better place. Sharing is good on the basketball court and in life. Being selfish is bad.
Using all of your dollars only for yourself is selfish. Most of us understand that this is bad.
But a basketball player who shoots too much is just like a person who spends all of his money on himself.
Shooting is not sharing!
Derrick Rose is a very gifted basketball player. It is exciting to watch him cross over hapless defenders. It is cool to see him dunk over much bigger opponents. I get that. Derrick Rose is fun to watch!
But is Derrick Rose really an effective, efficient player? Before the advent of advanced basketball statistics we would have just had to rely on how we felt watching Derrick Rose play. And like I said, Derrick Rose is fun to watch. No one can deny that.
Derrick Rose is a point guard. Point guards are supposed to be the ultimate basketball sharers. They are supposed to give out dollars--i.e., shots--to all of their friends. I am sure that Derrick Rose is a good person. But advanced basketball statistics show that he is not a sharer.
Bave Derri is an economist at Southwest Northeast Central Eastern College in Looneyville, Texas, an institution that is to economic research what the Institute of Advanced Study was to physics back when Albert Einstein worked there. Derri does not deny that it is fun to watch Rose play but he recently sent me an email explaining exactly how the numbers show that Rose does not share as much as he should.
In the 2010-11 season, Rose attempted exactly 31 shots in a game once--and the Chicago Bulls lost. They also lost three of the five games in which Rose attempted exactly 27 shots. The Chicago Bulls were pretty good last year. They had the best record in the NBA (62-20). But four of their losses came when Rose attempted either 27 or 31 shots.
I get that Chicago fans want Rose to be the next Michael Jordan but Rose only ranked sixth on the Bulls in true shooting percentage. That means that when Rose shot the ball it was less likely to go in the hoop than it was when Rasual Butler, Joakim Noah, Kyle Korver, Keith Bogans or Omer Asik shot the ball. Luol Deng's true shooting percentage was barely less than Rose's (.549 for Deng compared to .550 for Rose) but Rose attempted 1597 shots while Deng only attempted 1155 shots.
Sharing is caring, whether you are helping a homeless person in Starbucks or a Sudanese friend on the basketball court.
I know that advanced basketball statistics make some of you feel cranky but true shooting percentage is not only an advanced basketball statistic but it contains the word "true." If you are against using true shooting percentage to rank basketball players then you really are a primitive person who has not learned to value truth.
The sad story of Rose hoarding shot attempts carried over from the 2010-11 regular season into the playoffs. When Rose attempted 29 or more shots the Bulls went 0-2 but in the three games in which he attempted 18 or fewer shots the Bulls went 3-0. If Rose had attempted 18 or fewer shots in every playoff game the Bulls would have had a perfect playoff record! They would have been the greatest championship team ever!
What about poor Carlos Boozer? He went to Duke for three years so he probably is smart enough to understand the value of advanced basketball statistics. When he played for Utah, a team with a point guard who shared the ball, Boozer had two straight seasons in which he averaged at least 20 ppg and at least 10 rpg. That all changed when Boozer became a Bull and started playing alongside Rose. Boozer's scoring average plummeted to 17.5 ppg last season and in the playoffs it dropped to 12.6 ppg.
Rose tried to win those playoff games all by himself. He did not trust his teammates. He did not share the ball with them. If Carlos Boozer had been a homeless person in Starbucks, Rose would not have given him a dollar.
Derri came up with a new advanced metric to quantify the importance of sharing. He calls it Derri's Ultimate Methodology (DUM). This DUM formula is so advanced that only an economist could understand it so I will not even attempt to describe it here but Derri informs me that Rose has a -206.5 DUM number. Derri says that the only two guards he can find in NBA history who were more selfish than Rose are Isiah Thomas and Allen Iverson. Derri estimates that Thomas and Iverson have combined to ruin 10 NBA franchises. Derri is still investigating what impact Iverson's brief stint in Turkey had on Derri's beloved Detroit Pistons but preliminary indications are that Iverson is the reason that the Pistons are still struggling.
But, wait a minute. Didn't Isiah Thomas win two championships? Didn't Allen Iverson carry a thin Philly roster to the NBA Finals in 2001? Derri has all of the answers to your simple questions. Thomas' Detroit teams were successful because of Dennis Rodman. Derri notes that Rodman was a greater player than even Michael Jordan. Rodman had a DUM number of 666! Rodman's DUM number was more than three times larger than Einstein's IQ. That means Rodman was a basketball genius! Similarly, Iverson's Philadelphia teammate Dikembe Mutombo had a DUM number of 319. Mutombo was not quite the basketball Einstein that Rodman was but Mutombo was at least at the Kurt Godel level.
I spent half a day on the phone with various NBA executives talking about Derrick Rose and the DUM numbers but after I said my piece each of them just replied "Dumb----" and hung up the phone. I am mystified why NBA executives would not want to use every means available to improve their teams.
Joakim Noah, Omer Asik and Carlos Boozer are not basketball Einsteins or even basketball Godels but Derri's DUM numbers show that they at least are equivalent to some of the lesser known figures at the Institute for Advanced Study. It would be smart for Rose to pass the ball to them more often.
After all, a hero is nothing but a sandwich and a player with a low DUM number like Rose would not even buy a sandwich for a starving man.
Labels: Dave Berri, Derrick Rose, Henry Abbott
posted by David Friedman @ 3:29 AM
What if ESPN's Main Basketball Blogger Wrote About the Miami Heat the Way that He Writes About the L.A. Lakers?
The following article is satirical but all of the cited box score statistics are true (they are deliberately taken out of context but the raw numbers are accurate). Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.The Stat-Centered Selfishness of LeBron James is Destroying the Miami Heatby Aenry Habbott
LeBron James sprained his ankle during the Miami Heat's blowout victory over the Indiana Pacers but he stayed in the game simply to try to amass a triple double (he failed, falling two rebounds short)--but, despite being healthy enough to chase individual stats on Wednesday, he sat out Thursday's game against the Atlanta Hawks, the only team that has beaten the Heat this season. This might have been the most important game of the season for the Heat but James did not care that Dwayne Wade also was sitting out due to injury, thus leaving the Heat very shorthanded; James came on to the court before Thursday's game, hit some shots and showed no physical limitations but he did not want to risk damaging his gaudy individual numbers.
Superficially, it is easy to see why so many people think that LeBron James is great: he scores, rebounds, defends and passes. But basketball greatness consists of so much more than what the naked eye can discern; basketball truth has only been revealed to statistical mavens like Bave Derri, an economist at Southwest Northeast Central Eastern College in Looneyville, Texas. Derri examined certain selected statistics and came to a startling, unconventional conclusion: James is actually a selfish player whose selfishness is destroying Chris Bosh's career and could doom the Heat to never win a title.
James attempted more shots than any Miami Heat player in 2010-11. The Heat went 0-1 when James attempted 30 shots. They went 0-2 when he attempted 24 shots. That winning percentage is even worse than the mark posted by the 9-73 Philadelphia 76ers in 1972-73--and that was the worst team in NBA history! When James shoots the ball either 30 or 24 times the Heat are worse than the worst team in NBA history.
But that is only part of the story told by advanced basketball statistics.
Did you know that the Miami Heat went 4-0 in 2010-11 when Chris Bosh attempted between 19 and 22 field goal attempts? That is a perfect record! You cannot beat 100%; NBA executives may not understand this kind of math but Derri confirmed to me that no one--not Bill Russell, not Magic Johnson, not even Michael Jordan--has ever led a team to a perfect winning percentage. These advanced statistics show that Chris Bosh is actually the best player in the NBA--but James is so selfish that he won't pass the ball to Bosh. When Bosh attempted just nine shots versus Sacramento on March 4, 2011 the Heat lost. The Heat also lost four of the seven games during the 2010-11 season in which Bosh attempted 13 shots. During the 2011 playoffs the Heat went 4-1 when Bosh attempted at least 18 shots--and Derri informs me that his complicated algorithm explains that the one game the Heat lost when Bosh attempted at least 18 shots was actually Isiah Thomas' fault but the reasoning behind this is so advanced that only an economist could understand it so I will not even attempt to describe it here.
The final proof came on Thursday. With James using a minor injury as an excuse to sit out to protect his individual statistics, Bosh proved that he is in fact the most valuable player on the Heat. Without James around to stifle him, Bosh attempted 27 shots and led both teams with 33 points and 14 rebounds as the Heat defeated the Hawks 116-109 in triple overtime. One of the times that Bosh made a shot James did not stand up and cheer, proving that James does not really support his teammates when they are performing well. Derri notes that if James had stood and cheered then the Heat probably would have only needed two overtimes to win the game instead of three; Derri's new Based on Standing formula (also known as the BS formula) multiplies a team's efficiency differential by how many times its leading scorer cheers when one of his teammates scores but subtracts 10 points for every time he does not stand and subtracts 20 points if he scowls. Derri says that according to this new, exciting metric LeBron James is the most selfish player in the NBA. I asked five NBA coaches about this but never got a response because they each laughed at me. Derri told me to not be upset, though, because coaches actually have no impact on who wins NBA games anyway. Derri is an economist and he bases his conclusions strictly on advanced basketball statistics so if you disagree with him then your thinking is outmoded and the rest of the basketball world will soon just sneer at you because you are an uninformed Luddite who rejects all notions of progress.
On March 30, 2010, Chris Bosh--then a Toronto Raptor--attempted 27 shots as the Raptors defeated the New Jersey Nets 100-90. That means that Bosh's teams are 2-0 since 2010 when he attempts exactly 27 shots in a regular season game. The advanced basketball statistics prove beyond any doubt that when Bosh attempts 27 shots his teams are undefeated and, according to Derri, unbeatable.
As convincing as that data is, I saved the best stat for last. Chris Bosh's career true shooting percentage is .571, while LeBron James' career true shooting percentage is just .567. Those are not only advanced basketball statistics but they contain the word "true." I just don't understand why so many NBA executives and coaches ignore the truth--and the truth is that since Bosh has a higher true shooting percentage than James the Miami Heat's optimal strategy is for Bosh to shoot 27 times a game.
Postscript:
Professor Derri has combed through the data and uncovered something that may overturn the conclusions mentioned above: Mickell Gladness has a true shooting percentage of 1.000 this season and the Heat won both games that he played in. That suggests that the optimal strategy for the Heat actually may be to play Gladness more frequently so that he can get more touches and more shot attempts. I asked six NBA executives about this and they each hung up the phone after laughing non-stop for 10 minutes apiece, which just confirms that NBA executives are too stupid to understand advanced basketball statistics. Perhaps if I do dozens of more posts revealing that James is a selfish player I will someday convince them that I am right.
Labels: Chris Bosh, Dave Berri, Dwyane Wade, Henry Abbott, LeBron James
posted by David Friedman @ 5:55 AM
MLB "Stat Guru" Phil Birnbaum Explains Why "Advanced Basketball Statistics" Don't Work
I have written several articles detailing the flawed methodologies of "advanced basketball statistics," including
Economics is Not a Science, Nor is Basketball Statistical Analysis and
Economics is Not a Science, Nor is Basketball Statistical Analysis, Part II. Phil Birnbaum is a "stat guru" who primarily focuses on baseball, a sport whose discrete, one on one encounters between pitchers and batters lends itself much more readily to accurate statistical analysis than a free flowing five on five sport like basketball. Birnbaum has
taken a look at "advanced basketball statistics" and he is not impressed by what he found:
You know all those player evaluation statistics in basketball, like "Wins Produced," "Player Evaluation Rating," and so forth? I don't think they work. I've been thinking about it, and I don't think I trust any of them enough put much faith in their results. That's the opposite of how I feel about baseball. For baseball, if the sportswriter consensus is that player A is an excellent offensive player, but it turns out his OPS is a mediocre .700, I'm going to trust OPS. But, for basketball, if the sportswriters say a guy's good, but his "Wins Produced" is just average, I might be inclined to trust the sportswriters.I don't think the stats work well enough to be useful.Please click on the above link and read Birnbaum's article in its entirety, because he does an excellent job of explaining exactly how difficult it is to correctly assign individual credit for team success in basketball--and Birnbaum does not even address an issue that I have brought up several times: the raw box score numbers themselves are very subjective (
I have mainly focused on assists but the same could be said for blocked shots, steals and, to some degree, even rebounds, depending on how the official scorekeepers define tips, etc.).
Birnbaum cites a
study by David Lewin and Dan T. Rosenbaum that shows that minutes played by players in a preceding season is at least as good of a predictor of team performance in the subsequent season as the so-called "advanced basketball statistics" are. Birnbaum notes that minutes played "is probably the closest representation you can get to what the coach thinks of a player's skill," so this is an indication that--contrary to the constant bleating by "stat gurus" like Dave Berri and their media sycophants like Henry Abbott--NBA coaches actually do have some idea about what they are doing.
Birnbaum expresses some hope that plus/minus statistics could be useful if the sample sizes are large enough but, as I
previously reported, "stat guru" Ken Pomeroy has studied plus/minus stats and is very skeptical of their usefulness. Birnbaum concludes, "But, just picking up a box score or looking up standard player stats online, and trying [to figure out] from that which players are how much better than others (the approach that 'Wins Produced' and other stats take)...well, I don't think you're ever going to be able to make that work."
Labels: "advanced basketball statistics", Dave Berri, Henry Abbott, Ken Pomeroy, Phil Birnbaum
posted by David Friedman @ 5:24 PM
Economics is Not a Science, Nor is Basketball Statistical Analysis, Part II
Russ Roberts' recent Wall Street Journal article titled Is the Dismal Science Really a Science? makes some of the same points that I have stated forcefully for several years. Roberts--who is an economics professor at George Mason University--declares that economics is not a science because "most sciences make progress. Nobody in medicine wants to bring back lead goblets. Sir Isaac Newton understood a lot about gravity. But Albert Einstein taught us more." Roberts adds, "Facts and evidence still matter" but that instead of proving or disproving theories it seems like economists are primarily just "confirming our biases." Roberts concludes, "The economy is a complex system, our data are imperfect and our models inevitably fail to account for all the interactions. The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists. Economics is a powerful tool, a lens for organizing one's thinking about the complexity of the world around us. That should be enough. We should be honest about what we know, what we don't know and what we may never know. Admitting that publicly is the first step toward respectability."
The basketball "stat gurus" who received their training as economists should take heed of Roberts' words and likewise be "honest" about the limitations of their methodologies--but, of course, that will likely never happen, because how can Dave Berri and others sell books if they admit that all they are doing is shuffling numbers on spreadsheets to confirm their biases and that evaluating basketball players and teams is a far more complex enterprise than they care to admit?'
As I wrote in October 2008, Economics is Not a Science, Nor is Basketball Statistical Analysis. The data being used by "stat gurus" is incomplete and often inaccurate. Statistics can be a "powerful tool" (in Roberts' words) to help to understand basketball but they do not provide definitive answers: the player rankings produce by Berri or John Hollinger do not represent some absolute, objective reality but merely reflect the biases and limitations inherent in the formulas that Berri and Hollinger invented.
In The Difference Between Measuring Defense in Basketball and Baseball, I made the important point that basketball statistical analysis is pseudoscience because its practitioners do not base their research on the scientific method:
- Ask a Question
- Do Background Research
- Construct a Hypothesis
- Test Your Hypothesis by Doing an Experiment
- Analyze Your Data and Draw a Conclusion
- Communicate Your Results
If you are still wasting your time reading the proclamations of "stat gurus," then the next time one of these oracles speaks take note if he mentions a margin of error for his numbers, see if he explains the sample size from which he derives his calculations and monitor how he explains cause/effect relationships--i.e., it is one thing to note that a certain player's turnovers are down or his field goal percentage is up but quite another matter to explain, in the context of nine other players on the court at any given time, why that player's performance has fluctuated in a particular manner.
Labels: basketball statistical analysis, Dave Berri, John Hollinger, Russ Roberts
posted by David Friedman @ 6:39 PM
Allen Iverson Ends Short-Lived Retirement
"I know I can play and I'm going to prove that."--Allen Iverson,
12/3/09 press conference.Allen Iverson ended perhaps the shortest
retirement in sports history by scoring 11 points, dishing off six assists and grabbing five rebounds in his second coming as a Philadelphia 76er but the 76ers lost to the Denver Nuggets 93-83. Chauncey Billups led the Nuggets with 31 points, eight rebounds and eight assists, helping to overcome a sluggish 14 point, 5-21 shooting performance from Carmelo Anthony, who failed to score 20 points for the first time this season. Andre Iguodala topped the Sixers with 31 points but that was not nearly enough to overcome Denver's ability to draw fouls and make free throws. Billups made all 11 of his free throws as the Nuggets shot 24-26 from the free throw line, compared to just 8-9 free throw shooting by the Sixers.
Iverson's relatively modest statistics were actually pretty good for someone who has not played in an NBA game in a month and it is worth noting that he had the second best plus/minus number for the 76ers (-1, trailing only Iguodala's +1); in other words, the Nuggets did most of their damage when Iverson was not on the court. The Sixers built a 10 point lead in the first half, were up 44-41 at halftime and were ahead 65-61 when Iverson went to the bench with 37.7 seconds remaining in the third quarter. When Iverson returned at the 9:08 mark in the fourth quarter the Nuggets led 72-65 and the Sixers were not able to gain any ground the rest of the way.
The game's outcome is hardly surprising; the Sixers were 5-15 prior to Iverson's arrival and had lost nine straight games. In fact, the Sixers have yet to win more than 41 games in a season since jettisoning Iverson early in the 2006-07 campaign; with Iverson onboard, they won at least 43 games in five of the seven full seasons prior to that and posted a .561 winning percentage (equivalent to 46 wins in an 82 game season) during the lockout shortened 1999 season, Iverson's third year in the league.
The real story is not the result of one game but the tremendous battering that Iverson's image has taken in the past year or so: in the 2007-08 season, then-Nugget Iverson ranked first in the NBA in minutes (41.8 mpg), third in the NBA in scoring (26.4 ppg), eighth in the NBA in steals (2.0 spg) and ninth in the NBA in assists (7.1 apg) for a team that won 50 games in the tough Western Conference--but since that time he has been traded by Denver and essentially banished by Detroit before fleeing Memphis early this season after playing just three games. In the blink of an eye--and without suffering a serious injury or any tangible loss of his physical skills--Iverson went from being one of the most prolific players in the league to persona non grata, someone who even the most woeful teams in the league expressed no public interest in signing. Are we really supposed to believe that Iverson could not help the Nets, Knicks or some of the league's other cellar dwellers? A lot of teams are putting all of their eggs in the proverbial LeBron James basket and it will be really interesting to see how their fans react when James does not sign with any of those teams and their fans realize that they have been sold a bill of goods.
Supposedly, Iverson's unwillingness to come off of the bench scared away most of his potential suitors but--as Iverson mentioned in his recent interview with John Thompson--prior to Iverson's arrival in Detroit there had never been a question about whether or not Iverson should be a starter. Then the Pistons inexplicably decided that Rodney Stuckey simply has to be a starter, so they sent Iverson to the bench (Stuckey has started all 20 games for the Pistons this year and near the season's quarter pole the Pistons are on pace to post their worst record since 2000-01). Iverson told Thompson that he would be willing to come off of the bench if someone beat him out for the starting spot by outplaying him and if "I know in my heart that that player is better than me. I wouldn't have (a) problem if (a coach told me) 'This guy right here outplayed you. He's a better player than you. He's the starter'...Why would I have a problem with that? Just like guys got to accept when I start over them--but they know when they look in the mirror and ask themselves 'Are you better than Allen Iverson? Should you be starting over Allen Iverson?' They know the answer."
Any intelligent, informed basketball observer--for instance,
Jeff Van Gundy--understands that the Pistons bungled the Iverson situation; I would go further and say that the Pistons actually damaged Iverson's reputation around the league (not that this was their intention or goal per se). Uninformed basketball observers--such as "stat guru" Dave Berri*--leaped at the opportunity to pile on to Iverson; last season had barely gotten underway and the Pistons had not yet re-signed Antonio McDyess (who was traded to Denver in the Iverson deal but then let go by the Nuggets) but Berri immediately declared that the Pistons were heading into a downward spiral that was entirely Iverson's fault. The Pistons did in fact have a subpar season but there were many factors involved, including a coaching change that did not work, injuries to key players, McDyess' absence for a month--and the bizarre way that the Pistons seemed to do everything possible to minimize Iverson's effectiveness, as opposed to playing an uptempo, wide open style that would have taken advantage of Iverson's ability to create open shots for himself and others; after all, Pistons President Joe Dumars publicly stated that he traded Billups and McDyess for Iverson precisely because Iverson could add a dimension to Detroit's offense that Billups did not provide. Why acquire Iverson and make that statement if you have no intention of taking advantage of Iverson's skill set strengths? Was Dumars' grand plan really simply to acquire salary cap space to spend on Ben Gordon and Charlie Villanueva? Don't expect to see that Stuckey-Gordon-Villanueva "nucleus" in the NBA Finals any time soon.
Whether or not you like Iverson, he has earned respect because of his productivity and because of how hard he plays. The reason that Berri's articles about Iverson are so detestable and the reason that I
respond so forcefully to them is that it seems like Berri--a nobody in his primary field, someone whose work assuredly will not stand the test of time--is trying to make a name for himself as an NBA "stat guru" at Iverson's expense, bamboozling the general public with mathematical gimmickry that the average person is not equipped to debunk; most people do not have much formal mathematical training, so they are reluctant to challenge an economist when he spouts off about what the "numbers" supposedly say, though intelligent people understand that
Economics is Not a Science, Nor is Basketball Statistical Analysis and that, as I
wrote earlier this year, "Basketball statistical analysts do not yet have all of the necessary data to completely 'model' the sport, nor do they fully understand how to use the data that they have."
Watch Iverson play for the rest of this season, look back at old footage of Iverson--like this
nearly nine minute (!) compilation of dunks by the diminutive guard--consider Iverson's high rankings in pro basketball history in categories like scoring average, steals and minutes played and then decide for yourself whether
my perspective or
Berri's perspective best represents what you honestly think and feel about Iverson's place in basketball history: do you believe "no sensible person can deny that he is not only one of the greatest 'little men' (six feet and under) in pro basketball history but one of the greatest players of all-time, period" or do you believe "Iverson--across his entire career--has been slightly below average"?
*--One of the great mysteries of the universe (or least the basketball universe) is why ESPN's Henry Abbott has seemingly made it his personal mission to heavily promote Berri's half baked basketball ideology; even other "stat gurus" are extremely skeptical about Berri's methodologies, yet Abbott incessantly links to Berri as if Berri has discovered the Holy Grail of basketball analysis. ESPN employs its own "stat guru"--John Hollinger, who has sometimes crossed swords with Berri--and even though Abbott also links to Hollinger it seems like Abbott does so out of duty more than belief, whereas Abbott seems determined to lift Berri--a minor figure in his chosen field (Berri is an associate economics professor at that bastion of economic theory, Southern Utah University)--into prominence in the basketball world.
Labels: Allen Iverson, Carmelo Anthony, Chauncey Billups, Dave Berri, Denver Nuggets, Detroit Pistons, Henry Abbott, Philadelphia 76ers
posted by David Friedman @ 4:16 AM
Jeff Van Gundy Speaks the Truth About Allen Iverson
About a minute and a half after the Detroit Pistons acquired Allen Iverson from the Denver Nuggets in exchange for Chauncey Billups and Antonio McDyess (the Pistons later re-signed McDyess after the Nuggets released him), Dave Berri--of Wages of Wins/True Hoop fame--blamed every ill in the Detroit metro area on Iverson. When I posted some comments on Berri's site pointing out that it was not fair or logical to hold Iverson entirely responsible for the Pistons' record considering that the Pistons were without McDyess' services for a month, that they had a new coach and that they foolishly decided to bench either Iverson or Richard Hamilton so that Rodney Stuckey could start, Berri's dittohead idiot followers came out of the woodwork anonymously spewing nonsense (Berri generally lets his drones do his dirty work as opposed to directly responding--unless the various creatively named commenters on his site are in fact him in "disguise").
During Denver's 119-105 win over the L.A. Lakers on Friday night, ESPN analyst Jeff Van Gundy spoke the truth about the Iverson situation in Detroit--and his words should sound very familiar to anyone who followed my analysis of the situation: "This is not to defend Iverson for some of the things--practicing and all that, whatever--but I think in the last year he has been the biggest scapegoat for the Detroit Pistons' shortcomings last year. That team just ran out of steam...Last year, the Detroit situation with him (Iverson) was mishandled. You don't bring in a guy like that and then tell either Richard Hamilton or Allen Iverson they're coming off the bench. You start Iverson, you start Hamilton, you bring Stuckey off the bench--or you just buy Iverson out when you make the trade. But to ask either one of those guys to come of the bench, to me, doesn't make any sense." In other words, a veteran NBA coach who is considered one of the sport's top TV analysts agrees 100% with what I have been saying for months about Iverson and Detroit.
Labels: Allen Iverson, Dave Berri, Detroit Pistons, Jeff Van Gundy
posted by David Friedman @ 1:17 AM
Exclusive Interview with ESPN's Fran Fraschilla, Part III
In Part II of my interview with Fran Fraschilla, he described his player evaluation methods. Player evaluation is no longer limited to GMs, coaches, scouts and TV analysts; in recent years, a veritable brigade of numbers crunchers have laid down the gauntlet and asserted that their formulas are more accurate and reliable than the observations made by the professionals.
Friedman: "Particularly in the past 10 years or so, a lot of statistical analysis has come into basketball, a process that started with Bill James’ baseball work. You see this a lot in the NBA right now. I think that there is value to it but I also think that the trained eye is important. Without leading you to an answer, I’d be interested in your perspective on where you fall on the continuum that ranges from old school people who came up in an era that relied entirely on the trained eye and used only the most basic stats to the people on the other end of the continuum like Dave Berri at Wages of Wins who has the attitude that he does not even need to watch games, that the eye is biased and all that he needs to do is crunch numbers in a certain way and then he knows exactly what is happening. You basically have two extremes: you have an old school guy who says, ‘I don’t care about the numbers because I know what I am seeing' and then you have Dave Berri who essentially says, ‘I don’t watch games. All I do is crunch numbers.’ Where do you place yourself on that continuum and what do you think of that whole debate?"
Fraschilla: "First of all, knowledge is power, so the more knowledge that you have the more likely you are to have an educated opinion about a player. I think when you have the opportunity to use the various statistical categories that we see now in basketball—you mentioned Wages of Wins, plus 82games.com, where guys get shots on the floor, whether a guy is better going to his left or his right, how effective he is in the pick and roll—all of that information coupled with the innate feel that you have from having a trained eye allows you to make an educated guess on whether a guy can play or not. There are certain things statistically that might really stand out positively about a player but at the end of the day I think your eyes will normally not lie. When there is an incongruence between what your eyes are telling you and what the numbers are saying, as an evaluator you need to figure out where you’re going wrong in terms of your opinion or where the numbers may be skewed to make a player who is a good player look even better. I think that all of the information that you can take in and then filter back out can only help you. So probably on that continuum I am right down the middle: give me as much information as I can possibly digest before I have to make a decision but ultimately it becomes a decision based as much on feel as anything."
Friedman: "I agree with you. I disagree with Berri’s opinion that anybody can understand the NBA game—or any game for that matter—without watching it. I don’t care how precise one’s numerical analysis is, it is still essential to watch the game with a trained eye. If you took Berri’s numbers or Kevin Mackey took Berri’s numbers or someone who actually knows basketball took his numbers then I agree with you that this information could be powerful—but for Dave Berri, who is an economist who in my opinion does not know basketball, to say that he does not have to watch the game to understand it better than an NBA general manager is absurd. To get to something specific regarding this issue, during the NBA Finals in my game recaps I made the point that Kobe Bryant played better than any of the other Lakers in that losing effort. Not to say that everything he did was perfect or that he could not have played better but he was clearly the best player on their team. They had a real problem—well, they had a number of problems but one specific problem that they had was that Pau Gasol did not play to the level that he did in previous series."
Fraschilla: "Right."
Friedman: "He did not set his screens as aggressively, he was not as physical, after he set screens he did not roll to the basket as aggressively as he had previously. When he caught the ball in the paint he did not finish with authority. I think that these are all things that you understood and saw as you watched those games."
Fraschilla: "Yes."
Friedman: "I understand them because I’ve trained my eye to the point that I can at least understand that much."
Fraschilla: "Yes."
Friedman: "So those things were all evident to me and I wrote about them during the series but when someone just crunches the numbers--Gasol’s high field goal percentage and some other numbers--the Wages of Wins verdict on the Finals was that Gasol was the Lakers’ best player in the Finals. I think that anybody who understands basketball and watched those games would find that to be an absurd conclusion."
Fraschilla: "It’s funny--I just talked today to (Boston assistant coach) Tom Thibodeau, who is a very good friend of mine. He was Doc Rivers’ defensive guy. He’s been anonymous for about 18 years. I was going to dovetail back to something you said. He’s been a good assistant coach all these years, for Jeff Van Gundy, for John Lucas and now Doc but here’s the interesting thing. I had a couple years when I wasn’t coaching and I had the chance to do advance scouting in the NBA for about a month or two at a time before my television season (in college basketball) started and the one thing that I always laugh about on Draft Night—I don’t get a chance to talk about the college players because everyone thinks that I am the international guy but I do 60 college games a year so I follow the college game 10 times more closely than the international game—but what I was going to mention is that I don’t think that our college guys who follow the draft understand how good the league is. That is why I always say that it does not matter who is picked because two thirds of these guys, statistically, are going to be busts, washouts—that’s just the way it is. A couple years ago I wrote a 35 page booklet about how I would organize an NBA front office from the personnel side and one of the things I would do is make my college scouts twice a month during the season go see an NBA game. In other words, if you are out in L.A. scouting USC and UCLA and the Lakers are in town then I want you to go see to the Lakers game the night before you see UCLA play USC. I would make my scouts do that at least twice a month because if you are not watching NBA basketball on a regular basis then you can easily get tricked by how good college players are."
Friedman: "That could be why some people thought J.J. Redick was going to be so great in the NBA but maybe it is not going to turn out that way. He was the College Player of the Year. Is that the kind of thing you are getting at?"
Fraschilla: "Yeah, exactly. I don’t have a problem with J.J. Redick. I think that he is what a lot of us thought he was going to be because he is a 6-3 guy who is an average athlete who obviously does one thing really well. That particular skill has not been utilized yet so maybe it’s just the system he’s in now but I do know that the Magic need guard help desperately so it’s not like he has not gotten a chance. I absolutely think that it is important for anybody who talks about scouting or watching college guys with the intent of figuring out if they are going to be NBA players then you have to watch NBA basketball to understand that these guys are really good in terms of shrinking the floor, closing out on an open man--I’m going off on a tangent. There are a lot of guys in the NBA who do a great job scouting but sometimes when I am out on the road doing games on TV I wonder, ‘Why did that guy leave four minutes before the end of the game?’ or ‘Why did that guy show up two minutes into the game?’ It kind of boggles my mind sometimes at some of the decision making that goes on in the league, particularly when it comes to the draft."
Friedman: "In terms of the original question, I think this also applies to the people who are doing the statistical analysis. I think that a lot of them are doing some great work and some interesting work but when you get to the end of the continuum where they think that they can understand the game without watching it then I think that they have become a little too impressed with their own work and their formulas."
Fraschilla: "I agree with that completely--give me the statistical information and let me factor it in with what my eyes are telling me and what my 30 years of experience is telling me and see if I can’t put that all together to make an informed evaluation of somebody. I think that’s a good point."
On Thursday in Part IV of this interview, Fraschilla talks about the differences between the NBA game and the college game and he describes how he became ESPN's guru about FIBA basketball.
Labels: Dave Berri, Fran Fraschilla, J.J. Redick, Kobe Bryant
posted by David Friedman @ 4:08 AM
