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Category Archives
November 02, 2005
Posted by Nick
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+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Basketball
October 24, 2005
Posted by Nick
Is there a way to use stats in basketball like you can in baseball? There's a movement to sabermetricize (is that a word?) big-time hoops.
Not until recently, however, did a community analogous to baseball's SABR evolve, when the Association for Professional Basketball Research was founded in 1997. Today, the APBRmetricians -- who are clearly better with numbers than acronyms -- tend to agree on certain truths. For example, a team's efficiency is best measured per possession, not per game (a running team may rack up points but still be an inefficient offensive team), and the one inscrutable player stat is how a team fares when someone is on the court versus when he is off it, because this ties back to point differential. And point differential, obviously, is the end goal.
Unlike baseball, however, in which pitchers and hitters create individual matchups, every action on a basketball court is influenced by nine other players, not to mention a coach. For this reason, there is no "holy grail" in basketball equivalent to baseball's on-base percentage. Instead, the APBR community looks at factors like adjusted plus/minus, eFG percentage, rebounding rates, shot-charting and defensive "stops."
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October 12, 2005
Posted by Nick
Why are people so freaked out by the Bulls' desire to give Eddy Curry a DNA test?
Eddy Curry, a 22-year-old player in the National Basketball Association who missed 19 games last season because of an irregular heartbeat, refused the Chicago Bulls' request that he take a DNA test to determine whether he is susceptible to a potentially fatal heart condition. He was traded last week to the New York Knicks, and he passed his physical on Friday.
Although some specialists in the field said it has happened before, this is the first reported instance of a professional athlete in the United States being asked to submit to genetic testing. Some doctors think such tests are accurate. Many inside and outside the medical community oppose it for privacy reasons.
Some members of the press reacted harshly, targeting Bulls general manager John Paxson, who asked Curry to be tested. "Butt out, Bulls," one Chicago columnist wrote. "Even if your heart is in the right place. ... you have dangerously stepped past a health issue and into a privacy issue."
We will likely see more of this -- the stakes are too high. But I'm not sure I understand the argument that they shouldn't. Can someone help me on this?
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August 17, 2005
Posted by Nick
Here's an interesting observation:
All this worry and hand-wringing over advancing technology in golf equipment strikes me as a little hysterical.
It reminds me of that era when basketball fans were clamoring to have the basket moved higher than 10 feet, when it seemed like everyone and his brother was dunking. Thank god the basketball gods never did, because it would have changed the game, making it different from the one you and I play.
Do others see it this way? I must admit, I'm inclined for the moment to agree.
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January 07, 2005
Posted by Nick
Slate has an absolutely brilliant piece about using neuroscience to freak out opposing player free-throw shooters.
Last week, I wrote to the NBA owner I deemed most likely to consider applying the scientific method to free-throw shooting, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks. I told Cuban that the assumption that waving balloons wildly will produce the biggest distraction is just plain wrong. Given how the brain perceives motion, randomly moving balloons aren't very off-putting. When you see a lot of little objects moving crazily back and forth, all the different motion signals that get sent to the brain cancel each other out. In the mind of a free-throw shooter, a crowd of people waving wiggle sticks looks like a snowy TV screen. This sort of white noise might make it harder to see the rim, but the stats show that isn't a big deal for the pros.
But what if the waving balloons didn't cancel each other out? If fans behind the backboard waved their balloons from side to side in unison, opposing players would perceive a field of background motion. When we see a moving background, we tend to assume that we're the ones moving and that the background is staying put. If everything on my desk suddenly drifted to the right, I would probably assume that my chair had rolled to the left. And if I were at the free-throw line as the world drifted to the right, my shooting motion would automatically compensate for what I perceived to be my own motion to the left. David Whitney, a visual psychophysicist at the University of California-Irvine, recently described this phenomenon in the lab. The results, published in Nature ("The influence of visual motion on fast reaching movements to a stationary object"), showed that a field of background motion can bias hand movements in the direction of that motion.
Did it work? Read the whole thing to find out.
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July 22, 2004
Posted by Nick
An interesting piece in Salon attempts to answer a question that's been on the minds of sports fans for some time:
To use the title of the bestselling book about the A's success for want of a better shorthand term: Where is the "Moneyball" revolution in the NBA?
This question goes for the NFL, NHL and other sports, too. But for basketball, the piece rightly points out that it's difficult to ape the same approach Bill James and Billy Beane mastered.
There's no denying that comparing basketball to baseball doesn't get you very far. That's because both sides of the "Moneyball" equation are very different in basketball than they are on the diamond.
"The science of basketball is not as consistent as baseball," says Dean Oliver, author of "Basketball on Paper," which uses Bill James-style, or sabermetric, statistical analysis on the NBA. Oliver and others who do this type of work point out that baseball is far easier to measure because most of what needs to be measured comes down a series of one-on-one confrontations between the pitcher and batter. Basketball is a flowing, team game, and it's difficult to figure out how much credit to assign to each player on the floor for a made basket or a defensive stop.
"I hear that when I talk to NBA people," Oliver says. "When I raise the fact that 'Moneyball' is working in baseball, they say, 'Baseball is very different than basketball.' And they're right."
All that's true so far as it goes, but I think a lot more can be done in psychological profiling for sports like the NBA, the kind of psychological profiling Mike Flanagan and the Baltimore Orioles are doing. Talented players are plentiful. But so are headcases. Kwame Brown, anyone? There has to be some way to refine tests that will help you determine when a great talent but potential disaster like Allen Iverson will become the Answer and when he'll become the questionable choice that gets a GM fired.
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January 27, 2004
Posted by Nick
NBA Hoops fan Tyler Cowen of The Volokh Conspiracy (and Marginal Revolution) asks the following good question.
... why does overall NBA attendance and interest seem to go up when we see one or two dominant teams (e.g., the former Celtics, Lakers, and Bulls) rather than a so-called "competitive balance"? Do fans really look to a sports season to see a long coronation march, perhaps punctuated by one final dramatic showdown?
My first stab at an answer is: because David Stern wants it that way. Seriously, I'm not sure there's a good scientific (or even pseudo-scientific reason). But John Ellis describes something interesting in the context of political races and media that might be relevant here: The Rule of Two
The iron rule of media bias was once explained to me years ago by Henry Griggs, a media and political consultant. He described it as an analog of what he called "Fiji math." "In Fiji," he said, "they used to count as follows: one, two and many. There was no "three" or "four" or "five." There was just one, two and then that third number; "many." That's how the media cover politics. They can only count to two."
This bias is exaggerated by the exorbitant cost of covering campaigns. Simply put, the major television networks, newsmagazines and newspapers can't afford to cover a "many" field. As a matter of simple economics, the field must be reduced to two as quickly as possible.
So maybe it's partly economics. You see this in the media's bemused disdain for guys like Kucinich who don't have a prayer. The sooner they get the race to Kerry/Dean or Kerry/Edwards or Dean/Edwards the better for them (of course, they'd never admit this, impartial journalists that they are).
I am particularly keen to this problem since I am a Les Boulez fan (Wizards, who are they?) and haven't been able to root for a dominant team since the 70s. NBA sports fans and the media might also practice "Fiji math." In the 80s there were the Lakers and the Celtics and "many." In the 90s there were the Bulls and the Rockets/Jazz and "many." The Pistons also dominated a little bit in there. This helps create a less complicated narrative thread (remeber, it was David vs. Goliath not David and Steve and Jerry vs. Goliath and Ricky and Tim) and lends itself to compelling story-telling. Steven Pinker or some evolutionary psychologist probably has a better answer, but this will have to do for now.
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