SABERMETRICS AND BASKETBALL. The March 12 Wall Street Journal also had an article comparing NBA teams that have at least one employee whose only duty is statistical analysis and those who don’t. The 15 teams that use a full-time statistician currently have a winning percentage of 59%. Those 15 teams who who don’t have a winning percentage of 41%.
Archive for the ‘Basketball’ Category
SABERMETRICS AND BASKETBALL.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010SABERMETRICS COMES TO GOLF.
Saturday, March 13th, 2010SABERMETRICS COMES TO GOLF. The Wall Street Journal (March 12) had an article on a new measurement for putting success of professional golfers devised at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The statistic takes into account the relative difficulty of the green based on average performance, the relative strength of the field and the distance of the putt. (By the way, the average number of putts for a Tour pro from ten feet on the average course is 1.63. It’s at thirty feet that the average is about 2.0.) By the new metric, Luke Donald comes in #1 and Tiger Woods is #2. It’s nice to see that the article pays tribute to Bill James (”Together with other new statistics being developed by MIT and other academic institutions, “putts gained” could open up a new frontier in golf record-keeping and performance analysis comparable to the sea change in baseball statistics following Bill James’s pioneering work in the 1970s and 1980s.”)
BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE.
Saturday, February 20th, 2010BASKETBALL COACHES—FOOTBALL STYLE AND SOCCER STYLE. In football, every play is planned after an interval for deliberation. Coaches now call most plays. In soccer, there is a continuous flow. A soccer coach has to prepare his players to react to events. Most basketball coaches take after football coaches. Aside from fast break situations, there are lots of set plays. At the end of the game, there are lots of time outs, and only rarely at the end of a game does a coach let his team take the ball after a basket and attack before the other team can set its defense. College coaches who don’t seem to call a lot of plays, who let their players play, (such as, I think, Jim Boeheim of Syracuse) are not rated as highly as their record deserves. Coaches by their nature hate mistakes. It seems that Tyrus Thomas has gotten crosswise with his coaches because he makes mistakes. For example, he is criticized for “poor shot selection”, although his shooting percentage is 48.6%, so he can’t be taking too many bad shots. (For comparison, Joakim Noah, who has a similar offensive game, is shooting 49.5% this year.) As for defense, you would think that you would want an agile shot blocker like Thomas to be doing some free lancing on defense (otherwise known as “playing help defense”). One report noted that Tyrus’s new coach is Larry Brown, who is know for being a stickler on how things are done. We’ll see what happens.
TYRUS THOMAS—DEFENSE VERSUS OFFENSE.
Saturday, February 20th, 2010TYRUS THOMAS—DEFENSE VERSUS OFFENSE. I am a lifelong Bulls fan. I can’t hold back from going out on a limb about their trading Tyrus Thomas. In any sport, it’s unusual to see a player with extraordinary physical talent being traded at an early stage in his career. The danger is that the trade will become famous for its folly. Over the past 50 years, the trades of Nolan Ryan and Lou Brock come to mind. Why. then, take the chance of trading Thomas? I have argued earlier that defense should be as important as offense in most sports, but that is not how players are valued. Thomas’s great strength, at least at this point in his career, is on defense, and teams, as well as journalists and fans, don’t pay a lot of attention to defense.
AN ARGUMENT FOR MAKING REFEREE REVIEWS PUBLIC IN SOCCER.
Sunday, November 22nd, 2009AN ARGUMENT FOR MAKING REFEREE REVIEWS PUBLIC IN SOCCER. I have posted several times that referee reviews in baseball, basketball and football should be made public. Some of my arguments were that referee mistakes are part of the narrative of the game, that the leagues have some protection in the event a referee is dishonest (as has been the case in professional basketball), and that, as I posted on here, forensic economists can “look for statistical evidence of malfeasance.” The weekend Financial Times (November 21/22) had an article about how 15 people have been arrested in a match-fixing scandal which may involve over 200 European soccer games in nine countries, including three games in the European Champions League. Those arrested are suspected of offering payments to “players, coaches, referees and officials from leagues.” I don’t know why sports officials don’t embrace the opportunity to forestall some of the questions about refereeing.
THE NBA’S THREE SETS OF “RULES.”
Sunday, November 1st, 2009THE NBA’S THREE SETS OF “RULES.” Refereeing basketball games is difficult enough, but the NBA makes it more difficult by having three different sets of “rules.” In addition to the rules that apply to over 90% of regular season games, there is a second set of “rules” for the last couple minutes of a game. How the game has been refereed for the first 46 minutes of the game provides no guidance. In fact, I think the only guidelines for the last two minutes are that the referees should “let the players play.” How much should they be allowed to “play”? Just “more.” (I have always thought that the reluctance to call fouls comes because the league tolerates uncertainty to try to avoid having games decided at the free throw line). The third set of “rules” is for playoff games, and again there is little guidance provided by the regular season. How is “playoff basketball” different? It’s not in the rulebook or in the customary law established over the 82 games of the regular season. The league grants referees a lot of discretion—each referee is in a sense on his own at the most important times. The league should not be surprised when it faces a wall of cynicism about refereeing.
MAKING REFEREE RATINGS PUBLIC—UPDATE.
Saturday, October 31st, 2009MAKING REFEREE RATINGS PUBLIC—UPDATE. I recommended here that the National Basketball Association should make all its referee ratings for individual games public. One argument I made in support of the recommendation was that Referee Tim Donaghy had been accused of fixing games he refereed, and that “Commissioner Stern of the National Basketball Association would be a lot happier right now if he could point to contemporary evaluations of the disgraced referee’s calls.” Tim Donaghy has now served his jail time and has written a book claiming that he bet successfully on games he did not referee. He attributes his success to knowing how those games would be refereed, either because he had figured out from the referee assignments that the league wanted a certain result or because he knew that a referee for the game had strong feelings for or against one of the players. This link provides excerpts of the allegations for particular games. Are the allegations true? I repeat that Commissioner Stern would be a lot happier now if he could point to contemporary evaluations of the refereeing in those games.
MY FAVORITE SPORTS NICKNAME.
Sunday, October 25th, 2009MY FAVORITE SPORTS NICKNAME. Yahoo!Answers yesterday had this answer to the question “Is there a word without vowels in it?” Many of them have a “y” in them, but the words “cwm” and “psst” are nominated. I was reminded of my favorite sports nickname. Bill Mlkvy was a star for the Temple basketball team—the Temple Owls—back in the fifties, and still holds the NCAA record for the most consecutive points scored without an intervening score by a teammate (54 in a row). Mlkvy’s nickname: “The Owl without a Vowel.”
BASKETBALL AND PIANO MUSIC.
Thursday, August 20th, 2009BASKETBALL AND PIANO MUSIC. Some time after Van Cliburn had burst upon the American musical scene by winning a major Russian piano competition, he gave a concert in Kansas City at the same time that a major basketball tournament was taking place. Some coaches took an evening to hear Cliburn, and one of them was heard to exclaim, “Six foot four with hands like that! What a waste!”
DIMAGGIO DID IT TWICE.
Tuesday, July 7th, 2009DIMAGGIO DID IT TWICE. There is an anomaly to Mlodinow’s contention that DiMaggio’s streak could be accounted for as the result of a random process— that there is a better than 42% chance that some major league player or other would have had a 56 game hit streak at some time in the years going back to the 1870’s. The wikipedia article I linked to displays the anomaly. The article lists hitting streaks for Minor League Baseball. There is a Minor League Baseball player who had a 61 game hitting streak—and that player was Joe DiMaggio.
