Are you picking Philly to make the Eastern finals? Think again:
In a league in which you need a proven crunch-time guy to battle the
other proven crunch-time guys in the last three minutes of close games,
they don’t have a proven crunch-time guy. (And don’t tell me it’s
[Elton] Brand. I watched him for four years on the Clippers; he’s not that type
of player.) Fundamentally, this can’t work for anything beyond 45-47
wins and maybe a second-round appearance … and that’s before you factor
in the skewed level of expectations already in place, or the fact that,
again, they just spent $83 million to reunite the best two guys on a
27-win Clippers team from 2003. I just don’t see it.
I’m picking the Wizards to tank and making no other predictions. The interesting question is whether Cleveland will deal for Allen Iverson. Here is much more. You’ll also find this excellent sentence:
Jamaal Tinsley is a sunk cost.
But Simmons also writes this:
No, the zero-sum feature of professional sports does not apply to just “anything” else. In particular, it doesn’t apply to wealth distribution. It is perfectly possible, and in fact quite common, for both the rich and poor to get richer.
But I’m glad he knows about sunk cost.
He’s the best and most entertaining sports writer going (that I know of). Campaigned for the Bucks GM job and they almost certainly would’ve been better off with him. But he’s probably a better accountant than economist. He’s a whiz with the salary cap, but no way he’d buy the idea that shooting streaks are random. It all becomes narrative.
His podcasts are good too.
Using a different example, from a sport I’m more familiar with, people extol the virtues of Derek Jeter as a clutch kind of guy, a great postseason performer. Well, if you aggregate his postseason stats through the years, he’s hitting .309 with a .377 on-base% and a .469 slugging%. He hit 17 HR, scored 85 runs, and drove in 49, stole 16 bases. All of this in 123 games. Pretty much, if you give him another 30 games, his postseason record will look just like a typical Derek Jeter season, and you would not be able to distinguish the “postseason aggregate” with a “regular season”. The same is true for just about anyone with enough plate appearances in the postseason – Manny Ramirez, Chipper Jones, Bernie Williams, even Reggie Jackson (double his postseason stats and it looks like a Reggie Jackson season could look, and not as good as his 1969 season).
You have to love Simmons. You don’t have to love anything other than the “logic” that he and any other true nutjob fan applies to sports. During the playoffs a few years ago, he wore a lucky shirt that a bird had pooped on because he thought that the bird poop made it even more lucky. He is convinced that his columns can jinx or reverse jinx his team.
What gets me, I guess, is that even an economist (though BS is definitely not one) can turn off the actual logical side of his brain and turn on the twisted sports logic side to watch sports. It’s part of why I love sports.
AZ,
Actually the data doesn’t necessarily show that the Lakers would defeat the Sixers in your example, all things equal.
The only model that uses regression analysis that I know of doesn’t show Kobe Bryant to be superior to Elton Brand. If anything it shows the opposite. That model is developed in Wages of Wins and has a blog dberri.wordpress.com
The author, David Berri, has also done actual research on the “crunch time performer” as well.
His findings, in general, say that NBA decision makers are not very good. And people really shouldn’t be shocked.
Very prudent not to make any predictions. I still chuckle over your post declaring the Shaq trade a success based on about 40 minutes of play in two games of Phoenix’s first play-off series. I though “sample size” was a concept borrowed by sports pundits from statistics, but its evidently yet to be transmitted from the sports world.
A blog means being frequently reminded when you’re wrong.
Good fun, good fun.
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