Category: Sports

Falling:

Damian Lillard
Jordan Poole
Zion Williamson
Klay Thompson
Andrew Wiggins
Austin Reeves

Rising:

Embiid
Maxey
Porzingis
Haliburton
Curry (not Seth)
Dare I say Kyrie Irving?
Lebron, if that is even possible at this point, he is already GOAT
Greg Popovich
Wemby
Bam Adebayo

That is a lot of status reshuffling, but it seems to be happening pretty quickly and I suspect most of it will stick, with Kyrie Irving maybe still up for grabs.  Others?

When I was over Auren Hoffman’s house, I bet (using play chips only) 70% that either Boston or Denver wins the title this year.

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

As for the students themselves, recent research indicates that sports performance makes former student athletes more valuable in the workplace. Former college athletes are much more likely to enter the high-earning fields of business and finance, relative to their non-athlete classmates. That can benefit the former students, their alma mater and the overall economy.

The research also shows that student athletes are less likely to get a doctoral degree or become a medical doctor, or to enter STEM fields. Might it be that the STEM jobs will become the province of the less athletic?

Looking at just Ivy League graduates, former athletes do better in the labor market — that is, they earn more money — than non-athletes. This result holds even when controlled for school attended, year of graduation, field of study and first job. Those same athletes are also more likely to hold senior positions. That could be evidence of leadership skills, or of their ability to learn and improve over time, as indeed good athletes must do. After five years, the earnings of the former college athletes start to outperform their non-athletic peers.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that college athletes actually learn something useful. And what they learn, in many cases, is probably leadership skills. It is also possible that their athletic experiences sharpen their wits, their competitive sense, their problem-solving acumen and their ability to work with others.

Interestingly, the same study shows that athletes in more socioeconomically diverse sports, such as track and field, also earn more than their non-athletic peers. This suggests that their advantage comes not from having attended some fancy prep school.

Here is the original work by Natee Amornsiripanitch, Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson & Vladimir Mukharlyamov.  One broader lesson is that colleges and universities should encourage more “hands on projects.”

There has staggeringly been only one U.S. representative among the league’s top 10 rebounders for each of the past three seasons.

That is from Marc Stein.  How did that happen?  Where is the current-day Charles Oakley?  Moses Malone, our nation turns it lonely eyes to you!  Dennis Rodman would do as well. Yet here is the list of the top rebounders from last year in the NBA, and yes Rudy Gobert is French.

Of course, you all know that in the key FIBA games the U.S. squad was badly rebounded by a number of nations, including the tiny Lithuania (their population is tiny, not their size per person).  And Bam Adebayo was tired from the Finals and was not available.

Why has the balance of rebounding power turned so seriously against U.S. basketball players?  Is it that all the tall ones are nowadays being hired by Goldman Sachs or Open AI?  Somehow that doesn’t seem right to me.

One hypothesis is that today the game demands a broader set of skills, and more teamwork, than in earlier times.  Charles Oakley still would make the NBA today, but perhaps as an 11th man, rather than as a regular player who could hone his skills and become a leading figure.  In other words, the return to training big men has (maybe) gone up a lot.  Simply being big and strong yields a smaller return than before, because on offense they are counting on you to hit that open three-point shot.  On defense, they are counting on you to rotate on perimeter defense in a manner that Oakley did not have to worry about so much.  And so on.

And maybe the European and other teams do a better job training their big men at younger ages.  The European big guys do in fact have excellent long-distance shooting and often higher quality passing skills.  The U.S. players (mostly) leaving college after their first year does not help with this.

And thus, in that equilibrium, the better shooting makes the teams as a whole, better rebounders as well.  That is a modestly counterintuitive conclusion.

Or is there some other, better model for why U.S. rebounding prowess has declined in recent years?

In multi-stage tournaments, anticipated competition in future stages might affect the outcome of competition in the current stage. In particular, the presence of super- stars might demotivate the next-best competitors from seeking to advance to later rounds, where they ultimately are likely to face a superstar. Data from men’s professional tennis tournaments held between 2004 and 2019 affirm that the participation of superstars (Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray) reduces the probability that the remaining Top 20 players win their matches. Such shadow effects arise even in very early tournament stages, in which favoured players lose more often than expected, given their ability. The effects are more pronounced when multiple superstars com- pete in the tournament and disappear once all superstars have been eliminated from competition. Furthermore, shadow effects increase the probability of retirement of strong but non-superstar competitors and disappear once superstar performance is not dominant.

That is from a new paper by Christian Deutscher, Lena Neuberg, and Stefan Thiem, via the excellent Kevin Lewis.