Category: Sports
Model this, basketball defense
The veteran forward [Jared Dudley] explained concessions are sometimes necessary and the Suns purposely awarded opponents easy buckets occasionally to speed games up, which he emphasized the Wizards are not considering.
Here is more from Jorge Castillo, who is writing about the desire of the Wizards to speed up their offense, and take more three point shots, and all that entails.
Is the way forward here to model the Suns, the Wizards, Dudley, or all of the above?
Cryotherapy markets in everything
While Anastasia Garvey, an actress and model, doesn’t have office pressure, she says she is constantly on edge wondering if she’ll get a certain job. She has developed a regimen of ways to disconnect: meditation, acupuncture, cupping therapy, monthly trips to a reservation-only spa and most recently cryotherapy — as in spending some time being blasted by air cooled to minus 260 degrees.
It only lasts three minutes, plus time to warm up again on a stationary bike, but it costs $90 a session, she said. She goes three times a week.
“The first time I did it I couldn’t remember my name,” she said. “You’re in a freezer. You’re so cold you can’t think of anything.”
There are many interesting ideas and bits in this NYT Paul Sullivan piece: “As for the seeming contradiction of the Buddhist boxer…”
Observers expect forecasters to show high confidence
Observers seem to focus on the target event and not its complement. Bagchi and Ince have a new paper on this question:
Consumers routinely rely on forecasters to make predictions about uncertain events (e.g., sporting contests, stock fluctuations). The authors demonstrate that when forecasts are higher versus lower (e.g., a 70% vs. 30% chance of team A winning a game) consumers infer that the forecaster is more confident in her prediction, has conducted more in-depth analyses, and is more trustworthy. The prediction is also judged as more accurate. This occurs because forecasts are evaluated based on how well they predict the target event occurring (team A winning). Higher forecasts indicate greater likelihood of the target event occurring, and signal a confident analyst, while lower forecasts indicate lower likelihood and lower confidence in the target event occurring. But because, with lower forecasts, consumers still focus on the target event (and not its complement), lower confidence in the target event occurring is erroneously interpreted as the forecaster being less confident in her overall prediction (instead of more confident in the complementary event occurring—team A losing). The authors identify boundary conditions, generalize to other prediction formats, and demonstrate consequences.
Of course this also has relevance for the evolutionary processes governing pundits.
Here is a related press release (pdf). For the pointer I thank Charles Klingman.
There are an estimated 250 paternoster lifts (Personenumlaufaufzüge) still in use in Germany
The culture and polity that is Germany:
Officials in Stuttgart were among the loudest protesters against the labour minister Andrea Nahles’ new workplace safety regulations, which stated that the lifts could only be used by employees trained in paternoster riding.
“It took the heart out of this place when our paternoster was brought to a halt, and it slowed down our work considerably,” said Wolfgang Wölfle, Stuttgart’s deputy mayor, who vociferously fought the ban and called for the reinstatement of the town hall’s lift, which has been running since 1956.
“They suit the German character very well. I’m too impatient to wait for a conventional lift and the best thing about a paternoster is that you can hop on and off it as you please. You can also communicate with people between floors when they’re riding on one. I see colleagues flirt in them all the time,” he added, celebrating its reopening at a recent town hall party to which hundreds of members of the public were invited.
…In officialese the lifts are referred to as Personenumlaufaufzüge – people circulation lifts – while a popular bureaucrats’ nickname for them is Beamtenbagger or “civil servant excavator”. The name paternoster – Latin for “our father” – is a reference to one of the prayers said by Catholics using rosary beads, which are meditatively passed through the hand, just as the cabins are in perpetual motion around the shaft.
There is more here, with excellent videos of paternoster riding, all via Michelle Dawson. By the way, it has been against the law to build new paternosters since 1974.
What kind of blog post produces the most comments?
Imagine if I wrote a post that just served up a list like this:
The people who deserve to be raised in status:
Norman Borlaug, Jon Huntsman, female Catholics from Croatia, Scottie Pippen, Yoko Ono, Gordon Tullock, Uber drivers, and Arnold Schoenberg,
And
The people who deserve to be lowered in status:
Donald Trump, Harper Lee, inhabitants of the province Presidente Hayes, in Paraguay, doctors, Jacques Derrida, Indira Gandhi, and Art Garfunkel
You might get a kick out of it the first time, but quickly you would grow tired of the lack of substance and indeed the sheer prejudice of the exercise.
Yet, ultimately, the topic so appeals to you all. So much of debate, including political and economic debate, is about which groups and individuals deserve higher or lower status. It’s pretty easy — too easy in fact — to dissect most Paul Krugman blog posts along these lines. It’s also why a lot of blog posts about foreign countries don’t generate visceral reactions, unless of course it is the Greeks and the Germans, or some other set of stand-ins for disputes closer to home (or maybe that is your home). Chinese goings on are especially tough to parse into comparable American disputes over the status of one group vs. another.
I hypothesize that an MR blog post attracts more comments when it a) has implications for who should be raised and lowered in status, and b) has some framework in place which allows you to make analytical points, but points which ultimately translate into a conclusion about a).
Posts about immigration, the minimum wage, Greece and Germany, the worthiness of entrepreneurs vs. workers, and the rankings of different schools of thought or economists all seem to fit this bill.
Sometimes I am tempted to simply serve up the list and skip the analytics.
Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.
My favorite things Croatian
1. Novelist: Help! I do own a copy of Sarah Nović’s Girl at War, but haven’t yet read it.
2. Basketball player: Toni Kukoc, the “Croatian sensation.”
3. Painting: There was an active school of Naive painting in Croatia, from Hlebine near the Hungarian border. Perhaps my favorite from the group was Ivan Generalic, but Mirko Virius was very good too.
4. Inventor: Nikola Tesla. Before you go crazy in the comments section, however, here is a long Wikipedia page on to what extent we can justly claim that Tesla was Croatian. Here are further debates, Croat or Serb? Or both?
5. Pianist: How about Ivo Pogorelić? Here is his Petrushka.
6. Economist: Branko Horvat, the market-oriented market socialist, is the only one I can think of, here is an overview of his contributions (pdf). Am I forgetting someone?
7. City: Split, not Dubrovnik. I am here for two days right now, then on to Belgrade for a conference/salon.
I cannot name a Croatian movie or composer or pop star. I have the feeling they have many more famous athletes. Don’t they have a lot of beautiful models? Aren’t they the world’s most beautiful people? Has anyone set a movie here?
The bottom line: It would be worse without Tesla.
A better player for a bad team?
Kevin Love, in his infinite wisdom, decided to test the free agent market. At least for a while, it seemed to raise the possibility that he wouldn’t return to the Cleveland Cavaliers with LeBron James.
Courtside critics of Love frequently cite the Coase theorem, especially when criticizing his play this last year for Cleveland. Arguably Love is a better player on a bad team than he is on a good team. He scores a lot, but only if he is the primary option on offense; you can see this by comparing his numbers on Minnesota, a poor team where he was a big star, with his numbers for Cleveland, where he was the number three scoring option. He needs a lot of touches to hone his shooting, which is a kind of scale effect. He also pulls in a lot of rebounds by neglecting his duties on team defense. For a poor team, maybe that is OK, because the team defense had serious holes anyway. For a good team it can wreck the entire plan.
This situation differs from the traditional O-Ring model (clever link there), in which the lesser talented workers hold the more talented worker back. Here the lesser talented workers allow a flawed, attention-demanding competitor to flourish.
It may sound negative to say a player is more valuable on a bad team, but that is a skill too. These individuals are perhaps no less virtuous or hard-working than those who are better on a good team. Michael Adams was better on bad teams (and he played on lots of them), but was hard-working and non-selfish and also widely admired, even though he was too short and weak to hold the line in a good defensive set-up.
There are analogues in business. Some managers may have special talents in bringing out the best in less talented workers. Or they may make better decisions when they get to be the real boss of just about everything. They may need a lot of unfettered experience to refine their skills, and perhaps they’re not so good at collaboration anyway.
Some politicians may be better at running chaotic countries; Nelson Mandela would have been wasted as Prime Minister of Iceland.
Some economists may be of more value in weak departments than in strong departments. Their generalist skills fill in a greater number of gaps, and perhaps they can bring out the best in weaker students, when better students would find their lack of specialization a bigger drawback.
What are other examples of this phenomenon?
Given that Kevin Love is indeed re-signing with Cleveland, does this mean the knock on him is wrong? Or is the equilibrium that the Cavaliers will become a worse team? Or maybe virtually all players are good bargains the year before the salary cap will go up a lot? Maybe Cleveland re-signed him…because they can? The rumored deal is for $110 million, tell Coase about that.
Might the NFL accept the Tullock paradox?
The chairman of the National Football League’s health and safety advisory commission believes American football could ban helmets in the future.
The NFL has tried to reduce the risk of head injuries over the last five years and recently reached an almost $1bn legal settlement with ex-players suffering with head trauma.
But some experts think helmets give the players a false sense of security.
“Can I see a time without helmets? Yes,” said Dr John York.
“It’s not around the corner, but I can see it.”
There is more here, via Michelle Dawson.
The extreme durability of Lebron James
Over the past five seasons, LeBron’s played a total of 18,087 minutes, counting the regular season and the playoffs.
What that means: Compared to every other player, LeBron’s played at least 15% more minutes than anyone else in the league. He’s played nearly 2,500 more minutes than Kevin Durant, the runner-up.
Basically, pick any other NBA player. Since 2010, LeBron has played the equivalent of at least one extra season compared to that player — and likely, a lot more.
And over the past ten seasons, the minutes gap widens — LeBron has a 20% edge on Joe Johnson (who’s played the second-most minutes) and a 30% edge on Tim Duncan (who’s played the tenth-most).
And yet that is with very little in the way of injury, perhaps his most remarkable achievement. That is all from Dan Diamond.
Stephen Curry and the duration of the great stagnation
Stephen Curry set a record In May of this year:
It took Reggie Miller 22 games to set an NBA playoff record of 58 three-pointers for the Indiana Pacers in the 2000 playoffs. Now, Stephen Curry has broken that mark in just 13 games.
He is now up in the 80s I believe. Curry, by the way, is NBA MVP and his team is probably on the verge of winning the Finals. The three-point strategy seems to be working: for Curry, for the Golden State Warriors, and also for last year’s champions, the San Antonio Spurs.
Yet the three-point shot has been in the NBA since 1979 (!), and for most of those years it was not a dominant weapon.
What took so long? At first the shot was thought to be a cheesy gimmick. Players had to master the longer shot, preferably from their earliest training. Coaches had to figure out three-point strategies, which include rethinking the fast break and different methods of floor spacing and passing; players had to learn those techniques too. The NBA had to change its rules to encourage more three-pointers (e.g., allowing zone defenses, discouraging isolation plays). General managers had to realize that Rick Pitino, though perhaps a bad NBA coach, was not a total fool, and that the Phoenix Suns were not a fluke. People had to ponder the expected value concept a little more carefully. Line-ups had to be smaller. And so on. Most of all, coaches and general managers needed the vision to see how all these pieces could fit together — Arnold Kling’s patterns of sustainable trade and specialization.
In other words, this “technology” has been legal since 1979, yet only recently has it started to come into its own. (Some teams still haven’t figured out how to use it properly.) And what a simple technology it is: it involves only placing your feet on a different spot on the floor and then moving your arms and legs in a coordinated (one hopes) motion. The incentives of money, fame, and sex to get this right have been high from the beginning, and there are plenty of different players and teams in the NBA, not to mention college or even high school ball, to figure it out. There is plenty of objective data in basketball, most of all when it comes to scoring.
Dell Curry, Stephen’s father, was in his time also known as a three-point shooter in the NBA. But he didn’t come close to his son’s later three-point performance.
So how long do ordinary scientific inventions need to serve up their fruits? I am a big fan of Stephen Curry, but in fact his family tale is ultimately a sobering one.
Addendum: Tom Haberstroh fills in the history.
My favorite things Baltimore
I’m passing through Baltimore on the train today (a talk at U. Penn and chatting with Ashok Rao), so I have license to do this. Here goes:
1. Author: There is plenty to choose from here, including Poe, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Frank O’Hara, and H.L. Mencken. I do not love F. Scott Fitzgerald as many do, same with Upton Sinclair, but they deserve mention. I’ll opt for Poe, with Gold-Bug as my favorite story. Hammett’s Red Harvest I also enjoy and have taught a few times, delicious incoherence. Anne Tyler has a few good books, but stop reading after one or two of them.
2. Philosopher: John Rawls, though since we’re talking about Baltimore I feel I should call him Jack.
3. Painter: Morris Louis or Grace Hartigan? I feel I can do better, help out people.
4. Popular music: Tori Amos grew up in Baltimore, I like her Little Earthquakes and various singles, live cuts, and cover versions, available only in scattered form as far as I know. Is Dan Deacon popular? Frank Zappa is a remarkable musical talent, but I don’t actually enjoy listening to him.
5. Jazz: Eubie Blake, there is also Bill Frisell and Billie Holiday.
6. Classical music: Philip Glass was born there, though I associate him with NYC.
7. Baseball: I still remember that old Orioles rotation with Cuellar, McNally, Palmer, and Dobson, all twenty-game winners in the same year.
8. Soviet spy: Alger Hiss.
9. Movie, set in: I don’t love Diner or Avalon, how about The Accidental Tourist, or Twelve Monkeys? The first half of Silence of the Lambs is excellent.
For good measure toss in Thurgood Marshall, Tim Page, Babe Ruth, The Wire, Walters Art Museum, the underrated BSO, and Brooks Robinson. Who or what else am I forgetting?
The bottom line: Lots for one city! Let’s hope it gets better soon.
Are eSports real sports, a money pump, or both?
What are non-e sports for that matter? Via Liam Boluk, I read this from Prashob Menon:
Last year’s League of Legends championship, for example, drew nearly 30 million viewers, putting it in line with the combined viewership of the 2014 MLB and NBA finals, or the series finales of Breaking Bad and Two and a Half Men, plus the Season 4 finale of Game of Thrones. As with most sports, competitive gaming is now firmly entrenched in the US college system, with the country’s largest collegiate league counting more than 10,000 active players, some of whom are on full athletic scholarships. Eager to capitalize on growing interest in the sport, Major League Gaming (MLG) opened the first dedicated domestic eSports arena in October 2014, and major brands such as Ford, American Express and Coke have begun forming partnerships with game developers, teams, players, event organizers and video distributors. The US Department of State has been issuing athlete visas to competitive gamers since 2013.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to say eSports aren’t “real” sports, but the bigger question is whether it even matters. The media business is about eyeballs, and audiences are turning up in droves for the likes of Defense of the Ancients and League of Legends.
The economics indeed do not look so bad:
Moreover, eSports fans, unlike linear TV viewers, are highly engaged in the content. Major League Gaming, for instance, consistently beats the industry average on key digital ad metrics such as completion rates (90% vs. 72%), click-through rates (4% vs. 2%), and ad viewability (99% vs. 44%).
Here is Wikipedia on eSports. I believe I have timed my birth at more or less the right time, so I will die of old age just when such institutions are taking over the world and pushing out baseball’s eight-team American League, as it ruled in 1968.
Will youth sports disputes be improved by the intervention of the courts?
When Audrey Dimitrew won a spot on a club volleyball team in Chantilly, Va., the 16-year-old hoped to impress varsity coaches and possibly college coaches.
But when her coach benched her and the league told her she couldn’t join another team, the action shifted from one court to another — she and her family sued.
…The lawsuit is one of a number filed across the country in recent years as families have increasingly turned to the courts to intervene in youth sports disputes. Parents upset that their children have been cut, benched, yelled at by coaches or even fouled too hard are asking judges to referee.
The culture that is American youth sports, there is more here, via Michael Rosenwald.
Request for requests for Ben Bernanke, blogger
What would you like him to cover? Please don’t be rude, serious inquiries only. On Twitter Ben claims he will cover “economics, finances, and sometimes baseball.”
How nepotistic are we?
In just about every field I looked at, having a successful parent makes you way more likely to be a big success, but the advantage is much smaller than it is at the top of politics.
Using the same methodology, I estimate that the son of an N.B.A. player has about a one in 45 chance of becoming an N.B.A. player. Since there are far more N.B.A. slots than Senate slots, this is only about an 800-fold edge.
Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.
Emphasis added by me. And this:
An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.
That is all from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.