Archive for the 'Layups' Category

For all of the front-office watchers out there: yesterday, Mike Prada of SBNation.com rolled out a huge post that ranked every NBA General Manager from 1-30... Check it out, it's a must read.

And yes, you saw that correctly -- poor David Kahn can't even win the "Worst GM" derby.

(H/T: BDL.)

Researchers in Germany seem to think so:

"Throughout [Michael Jordan's] professional career he wore two pairs of shorts -- the ones we all saw on television, but beneath the Chicago Bulls uniform he also wore the blue University of North Carolina shorts from his spectacular days at the college level.

No, the researchers aren't suggesting that Michael became 'air Jordan' because his shorts were too tight. But the fact that he believed his college shorts could bring him luck might have made his performance a tad better."

They go on to explain the results in more general terms:

"What it all boils down to, according to four experiments the scientists conducted in Germany, is sometimes superstitions actually work. Not because they bring luck (either good or bad.) It's because believing that a rabbit's foot brings good luck can increase self confidence (luck is on his or her side) and thus the true believer performs better and sets higher goals."

I'm pretty sure Jordan wouldn't have lacked for confidence (or performance) even without his "lucky" UNC shorts, but in general I don't see anything too controversial about the finding. Furthermore, couldn't it also apply to a phenomenon like the "hot hand"? That is, if superstition is beneficial because the player's belief in some quasi-magical power increases his confidence, maybe the similar belief that you were "hot" might also give your performance a boost, simply because of that extra confidence.

Maybe. However, previous studies have actually confirmed that feeling "hot" boosts confidence... in a bad way. Players who considered themselves hot forced bad shots more often and ended up hurting the team, offsetting any benefit derived from the performance boost the German study found. In other words, you certainly want your players to be confident, and if a little superstition gets them there, fine... just make sure they're not too confident.

Here's an extremely interesting study from Jamie Merchant's blog Numeranda, regarding the "chemistry" of a given 5-man unit. Merchant used BasketballValue's 2010 adjusted plus/minus data for both lineups and individuals, and calculated which combinations were literally greater than the sum of their parts:

"Here was my thinking: we have at our fingertips (thanks to Aaron) two measures of APM, an individual measure and a five-man unit measure; is there some way to connect the one with the other? My first instinct would be to simply add the individual APMs together and see how they compare to the five-man unit APM. If player impact works in a simple, additive fashion, the two measures should be roughly equal. Is that the case?"

The usual APM caveats about samples sizes and standard errors apply, but the results are fascinating. For instance, we would expect Houston's Aaron Brooks/Shane Battier/Trevor Ariza/Carl Landry/Luis Scola lineup to be highly negative (-7), but they ended up being average (+0). And at the other end of the spectrum, we would expect Boston's Rajon Rondo/Ray Allen/Paul Pierce/Kevin Garnett/Rasheed Wallace combo to be very good (+8), but instead they were downright bad (-6).

Sometimes the pieces just fit... and sometimes they don't (we've already commented on how Wallace negatively impacted the C's when on the floor last season). This has been a basketball aphorism forever, but now we actually have some data to quantify the phenomenon.

I've been meaning to link to this for a long time, but I'm just now getting around to it... Apparently Matt Bonner of the Spurs (who recently inked a 4-year extension with San Antone) is, like myself, a bit of a sandwich fan. In fact, he has a blog at NBA.com called "Matt Bonner, Sandwich Hunter: The Quest for the Hoagie Grail". No kidding. In his travels as an NBA baller, Bonner takes time to hunt down the best sandwiches in each NBA city; his latest entry is #26, D'Angelo Grilled Sandwiches in Boston, where they make one wicked grinder. So go ahead and check out Matt's sandwich blog, and feel free to tell me in the comments section which NBA city makes your favorite sandwich.

Basketball Prospectus' Kevin Pelton has done some great research on the problems with handing out long-term contracts in the NBA:

"...It's not even the high cost of mediocrity that kills teams--it's the duration of it.

This jumped out at me over the course of compiling my position-by-position rankings of free agents. Sprinkled throughout these lists are players who have long since ceased to have any value to their team and have hung around solely because of their contract. [...] Often, like Antonio Daniels or the more extreme case of Cuttino Mobley, injury is a culprit. Sometimes, the player just aged. And occasionally, as in the case of Trenton Hassell, the contract was simply a mistake from day one.

...I see the takeaway as how teams can get themselves in trouble with the lengths of the contracts they offer as much as the yearly salary."

This is definitely true, and it's something the stats community has argued for a long time. True superstar free agent deals (Michael Jordan re-signing with Chicago in '96/97, Shaquille O'Neal signing with L.A. in '96, Kevin Garnett re-signing with Minnesota in '97, Tim Duncan re-signing with San Antonio in 2000, etc.) have largely been worth it. Likewise, low-cost players at the other end of the free agent spectrum invariably produce a good return on the investment: they come at no risk, and they’re usually just short-term deals, so if they flop, there are no long-term repercussions.

The middle class, however, is where ugly contracts are born. GMs have a long history of ignoring obvious warning signs when going after middle-class “established veterans”, which is why using the mid-level exception is usually a detriment to teams, not an advantage. The moral of the story is this: go all-in with your superstars, but when filling the rest of your roster, stick to the low-budget model of building through the draft and signing useful low-priced FA’s. And whatever you do, don't give long-term deals to middling players, because you will get burned.

From FOX Sports:

"An Ohio woman who paid $5 at a yard sale for a LeBron James pendant she thought was costume jewelry has found out it's worth nearly $10,000.

Vaneisha Robinson, 20, says she used to wear the basketball jersey-shaped pendant to high school when she didn't know its value. Then she had it appraised."

Good to know there's at least one person from Ohio who's still able to derive some benefit from James...

EDIT: ...Or not.

After my LeBron Rant last week, Butch Stearns of The Pulse Network contacted me and asked me to be a guest on his program, The Sports Buzz:

We covered the main thesis of the post, as well as some additional LeBron talk. Thanks again to Butch for having me on as a guest!

The hour-long LeBron James "Decision" last Thursday was a made-for-TV spectacle that left myself and almost every other sports fan on the planet feeling depressed and disgusted. But according to Advertising Age's Rich Thomaselli, James' indulgent hour not only made a metric ton of money for its advertisers, but it also may have ushered in a new paradigm in advertiser-funded programming. Plus, find out how and when the seeds were planted for the LBJ decision TV special (Jim Gray!)...

In case you haven't been following the action on NBA TV, TrueHoop's Kevin Arnovitz has done a great job of recapping the events of the 2010 Las Vegas Summer League. Check out his posts:

• The back of the envelope guide to Las Vegas Summer League (7/9)
• Day One Roundup (7/10)
• Day Two Roundup (7/11)
• Day Three Roundup (7/12)

I didn't see this back in April, but an econ blog called The Leisure of the Theory Class had several posts about the underlying philosophy behind benching players who are in "foul trouble":

Foul Trouble

Foul Follow-Up

ESPN's Eamonn Brennan also had a reaction here. The basic premise (one which I happen to strongly agree with) is that by benching a player on pace to foul out before the end of the game, a coach has voluntarily exacted the very same penalty -- not being able to use the player -- that he's afraid of having happen if the player fouls out. In other words, the coach is so afraid of something that might happen at the end of the game (Player X getting his 6th foul), he's willing to guarantee that the player doesn't play a certain amount of time in the middle of the game -- often more time than the player would have missed if he had not been subbed out!

Obviously, there are more complexities to the argument than that, so you should read both posts (and the comments). But the core idea remains that coaches: 1) overestimate the "risk" of leaving a star in, 2) overvalue the final minutes of the game at the expense of minutes in quarters 1-3, and consequently 3) give themselves a harsher penalty in the middle of the game than the one they're afraid of the referees giving them in the 4th quarter.