{"id":171,"date":"2009-02-15T15:32:43","date_gmt":"2009-02-15T21:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/maxmarmer.com\/?p=171"},"modified":"2017-10-11T09:24:22","modified_gmt":"2017-10-11T15:24:22","slug":"michael-lewis-takes-on-basketball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maxmarmer.com\/blog\/michael-lewis-takes-on-basketball\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Lewis Takes On Basketball"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball<\/a>, which popularized the revolutionary analytical approaches used to gain a competitive advantage in baseball, has his sights on doing the same for basketball. In this captivating New York Times Article<\/a>, Lewis takes us into the world of the basketball quants attempting to discover how to define true basketball value through the case study of Shane Battier, an unconventional player, highly undervalued by current statistical metrics, who may be the Kevin Youkillis of basketball. Lewis is an incredibly talented and insightful writer and his able to delve into the topic of rigorous statistical analysis in an engaging form that is riddled with transferable life lessons.<\/p>\n

Here are few of my favorite quotes.<\/p>\n

\n

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe think about this deeply whenever we\u2019re talking about contractual incentives,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team\u201d \u2014 and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. \u201cThey all maximize what they think they\u2019re being paid for,\u201d he says. He laughs. \u201cIt\u2019s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They\u2019ve got to rethink how they\u2019re getting paid.\u201d<\/p>\n

Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Gin\u00f3bili. Gin\u00f3bili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Gin\u00f3bili entered the game. \u201cNo one in the N.B.A. does that,\u201d Morey says. \u201cNo one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don\u2019t want them swinging while they\u2019re thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,\u201d Battier says. \u201cMy job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.\u201d The court doesn\u2019t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lakers\u2019 offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,\u201d Morey says. \u201cBut if Shane is on him, it isn\u2019t.\u201d A player whom Morey describes as \u201ca marginal N.B.A. athlete\u201d not only guards one of the greatest \u2014 and smartest \u2014 offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,\u201d [Battier] says, \u201cand when there\u2019s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don\u2019t lie.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a subtle difference,\u201d Morey says, \u201cbut it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there\u2019s still some uncertainty if it\u2019s right or wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. <\/strong>He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him.<\/p>\n

Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: \u201cYou and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I\u2019m playing him honest. Don\u2019t fall for his stuff.\u201d Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.<\/p>\n

hese men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino<\/span><\/a>, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. \u201cWhat 17-year-old has the stones to do that?\u201d Wetzel asks. \u201cTo just cut off Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?\u201d Wetzel answers his own question: \u201cIt wasn\u2019t like, \u2018This is a really interesting 17-year-old.\u2019 It was like, \u2018This isn\u2019t real.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I\u2019ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It\u2019s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he\u2019s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.<\/p>\n

Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character \u2014 take a charge, scramble for a loose ball \u2014 are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to \u201cplay for the team\u201d when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people.<\/p>\n

Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, which popularized the revolutionary analytical approaches used to gain a competitive advantage in baseball, has his sights on doing the same for basketball. In this captivating New York Times Article, Lewis takes us into the world of the basketball quants attempting to discover how to define true basketball value Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sports","cat-17-id"],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Lewis Takes On Basketball - Max Marmer<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.maxmarmer.com\/blog\/michael-lewis-takes-on-basketball\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Michael Lewis Takes On Basketball - Max Marmer\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, which popularized the revolutionary analytical approaches used to gain a competitive advantage in baseball, has his sights on doing the same for basketball. 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