Book Review: Scorecasting by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won
by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim

Moskowitz, the Fama Family Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, and Wertheim, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, have written an exceedingly compelling and readable book that argues, in the words of their introduction that:

As in life, much of what goes on in sports can be explained by incentives, fears, and a desire for approval.

The scope of the book ranges from amusing anecdotes (Over the last 25 years, no major league baseball player stepping to the plate for his final at bat of the season with his batting average sitting at .299 has drawn a walk.), to succinct presentations of previously published studies (John Huizinga and Sandy Weil's study of the particular value of blocked shots), to the book's centerpiece, a two-chapter, 57-page study attempting to isolate why home field advantage exists across all sports.

Though the examination of the authors' overall argument regarding home field advantage has already begun, undertaken by those with the proper statistical talent and experience, this layman found much of the argument compelling even if I can't properly judge the valuations they gave the various effects.

Most relevant to the subject of and the audience for this blog, Moskowitz and Wertheim state that, in the NBA, "21 percent of the home court advantage can be attributed to the league's scheduling." Much of the rest they attribute (across all sports, with the amount of home field advantage related to the degree of discretion granted referees in various sports) to referee bias from social influence.

In addition to the two long chapters studying home field advantage and the aforementioned chapter on the blocked shot study*, Scorecasting also addresses specifically addresses the NBA with regard to the incentive for officials to err on the side of making incorrect noncalls, the damage done by head coaches overreacting to the possibility a player might foul out, the impact of loss aversion on the final quarter of NBA games, the lack of evidence to support "Defense wins championships," the importance of superstars in winning championships, and the myth of the hot hand.

*Unfortunately, they only look at the value of blocked shots per blocked shot which somewhat undermines the argument that Dwight Howard is overrated as a defender due to a high volume of relatively low-value blocks. The accompanying charts of the ten-most and ten-least valuable shot blocking seasons make it possible to see that, with simple multiplication, Howard's 2009, the tenth least valuable season per block is almost exactly as valuable (in total) as Tim Duncan's 2009, the tenth most valuable season per block, because, though each block of Howard's was less valuable than each block of Duncan's, Howard blocked 55 more shots.

Some of the most interesting chapters, on the history of the draft pick value chart in the NFL, the preponderance of Dominican minor leaguers who are caught using PEDs, and that attendance at Wrigley correlates better with beer prices than on-field success have nothing to do with professional basketball but should interest the general sports fan.

HoopSpeak: The TrueHoop Network Goes to College

This semester, University of Michigan Professor of Comparative Literature Santiago (Yago) Colas is teaching a course called Basketball Cultures.

Prof. Colas is blogging (quite well, and at length) about his experience teaching the class at Go Yago! One of the students in the course, Matt Gordon, is blogging about taking the course at Hoopism, and the TrueHoop Network will collectively follow the course by having a member write an essay each week on one of the course materials.

I'm up first, writing about Michael Schumacher's biography of the league first great star, Mr. Basketball: George Mikan, the Minneapolis Lakers, and the Birth of the NBA.

You can read the complete essay at HoopSpeak as part of the Basketball Culture 101 series but here's an excerpt from George Mikan: The Ghost That Lingers:

The NBA is no longer arena-filler in between hockey games and ice shows in the Northeast nor joint vanity project and promotional vehicle for Midwestern industrialists. Teams don’t rely on balancing their books by scheduling themselves as the undercard on a double-header with the Harlem Globetrotters serving as the main event, and the best players are paid more intensely, for a longer period of time, and receive better medical treatment than Mikan, who retired (the first time) at 29. But the struggle to achieve a lifetime of success when your greatest skills abandon you at a young age is timeless, perhaps the inherent complication of having great athletic gifts.

Full credit and special thanks to Beckley Mason of HoopSpeak for organizing and running this endeavor. I enjoyed my participation in the project and look forward to reading the work of my colleagues in the coming weeks.

Book Review: Stumbling On Wins by David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt

Stumbling On Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports by David J. Berri and Martin B. Schmidt

This is not a book for serious basketball fans. Because of that some of my criticism may be beside the point, possibly even unfair.

I am not an economist and am not qualified to evaluate the technical methods the authors use to measure wins.

I can evaluate the book's arguments which are, as a whole, unconvincing. That's not the same as saying the book isn't worth your time. I found the reading experience equally frustrating and thought-provoking. My resistance to the arguments helped focus my mind on what information* could be added to the boxscore to help compare the value of players.

*Current list: points created (including points scored on free throws) replacing assists, offensive and defensive possessions played placed next to minutes played, fouls drawn, separating defensive rebounds on free throws from total defensive rebounds, and separating technical free throw attempts from total free throw attempts to better measure each player's control over his own free throw rate.

The arguments are especially (and typically) unconvincing in the most provocatively titled chapter, "Defending Isiah." It's not actually provocative* as the defense of Isiah Thomas largely consists of claiming that the entire NBA overrates scoring rate and only James Dolan was willing to let his GM/Coach spend obscene amounts of money on otherwise unproductive players. The strongest defense is offered on page 29, showing that Isiah spent $10.5 million less than the authors' salary predictor model on the first year salaries of Stephon Marbury, Jamal Crawford, Eddy Curry, Quentin Richardson, and Zach Randolph. The conclusion:

[I]t looks like Isiah was making--according to the logic of the NBA's free agent market--very sound decision.

The first problem with that conclusion is the focus on just first year salaries. Curry's salary goes up $800,000 each year he's under contract** (and the Knicks will still owe him over $11 million next year). The total cost of Curry's contract was $56 million dollars. Furthermore, New York surrendered one first round draft pick outright (2nd overall, 2006) and gave Chicago the right to swap first-round picks (9th and 23rd, 2007). Acquiring Stephon Marbury also cost the Knicks two first-round draft picks. Berri and Schmidt do not account for the cost of those assets. Nor do they acknowledge that Curry's contract could not be insured. This seriously reduced his market value. Same with Quentin Richardson. The vast majority of the savings on the first year contract costs ($6.6 of the $10.5 million) were on the first year of two six-year, uninsured contracts totalling over $100 million combined. Isiah Thomas was not making decisions based on a solid understanding of the free agent (or any other) market.

*Leaving Isiah's destruction of the CBA unmentioned is provocative to this reader, but your reaction to that omission may be less visceral.

**Quentin Richardson's contract goes up $580,000 each year. Jamal Crawford's contract goes up $720,000 each year. That deal also ends after next season. Zach Randolph's contract goes up $1.3 million each year. Stephon Marbury's contract went up $1.8 million dollars a year.

The backbone of the book, the method for calculating the number of wins individual players produce demonstrates a similar disinterest in the complexity of basketball both in terms of the model's inputs and the certainty with which conclusions are drawn from its outputs. Most interesting to me, is the genesis of the model. Their primary impetus both for measuring wins and concluding that scoring rate is overrated* was a study of how NBA coaches vote for the All-Rookie Team. Where I might have concluded any demonstrable bias in that voting was down to coaches spending a tiny fraction of their time thinking about voting for the All-Rookie Team and thus giving undue weight to minutes played, draft position, and media attention, Berri and Schmidt created a model that supports (for better and worse) their theory that NBA professionals don't understand how basketball works.

*Which is not necessarily an incorrect conclusion if part of a more nuanced argument than offered in this book.

Are NBA decision-makers perfect? Certainly not. But I suspect that all NBA decision-makers consider far more information than do Berri and Schmidt in this book. There is no place for scouting* in the Wins Produced model. Many successful NBA teams do not dismiss +/- out of hand. From page 38:

[T]he purpose of tracking statistics is to separate a player from his teammates. A player's plus-minus, though, depends crucially on his teammates. If you happen to play with very good players, your plus-minus will tend to be high. If the quality of your teammates is low, your plus-minus will fall. As a consequence, the plus-minus statistic appears to contradict the very purpose of tracking numbers in sports. Rather than separate the player from his teammates, the plus-minus statistic defines a player by the quality of his teammates.

To me, is both blatantly incurious and rather missing the necessity of each basketball player interacting with four teammates at all times. Teams must explore the consequences of how players interacted or project to interact with each other. I'm sympathetic (in my ignorance) of the difficulties of modeling such interactions. That's not necessarily an argument for sticking with the boxscore stats, though.

*Even a Nick Fazekas partisan such as myself acknowledges the possibility that he is physically incapable of playing in the NBA though I wish he'd had the chance to contest that claim.

There is not, I suspect, an absolute answer as to the perfect balance between shot creation (or volume or scoring rate, if you prefer) and scoring efficiency. Each team needs players capable of both and very few players are capable of both. Though they speak admiringly of Larry Brown's entreaties to "play the right way" and that the 2003-04 Pistons won an NBA Championship without having a single player in the top 25 in the league in points per game that season, they're reticent on Brown's success in building a team in Philadelphia around Allen Iverson, and extremely high-volume, low-efficiency scorer. It would be interesting to know if Berri and Schmidt consider that (or Brown's acquisition of Stephen Jackson to improve Charlotte's offense this season despite Jackson using lots of possessions with a below-average TS%) an example of a great coach creating an unnecessary challenge for himself or an example of creativity and a deeper understanding of how basketball teams function.

Questions such as that aren't explored in depth in the book (equal space is devoted to studies of the NFL which are outside both my expertise and interest). Whether the authors have no interest in such questions or plan to address them at a later date, I do not know. If it's the latter, it's imperative they keep up with the work being done within the professional basketball industry. The value of creating and using an alternative to PER (without the scouting reports wherein John Hollinger provides context to the formulaic) reliant on traditional box score stats diminishes daily as work on adjusted +/-, defensive analysis, and video analysis progresses.

Pro Basketball Prospectus 2009-10: Available Now

Kevin Pelton and Bradford Doolittle (and others) have written a hell of an annual and it's now available for download (print edition coming soon, click the link for details) for the ridiculously low price of $9.95. You'll learn things from this book, it will stimulate original thoughts of your own, and there's more than enough content to last you through the dog days of pre-season.

Best of all, for regular Hoopinion readers, only one paragraph of one page of the Hawks chapter is taken up by familiar cant.

I'm terribly proud to be a tiny part of this book and encourage everyone with a jones for serious, accessible analysis to check out the book. If I don't convince you, try the free samples.

• Thunder player comments
• Rockets team essay

Book Review: Shoooting Stars by LeBron James and Buzz Bissinger

Shooting Stars, the LeBron James autobiography co-authored by Buzz Bissinger, is a consistently alienating read--the story of a 24-year-old African-American midwestern product of the Akron public school system and the basketball industrial complex told in the first-person by a 54-year-old white northeasterner who spent his formative years at Phillips Academy and the University of Pennsylvania.

Not that such differences of age, race, class, and geography are impossible to overcome, just that Bissinger* strikes me as an especially unlikely candidate to accomplish the feat. (He may have his doubts, too.) Not that he had an easy task as, on the basis of the book, LeBron James has no interest in revealing** anything of himself. The combination leaves the reader with Bissinger, in an attempt to overcome the absence of particulars to report, providing a tonally unconvincing (and generically "literary") account of James's life spun out of the occasional telling detail presumably provided by the book's putative narrator via interview. Take the following examples, all of them from the first chapter (i.e. before I stopped noting each and every passage that stood out):

If you went up North Hill in the 1980s, you could tell that life was not like it once was: the obsolete smokestacks in the distance, the downtown felt so tired and weary.

or

The more I rode my bike around, and you could ride just about everywhere because it was midwestern small and compact...

or

There was something wholesome about it, the best of the Midwest, Cleveland without the 'hoods where you could go in and never come back out. One of my favorite spots in town was Swensons, which, straight out of Happy Days, still served up a burger and fries and Cherry Coke on a tray that was attached to the window of your car by a goofy-looking teenager still dealing with acne.

Now maybe LeBron James has been enrolled in a mediocre*** Creative Writing program quietly working toward an MFA in the off-season and perhaps I'm making my own assumptions about class and race but these passages (and there are many, many more like them throughout the book) lack verisimilitude. I don't doubt that Akron's decline was visible to a child nor that young LeBron rode his bike a lot nor that Swensons made a tasty burger and kids like drive-ins. None of this, though, is expressed with any sort of immediacy or authenticity. For that, the book suffers fatally and is to the credit of none who were involved in its creation, the inspiration for which is perhaps best indicated by this passage in the acknowledgments:

I would like to give a special thank you to my friend and manager Maverick Carter. Maverick, who also is the chief executive officer of LRMR, the marketing and branding company that handles all my business affairs, played an invaluable role in helping to create the vision for Shooting Stars.

The book improves as it begins to feature stories of James's AAU and high school teammates in chapters that recall the best of Bissinger's achievements in Friday Night Lights and wherein the combination of Bissinger's voice and recognizably direct recollections from James combine better than in the passages written in the first person.

*Bissinger made his reputation as a writer about sports with Friday Night Lights, the success of which was fueled as much by a provincial shock (both Bissinger's and the literary establishment's) at the revelation that some Texas towns might take high school football a bit too seriously as by Bissinger's talent as a reporter and writer. Michael Lewis's valentine to Billy Beane is a more recent example of the potential success of old news breathlessly reported to a new audience.

**The composition of those who blurbed the book (Jay-Z, Bob Costas, John Grisham, Mike Krzyzewski, Warren Buffett, Steve Lopez, and Madeline Blais) suggests that this is a book designed to appeal to media, cultural, financial, and athletic establishments rather than to be interesting.

***Redundant?

Q&A With Seth Davis On the Subject of His New Book

Yesterday, I reviewed the new book, When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball by Seth Davis (pictured, right) of SI.com and CBS. Today, I've got a brief interview with the author* to share.

*I appreciate him taking the time to answer my questions, even the ones The New York Times' Quad Blog scooped me on over the weekend.

HOOPINION: I assume you wished to interview both Larry Bird and Magic Johnson for the book. Why did neither choose to be involved with the book? At what point in the writing process did you resolve yourself to their non-involvement? Did their non-involvement change the writing of the book in any way?

SETH DAVIS: Yes, I wanted to interview those guys, but they are at a point in their lives where they are not giving this stuff away for free. I can totally understand that, and while I was disappointed I can honestly say that I don’t think the book suffered from it. The irony is, editorially those were the guys I needed the least, since they have both written autobiographies and had books written about them, not to mention the scores of interviews they have already given on this subject. Not having their participation also liberated me to write a little more critically about them than I would have otherwise.

HOOPINION: Was there anyone else you wished to but were unable to interview?

SETH DAVIS: The only people I really wanted to interview but couldn’t were the ones who are no longer alive. I feel very fortunate that most of the main principals are still around and they all had great stories to tell.

HOOPINION: One of the best things about the book is the amount of detail you provide about the games described. Could you please provide some background on how you acquired tapes for so many 30-year-old games?

SETH DAVIS: The schools provided much of the game videos. Bill Hodges also had a bunch of old game tapes, and one of his students transferred them onto DVDs for me. Magic’s high school coach, George Fox, had the video of the press conference where Magic announced he was attending Michigan State . And a local sportscaster in Terre Haute got me the video of Bird’s retirement ceremony a few years ago that served as the dramatic final scene in the book.

HOOPINION: The book's structure reminds me of John Feinstein's A Season Inside (though obviously with a narrower focus and thus greater depth). Was that book a conscious influence on you? Were there any other books that provided inspiration as to how to write or structure When March Went Mad?

SETH DAVIS: I certainly read that book, but that was a little different in that it was a contemporary account as opposed to a historical one. A better Feinstein comparison might be Forever's Team, which is about the 1978 Duke team that was the national runner-up, but again, that was about one team and mine was about two. The structure of this book was pretty unusual because it was really two books that converged into one. Thank god I had a phenomenal editor, Paul Golob, who really guided me through the organization of all this material.

HOOPINION: Frank Deford's blurb reads, in part, "Seth Davis reminds us what fun it used to be when we could still be surprised, when a whole sport could be turned upside down, right before our wondering eyes." How do you agree and how do you disagree with DeFord that greater access to games, players, and coaches has changed the way or even lessened the degree to which people enjoy sports in general and college basketball in particular?

SETH DAVIS: Well, Frank is a little older than I am, so he might be a little more wistful about it, but I certainly understand the point he is making. It’s my job to ruin the mystery in college basketball. I try to know everything there is to know about what’s going on, but back then, many of the people watching this game were seeing Magic and Bird play for the very first time. That is a very special thing, but the moment has passed and it’s not coming back.

HOOPINION: How good does it feel to have Frank Deford blurb your book?

SETH DAVIS: What a beautiful question! (ed. note--Thank you.) I’m told that blurbs are of marginal value, but while we were bandying about the different names of people we wanted to ask, the only one I felt strongly about was Deford. I don’t know him all that well, but we obviously share a common heritage with Sports Illustrated. So to you answer your question, it feels the same as it would feel to have Mozart tell me I’m a darn good piano player.

Book Review: When March Went Mad

WHEN MARCH WENT MAD: THE GAME THAT TRANSFORMED BASKETBALL
by Seth Davis

(buy the book)

On the eve of the 30th Anniversary of the NCAA Tournament championship game between Michigan State, led there by (as he was so often and so thoroughly referred to then) Earvin "Magic" Johnson, and Indiana State, carried there by Larry Bird, Seth Davis gives the (still) highest-rated championship game in history the book-length treatment. The championship game itself was neither well-played nor close enough to carry a book on its own so Davis soundly chose not to just recount the story of the season (though he does that well) but also to extend the backstory to the recruitment of Bird and Johnson* as well as describing how many of their teammates got to Indiana State and Michigan State, respectively.

*The 30-year-old tales of recruiting are simultaneously quaint and suggestive of how common extra benefits were in those days.

Neither Bird nor Johnson spoke with Davis for the book; not that there's a lack of source material to draw on regarding either's biography. Rather than have the absence of their first-person accounts limit the scope of the book, Davis allows himself more room to sketch portraits of the two coaches: Jud Heathcote and Bill Hodges. Davis obviously spent a lot of time talking to both men and it's period-appropriate that the book be, at times, dominated by the head coaches as much as the college game often was in the pre-shot clock era.

Hodges has the more interesting story, getting the Indiana State job before the season only after head coach Bob King suffered a brain aneurysm. Davis argues convincingly that Hodges' remarkable success in his initial season ultimately derailed his coaching career as Hodges, for reasons both in and out of his control, failed, with his subsequent Indiana State teams, to remain competitive on a national level.

Heathcote, who coached Michigan State for 20 years, is the more familiar figure but Davis makes full use of Heathcote's sarcastic wit* and storytelling acumen.

*Though Davis does fall into a trap all too typical of writers of sports books by not trusting readers to recognize Heathcote's sarcasm even in context and, thus, grinding a paragraph to a halt to reassure the reader that the immediately preceding quote was Heathcote being funny rather than an asshole.

Best of all for a serious basketball fan, Davis watched tape of as many Sycamore and Spartan games as possible from the 1978-79 season and ably augments the contemporary accounts with his own observations. In this respect and without making a big deal about it, Davis succeeds in bridging the gap between then, when Bird and Johnson were new and their games were unusual and magnificent enough to inspire mixed-up confusion as often as adoration, and now, when their games are iconic and revered.

It's jarring for someone my age (first basketball memory: the 1982 NCAA Championship Game) to read period accounts which are skeptical and/or critical of the young Bird and Johnson. To his credit, Davis doesn't retroactively score scornful points* against those who wrote what would prove to be profoundly wrong opinions about two of the greatest basketball players** ever to live, rather he uses them to accurately re-create the tenor of the time.

*Though he does, with a friendly manner, establish how long-standing his former CBS colleague Billy Packer's dismissive skepticism of college basketball teams from non-power conferences is.

**It's also useful to remember that neither player was finished developing as a basketball player. Bird turned the ball over 17 times in the '79 Final Four.

Similarly, Davis succeeds in describing how different college basketball was 30 years ago without (as Frank Deford unfortunately does in his blurb for the book) making a value judgment about one era versus the other. I think this quality speaks to Davis' interest in and appreciation of college basketball. He neither dismisses the palpable excitement of the time, when, for most people, Larry Bird existed as more myth than (young) man for much of the season nor passes up the opportunity to gather and process as much information as possible to tell the most complete version he can of the 1978-79 basketball seasons for these two teams.