Pater Familias

ARE TWINS BETTER IN SOME SPORTS THAN IN OTHERS? The NBA season is starting and the Lopez twins are joining the Collins twins, also identical twins, as NBA players. One of my correspondents suggested to me that twins seem to be more successful in professional basketball than in other sports. He pointed to the Van Arsdale twins in the seventies, the Grants in the nineties, and the Collins twins and Lopez twins today. I checked this wikipedia article and added the names of Heather and Heidi Burge and Coco and Kelly Miller in women’s professional basketball. With the article I came up with Tiki and Ronde Barber and Josh and Daniel Bullocks in professional football. In baseball, nine pairs of twins have played in the majors, even if you go back to 1910—with only five pairs of twins since 1950. So it looks like there is some evidence (although with small samples) that twins do better in basketball. Could one reason be that basketball is a sport that you can practice one on one?

REFEREEING IS PART OF THE NARRATIVE. In addition to accountability (and providing economists with data), there is another reason for making a league’s evaluations of refereeing public. Like many fans, I watch a game because of the story. I watched a couple football games this year where the announcers couldn’t explain an important call, even with the benefit of replay. I never found out what happened in the game. In a close game, the evaluation of the refereeing can be as helpful as a box score. If fans spend three or more hours watching a game, they should be able to know the story (the interest in what really happened is one reason the Sun Belt Conference released this report on the refereeing of the 2006 Alamo Bowl).

AN ECONOMIST CALLS FOR MAKING REFEREE EVALUATIONS PUBLIC. I posted here arguing that referee ratings should be made public. I linked to a report by the Sun Belt Conference on the the refereeing of the 2006 Alamo Bowl which I think should be a model for all leagues and conferences. Now I have received an abstract of a paper by Ian Ayres of Yale University which is entitled: “Give Freakonomics a Chance.” The full abstract is as follows: “An NBA referee has now pleaded guilty, and forensic economists have found signs of bias and cheating in the NBA, college basketball and sumo wresting. Ian Ayres argues that the NBA should release referee data to allow forensic economists to look for statistical evidence of malfeasance, before credibility in results is lost.” The link to the article is here. I have not read the article because although the Berkeley Electronic Press has a generous policy of permitting a free view if I can recommend the journal to my institution, I don’t have an institution.

SHOULD REFEREE RATINGS BE PUBLIC? The National Basketball Association is now faced with the nightmare of a referee (Tim Donaghy) being accused of betting on games he officiated. Did his bets influence his refereeing? Sports officials today are subject to regular review by means of tape. Box scores record the performance of players. Why shouldn’t the grading of the performance of officials be made public? (I recognize that union collective bargaining agreements may prevent this). It is not well publicized, but apparently major league baseball was pleased that it reduced the error rate on balls and strikes to 7% recently (about one missed call every half inning). It’s interesting to know that statistic. There is a model for what could be done. The Sun Belt Conference made public a review of the performance of their referees in the 2006 Alamo Bowl. The game announcers had criticized those referees and the report vindicated them. I recommend the report, which analyzes every disputed call in the game (and includes the important statement about one play: “This was one of those plays that could go either way and would make half the people happy and the other half upset.”) I think 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.

TWINS IN SPORTS –WITH ONE MISTAKEN IDENTITY STORY (COMMENT). Successful twins seem to be more common in sports than in politics. There were the Van Arsdale twins in basketball, who had remarkably similar careers. I saw them play when they were at Indiana. Dick Van Arsdale played 12 seasons in the NBA and scored 15,079 points and had 3057 rebounds; Tom Van Arsdale played 12 seasons in the NBA and scored 14, 232 points and had 3942 rebounds. I was glad to see that they played together their last year. In the middle of their careers, there was a story about a teammate coming up to one of them and saying, “Guess what! We traded for your brother!” Wonderful! Who did we give up?” “You.” The Gullickson twins were very successful in tennis, especially in doubles. One was left handed and the other was right handed. Unlike almost every other successful tennis player, they had not played the junior circuit and were not well known to other players. This led to a story about a European pro fuming that after beating him playing right handed, Gullickson had shown him up by beating him the next week playing left handed.

BASKETBALL–AN EXPERIMENT THAT FAILED. A follow up on an earlier post. I had posted at the beginning of the basketball season that the Bulls this year would test the importance of defense versus offense for a basketball team. I had thought that the Bulls were unbalanced this year in emphasizing defense rather than offense. Charles Barkley had expressed the same thought. It turned out, however, that the Bulls were about the same on defense as in past years (using field goal percentage against as a metric) and some what better on offense than in past years because of improvement by young players. So the experiment never took place.

ADJUSTED NBA STANDINGS REVISITED. Today is the NBA All Star Game. On January 1, I posted adjusted standings which corrected for the fact that some teams had played a lot more home games than road games. I planned to revisit the standings at the All Star break. The main conclusion is that there isn’t much value to adjusted standings at this point in the season. Most teams have now played roughly the same number of home and road games so that the regular standings are now a good guide to how well they have done. The exceptions would be Milwaukee with nine fewer home games than road games, San Antonio and Philadelphia with five fewer home games, and Denver with five more home games than road games, The only team this matters for is Denver, which would be two games behind Minnesota rather than one and a half games ahead if adjusted standings were used. On January 1, the adjusted standings showed Toronto with a big lead in its division. Toronto’s division now shows up clearly.

MUSCLE MEMORY AND HOT HANDS FOR BASKETBALL PLAYERS. I was really pleased to find the neuroscience blog of Jonah Lehrer. I looked at the archives. This is a consistently interesting blog. One of the posts described the famous study by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky that concluded that basketball players do not have hot shooting streaks. It makes sense that people would make the mistake of thinking they do because it has been shown that people generally underestimate the extent to which a series of random tosses of a fair coin will generate long strings of heads or tails. I was amused that I found the post just before Jamal Crawford of the Knicks had an evening when he missed his first four shots and then hit 16 in a row. I’m inclined to believe that Crawford’s success was a random event. I don’t believe in hot streaks, but I do have doubts about a related proposition. It seems to me that a basketball player has a stroke and that his stroke can be corrected (or “grooved”). Basketball players do warm up by practicing shooting and Michael Jordan was known for taking a lot of practice shots before a game. If muscle memory is important in shooting, the best test would be of free throw shooting. If the first shot was a little long, the player can make a minor correction on the second. I did do calculations for the free throw shooting of the Boston Celtic players given in the Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky paper. Eight of the nine players did about five or six percent better on the second shot of two (Kevin McHale was the exception). Scanty evidence at best.

NBA ADJUSTED STANDINGS. My son Nick suggested that I post my shorthand way of looking at the NBA standings. I take as par for a team that it wins all its home games and loses all its away games (“holding serve”). Then subtracting a team’s total home games from its win total tells how well it is doing against par. The following is how things stand in the Western and Eastern Conferences in the afternoon on January 1:

The big changes are that in the Atlantic Division, Toronto has a seven game lead on New Jersey and a four game lead on the second place team, which is Philadelphia. Houston is tied with San Antonio. New Orleans is only a game behind Minnesota for the last playoff position in the West.

BASKETBALL—HOW IMPORTANT IS DEFENSE?. The Bulls are running an experiment this year which should provide data on what for me is one of the great questions in basketball. The question is: Why don’t basketball journalists and fans give equal weight to offense and defense? A player spends half his time on defense so it should be equally important. To take some rough approximations, Eric Snow should be as highly regarded as Alan Iverson; Bruce Bowen should be as valuable as Michael Redd. The Bulls this year are considered to be as unbalanced a team as any in recent memory—unbalanced in terms of emphasizing defense rather than offense. Charles Barkley has compared the Bulls to a team with a good pitching staff and no hitters. There will be a test of another proposition. I have compared Ben Wallace for several years to Bill Russell. Not as good, but close. The experiment hasn’t begun yet because the Bulls are still on their long annual Circus road trip, but we will see. Of course, I should have a criterion for interpreting the results of the experiment. I think people generally agree that the Bulls do not have overwhelming talent. Perhaps it is the level of talent that matters rather than how it is divided between defense and offense. The last two years the Bulls’ wins have been in the 40’s. If the Bulls do much better than expected, perhaps win 50 games, that would indicate that good defensive players are underrated. A season in the 40’s would indicate that the defense/offense balance doesn’t make much difference. In the 30’s would mean that you’ve got to have shooters.