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05-04-2008, 11:06 AM
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May 4, 2008
Freakonomics
Hoop Data Dreams
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The True Value of Rajon Rondo
After going dry for 86 seasons, the Boston Red Sox (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/bostonredsox/index.html?inline=nyt-org) have won two World Series in the past four years. This hot stretch began soon after the team hired Bill James, the sport’s most accomplished statistician, as a senior baseball operations adviser. Whether coincidence or not, this overlap was widely noted, and it is now standard practice for baseball teams to hire a flock of statheads and use their analyses to help make decisions on and off the field.
This probably makes good sense for a sport like baseball, which is full of discrete events that are easily measured. It is also understandable, however, that there is less of an edge to be gained from statistical analysis now that everyone is doing it.
Basketball, meanwhile, might seem too hectic and woolly for such rigorous dissection. It is far more collaborative than baseball and happens much faster, with players shifting from offense one moment to defense the next. (Hockey and football present their own challenges.) A lot of things happen on a basketball court — picks, passes, defensive shifts — that aren’t routinely quantified. This is not to suggest that basketball teams don’t think statistically. But only recently have a few teams begun to hire a new breed of stathead to scrutinize every conceivable variable.
The Boston Celtics (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/bostonceltics/index.html?inline=nyt-org), owned by several men with venture-capital backgrounds, have for the past few years been one of the most data-driven teams in the N.B.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_basketball_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org) They have also just completed the biggest single-season turnaround in history, entering the playoffs two weeks ago with a league-best 66 victories after winning just 24 games last year.
Coincidence? Probably, for the Celtics obtained two monstrously accomplished players in the off-season, Kevin Garnett (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/kevin_garnett/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Ray Allen. It didn’t take a statistician to tell you that the Celtics would be a lot better this year than last.
But the team also employs what the general manager, Danny Ainge, calls his “secret weapon,” a 32-year-old named Mike Zarren, who seems to know every data point about every N.B.A. player, past and present. Garnett calls him Numbers, the Celtics Dancers call him Stats and Paul Pierce, the team’s longtime standout, calls him M.I.T. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) even though Zarren never went there. He did, however, lead a University of Chicago (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org) quiz-bowl team to four national tournament victories and later graduated from Harvard Law. (Disclosure: Steven Levitt taught Zarren while the latter was an economics undergrad at Chicago.) He subsequently fell from the lofty realm of academia into his dream job, as the Celtics’ stat savant.
Zarren also happens to be the team’s associate counsel, although this would be hard to believe if you came across him at a game, way up in the cheap seats, wearing his green satin Celtics jacket and shouting himself hoarse: “He pushed! He pushed! . . . You got ’em, K.G.!” To describe his Celtics fandom as rabid would be a gross understatement. This is his third season on the Celtics’ payroll — he worked two years without pay as a law student and while clerking for a judge — but his family has had season tickets since 1974. He began regularly attending games at age 5, and since moving back to Boston after college, he has missed only five home games.
“Three of those,” he says, “were due to illness.”
Danny Ainge was a key player on the last Celtics team to win an N.B.A. title, more than 20 years ago. He also played Major League Baseball for three summers, with the Toronto Blue Jays (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/torontobluejays/index.html?inline=nyt-org). You might think that is why he embraces the statistical approach to sport now commonly called “moneyball,” after the title of Michael Lewis’s book, but in fact Ainge is not a true believer. “I just think there’s a lot of to-do about nothing in some of that,” he says. “I mean, I heard about on-base percentage in 1976 when I was a junior in high school.”
Ainge hired Zarren simply because he wants any advantage worth having, and Zarren’s insights are “more information on every decision we make,” Ainge says. “Mike is a much smarter guy than I am. I’m open to smarter people than me. It still comes down to my instincts. I have to make the choice, no matter what my scouts say, no matter what the models say. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that a statistical model will ever be foolproof in basketball because there are so many variables, but I do think it can help us.”
There are two channels through which Zarren can help the Celtics. The first is by assessing potential deals and draft picks, which means bouncing information off of Ainge. The second channel is strategic advice, which means going to Coach Doc Rivers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/doc_rivers/index.html?inline=nyt-per), whom Ainge says is “skeptically receptive” to Zarren’s insights. You sense that Zarren has gained credibility within the Celtics not because the basketball people adore his regression analyses but because he adores the sport. “Most geeks are not basketball guys,” Zarren says, “and most basketball guys are not geeks. You have to be both to be successful in this developing field.”
What’s the most efficient shot to take besides a layup? Easy, says Zarren: a three-pointer from the corner. What’s one of the most misused, misinterpreted statistics? “Turnovers are way more expensive than people think,” Zarren says. That’s because most teams focus on the points a defense scores from the turnover but don’t correctly value the offense’s opportunity cost — that is, the points it might have scored had the turnover not occurred.
As for what the Celtics know about their own and opposing players — well, that information is guarded like the crown jewels. Off the record and under duress, Zarren did reveal some valuable information, but we judged credible his threat to hunt us down and kill us if it were published. He was willing to admit that Ray Allen’s worth goes far beyond his perimeter shooting, that Rajon Rondo’s rebounding was an undervalued asset, that Leon Powe’s surprisingly strong play was not so surprising to the Celtics and that, as transformative a player as Garnett was known to be, he has generated a variety of offensive and defensive pluses that even the Celtics didn’t anticipate.
Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse clicks, he can call up every clip in which LeBron James (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/lebron_james/index.html?inline=nyt-per) of the Cleveland Cavaliers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/clevelandcavaliers/index.html?inline=nyt-org) has touched the ball at the top of the key and see whether he went left or right, was double-teamed or not, passed or shot — and, if the latter, whether he missed, scored or was fouled. So if the Celtics dampen James’s scoring the next time they play a high-stakes game against the Cavs, Zarren might be entitled to a smidgen of credit.
Still, there remains a significant universe of basketball statistics that are simply not captured: each pass thrown and caught, each player’s position on the floor at a given time, any number of angles and proximities and nuances. Zarren lusts after such data and is quietly pushing for a technological solution that would produce it. One possibility: embed the floor of each N.B.A. arena with electronic sensors and have the players wear microchips in their sneakers.
The last few decades have been sad ones for the Celtics, marked by loss of life (including Len Bias, their 1986 first-round draft pick) and losses on the court. All that gloom will dissipate if they can manage to win their 17th championship this season. Other teams will of course rush to mimic the Celtics’ formula — beginning, presumably, by trying to acquire a player like Kevin Garnett. But there are a lot more Mike Zarrens in the world than there are Kevin Garnetts, and they also happen to come with a much lower price tag.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of the book “Freakonomics.” They are taking a hiatus after this column to complete their next book, “SuperFreakonomics.”
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May 4, 2008
Freakonomics
Hoop Data Dreams
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT
The True Value of Rajon Rondo
After going dry for 86 seasons, the Boston Red Sox (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/bostonredsox/index.html?inline=nyt-org) have won two World Series in the past four years. This hot stretch began soon after the team hired Bill James, the sport’s most accomplished statistician, as a senior baseball operations adviser. Whether coincidence or not, this overlap was widely noted, and it is now standard practice for baseball teams to hire a flock of statheads and use their analyses to help make decisions on and off the field.
This probably makes good sense for a sport like baseball, which is full of discrete events that are easily measured. It is also understandable, however, that there is less of an edge to be gained from statistical analysis now that everyone is doing it.
Basketball, meanwhile, might seem too hectic and woolly for such rigorous dissection. It is far more collaborative than baseball and happens much faster, with players shifting from offense one moment to defense the next. (Hockey and football present their own challenges.) A lot of things happen on a basketball court — picks, passes, defensive shifts — that aren’t routinely quantified. This is not to suggest that basketball teams don’t think statistically. But only recently have a few teams begun to hire a new breed of stathead to scrutinize every conceivable variable.
The Boston Celtics (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/bostonceltics/index.html?inline=nyt-org), owned by several men with venture-capital backgrounds, have for the past few years been one of the most data-driven teams in the N.B.A. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_basketball_association/index.html?inline=nyt-org) They have also just completed the biggest single-season turnaround in history, entering the playoffs two weeks ago with a league-best 66 victories after winning just 24 games last year.
Coincidence? Probably, for the Celtics obtained two monstrously accomplished players in the off-season, Kevin Garnett (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/kevin_garnett/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Ray Allen. It didn’t take a statistician to tell you that the Celtics would be a lot better this year than last.
But the team also employs what the general manager, Danny Ainge, calls his “secret weapon,” a 32-year-old named Mike Zarren, who seems to know every data point about every N.B.A. player, past and present. Garnett calls him Numbers, the Celtics Dancers call him Stats and Paul Pierce, the team’s longtime standout, calls him M.I.T. (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org) even though Zarren never went there. He did, however, lead a University of Chicago (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_chicago/index.html?inline=nyt-org) quiz-bowl team to four national tournament victories and later graduated from Harvard Law. (Disclosure: Steven Levitt taught Zarren while the latter was an economics undergrad at Chicago.) He subsequently fell from the lofty realm of academia into his dream job, as the Celtics’ stat savant.
Zarren also happens to be the team’s associate counsel, although this would be hard to believe if you came across him at a game, way up in the cheap seats, wearing his green satin Celtics jacket and shouting himself hoarse: “He pushed! He pushed! . . . You got ’em, K.G.!” To describe his Celtics fandom as rabid would be a gross understatement. This is his third season on the Celtics’ payroll — he worked two years without pay as a law student and while clerking for a judge — but his family has had season tickets since 1974. He began regularly attending games at age 5, and since moving back to Boston after college, he has missed only five home games.
“Three of those,” he says, “were due to illness.”
Danny Ainge was a key player on the last Celtics team to win an N.B.A. title, more than 20 years ago. He also played Major League Baseball for three summers, with the Toronto Blue Jays (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/torontobluejays/index.html?inline=nyt-org). You might think that is why he embraces the statistical approach to sport now commonly called “moneyball,” after the title of Michael Lewis’s book, but in fact Ainge is not a true believer. “I just think there’s a lot of to-do about nothing in some of that,” he says. “I mean, I heard about on-base percentage in 1976 when I was a junior in high school.”
Ainge hired Zarren simply because he wants any advantage worth having, and Zarren’s insights are “more information on every decision we make,” Ainge says. “Mike is a much smarter guy than I am. I’m open to smarter people than me. It still comes down to my instincts. I have to make the choice, no matter what my scouts say, no matter what the models say. I don’t think it’s realistic to think that a statistical model will ever be foolproof in basketball because there are so many variables, but I do think it can help us.”
There are two channels through which Zarren can help the Celtics. The first is by assessing potential deals and draft picks, which means bouncing information off of Ainge. The second channel is strategic advice, which means going to Coach Doc Rivers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/doc_rivers/index.html?inline=nyt-per), whom Ainge says is “skeptically receptive” to Zarren’s insights. You sense that Zarren has gained credibility within the Celtics not because the basketball people adore his regression analyses but because he adores the sport. “Most geeks are not basketball guys,” Zarren says, “and most basketball guys are not geeks. You have to be both to be successful in this developing field.”
What’s the most efficient shot to take besides a layup? Easy, says Zarren: a three-pointer from the corner. What’s one of the most misused, misinterpreted statistics? “Turnovers are way more expensive than people think,” Zarren says. That’s because most teams focus on the points a defense scores from the turnover but don’t correctly value the offense’s opportunity cost — that is, the points it might have scored had the turnover not occurred.
As for what the Celtics know about their own and opposing players — well, that information is guarded like the crown jewels. Off the record and under duress, Zarren did reveal some valuable information, but we judged credible his threat to hunt us down and kill us if it were published. He was willing to admit that Ray Allen’s worth goes far beyond his perimeter shooting, that Rajon Rondo’s rebounding was an undervalued asset, that Leon Powe’s surprisingly strong play was not so surprising to the Celtics and that, as transformative a player as Garnett was known to be, he has generated a variety of offensive and defensive pluses that even the Celtics didn’t anticipate.
Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse clicks, he can call up every clip in which LeBron James (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/lebron_james/index.html?inline=nyt-per) of the Cleveland Cavaliers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/clevelandcavaliers/index.html?inline=nyt-org) has touched the ball at the top of the key and see whether he went left or right, was double-teamed or not, passed or shot — and, if the latter, whether he missed, scored or was fouled. So if the Celtics dampen James’s scoring the next time they play a high-stakes game against the Cavs, Zarren might be entitled to a smidgen of credit.
Still, there remains a significant universe of basketball statistics that are simply not captured: each pass thrown and caught, each player’s position on the floor at a given time, any number of angles and proximities and nuances. Zarren lusts after such data and is quietly pushing for a technological solution that would produce it. One possibility: embed the floor of each N.B.A. arena with electronic sensors and have the players wear microchips in their sneakers.
The last few decades have been sad ones for the Celtics, marked by loss of life (including Len Bias, their 1986 first-round draft pick) and losses on the court. All that gloom will dissipate if they can manage to win their 17th championship this season. Other teams will of course rush to mimic the Celtics’ formula — beginning, presumably, by trying to acquire a player like Kevin Garnett. But there are a lot more Mike Zarrens in the world than there are Kevin Garnetts, and they also happen to come with a much lower price tag.
Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of the book “Freakonomics.” They are taking a hiatus after this column to complete their next book, “SuperFreakonomics.”