Category: Sports
Markets in everything, hockey romance edition
Posters gravitate to players who remind them of their favorite book boyfriends, and one popular choice is Seattle Kraken center Alex Wennberg. His team initially courted BookTok with posts and hashtags in the same style, and flew out a popular creator for a playoff game…
Within the subcategory of sports romance, hockey dominates. Right now, all 10 of the top sports romances on Amazon involve hockey.
Here is the full story.
Shadow Effects of Tennis Superstars
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.
The economics of NBA contracts
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
The Boston Celtics just set an NBA record by agreeing to a five-year, $304 million contract with two-time All-Star Jaylen Brown. The obvious question is whether any single basketball player can be worth that much money — especially someone who is not even the best player on his team, much less on a par with Lebron James, Stephen Curry or any number of other shoo-in hall of famers.
I’m not here to make predictions about Brown’s career. But the odds are the deal will be seen as a good one — maybe even a bargain. The economics of the National Basketball Association have been shifting toward more and more money.
This trend is evident in the rising value not just of players but of teams. Last year the Phoenix Suns sold for $4 billion (with the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury). To put that number in perspective, the Brooklyn Nets sold for $3.3 billion in 2019, the Houston Rockets sold for $2.2 billion in 2017, and the Atlanta Hawks sold for a mere $850 million in 2015.
Much of the rest of the column considers the impact of foreign money on other sports, and perhaps someday the NBA:
And then there is the growing internationalization of capital in sports, which will buttress high prices for both players and teams. This trend goes beyond American basketball: One Saudi Arabian club, Al-Hilal, has offered French soccer star Kylian Mbapp é $333 million to play next year in Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are already paying Cristiano Ronaldo $220 million over two years. Lionel Messi turned the Saudis down, but surely the offer increased his bargaining power with MSL’s Inter Miami, where his deal is valued at $50 to $60 million annually.
Might the Saudis consider something similar for a US basketball star? Lebron James already tweeted that he would gladly accept a comparable offer, and many others would accept far less.
The Desert Kingdom would probably have a hard time putting together a full NBA-like season with 30 teams. But it could bring in more European or other foreign players to its current league, shorten the season, or feature 3-on-3 games. In addition to wealth, they need to rely on innovation.
These scenarios don’t have to happen to serve as a check on NBA management or owners.
Qatar owns five percent of the Washington Wizards, we will see if this becomes a larger basketball trend or not.
Work from home, and golf
1) Working from Home (WFH) has powered a huge boom in golfing
2) Golfers are playing more golf on weekdays, for example 143% more on Wednesday in 2022 vs 2019
3) Golfers are playing more mid-afternoon, for example 278% more on Wednesday 4pm in 2022 vs 2019
Here is more from Alex Finan and Nick Bloom.
NBA (CEO) fact of the day
“there are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs of S&P 500 companies who are guaranteed that much.”
Here is further information.
Wemby
He clearly is a special and multi-faceted talent, but I am worried. Most of all, I am worried by his body shape, which reminds me of both Pervis Ellison and Shawn Bradley, with a height somewhere in between those two. Players with that kind of physique typically have problems a) avoiding injuries, and b) avoiding foul trouble (they are not always strong enough to hold their ground, they tend to reach a lot, and they tend to be fooled by fakes).
So can he stay on the court? I am not picking him to win Rookie of the Year, as some big men take much longer to develop (I am looking more at the five blocks than the 2-13 shooting in his Summer League debut). Let’s hope he gets the chance.
My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin
Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session. Here is part of the episode summary:
Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.
Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?
GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.
What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.
Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.
Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.
And another:
COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?
GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.
There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”
COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.
GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.
COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?
GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.
Recommended, interesting throughout. And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.
Undervalued talent in the NBA playoffs
With the underdog Miami Heat ahead of the Celtics 3-0, and the Denver Nuggets ahead of the Lakers 3-0, it is time to assess a lesson or two.
As for Miami, four of their key players — Gabe Vincent, Max Strus, Caleb Martin and Duncan Robinson — were undrafted altogether. This is not only a lesson in talent spotting, it is a lesson of talent development. Those four players have accounted for about forty percent (ESPN gate) of Miami’s points this season. No one on Miami made the All-Star team in 2023.
How about Denver? Jokic, if he proves durable, could end up as one of the top ten players of all time. He was a second-round draft pick (#41), snagged perceptively by Denver and then given a chance to develop, which took a few years. Only Jokic made the All-Star team this year. KCP, a key player for Denver, was let go by the Lakers two years ago and then the Wizards a year ago. Now he is an essential contributor, most of all against the Lakers. (Who even remembers who Denver gave up to get him?) The second best Denver player, Jamal Murray, was picked #7 in 2016. If Philadelphia had deployed their number one pick on him, instead of Ben Simmons, who basically refused to play, they probably would be winning a title right now.
So the potential gains to being good at talent selection are very real indeed. Not every major contributors starts off as a Lebron James or a Victor Wembanyama.
Modeling the current NBA
The surprise, and the irony, is that the more good players there are, the more important the great ones have become. The proliferation of offensive threats has meant that defenses can’t train their attention all on one person; that means that there are better shots for the best players to take, and the best players have become even better at making them. They have more room to drive to the basket, where shots are hyper-efficient. They are more practiced and skilled at hitting long threes. They are better at drawing fouls and savvier about off-ball movement, picks, and screens. Most of all, perhaps, they can pass, and the threat of those passes makes them harder to defend. More than ever, offenses revolve around a single star—a phenomenon that many around the N.B.A. have taken to calling heliocentrism, a term that the Athletic writer Seth Partnow used in a 2019 column describing the Dallas Mavericks star Luka Dončić. Hero ball “didn’t go away,” Kirk Goldsberry, an ESPN analyst, told the podcast “ESPN Daily.” “It just went to M.I.T., got a degree in analytics, and rebranded as heliocentrism.”
Do black NBA players play better without the fans?
In the NBA, predominantly Black players play in front of predominantly non-Black fans. Using the ‘NBA bubble’, a natural experiment induced by COVID-19, we show that the performance of Black players improved significantly with the absence of fans vis-\`a-vis White players. This is consistent with Black athletes being negatively affected by racial pressure from mostly non-Black audiences. We control for player, team, and game fixed-effects, and dispel alternative mechanisms. Beyond hurting individual players, racial pressure causes significant economic damage to NBA teams by lowering the performance of top athletes and the quality of the game.
That kind of causal mechanism is difficult to demonstrate, but perhaps there is something to this. Alternatively, how about the “fewer distractions in the bubble effect”? Entourage effect? etc. How could they miss this possibility? Here is the full paper by Mauro Caselli, Paolo Falco, and Babak Somekh. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
How young did the person start?
By the time he was in the sixth grade, Larry [Summers] had created a system to calculate the probability that a baseball team would make it to the playoffs in October based on its performance through the Fourth of July. In 1965 the Philadelphia Bulletin described Summers as the most qualified eleven-year-old oddsmaker in baseball.
That is from the new and very good Jon Hilsenrath book on Janet Yellen.
Who are the richest athletes in the world?
These numbers are surely inexact, but still this piece makes for interesting reading. Excerpt:
4. Anna Kasprzak
Net Worth: $1 Billion
Anna Kasprzak is a Danish dressage rider who has represented Denmark in the Summer Olympics in 2012 and 2016. Kasprzak is considered to be one of the best dressage riders in the world and she has won multiple medals throughout her career.
As of August 2022, Anna Kasprzak’s net worth is estimated to be $1 billion.
Was not on my Bingo card. Nor was Vinnie Johnson, who clocks in at $400 million! The Human Microwave to be sure…
Like father (and mother), like son
You may have seen the Golden State Warriorrs just won another NBA title. The backgrounds of so many of their top players are striking:
Stephen Curry: Commonly considered the greatest basketball shooter of all time, his father was All-Star Dell Curry, shooting guard and one of the best shooters of his era.
Klay Thompson: Father Mychal Thompson, an NBA All-Star level player.
Gary Payton II: Father Gary Payton, Hall of Famer point guard and defensive stopper, known as “The Glove.” The son is not an All-Star caliber player but he is a top contributor on defense.
Andrew Wiggins: Son of Mitchell Wiggins, well-known NBA player in the 1980s. Mitchell Wiggins led the Houston Rockets to a key game five victory over the Boston Celtics in 1986, Andrew Wiggins did the same in 2022. And Andrew’s mother won two silver medals for track and field in the 1984 Olympics.
Otto Porter, Jr.:”His father, Otto Porter Sr., was part of Scott County Central High School’s first title in 1976 and holds the high school record with 1,733 rebounds. His mother, Elnora Porter (née Timmons), helped the same school win the 1984 state championship.”
Jordan Poole: Father Anthony Poole advertises himself as “Wisconsin playground elite coach” on Twitter.
Kevon Looney: His cousin Nick Young played in the NBA.
We do not know much about the biological father of Draymond Green.
And those are the top players on the Golden State Warriors.
Addendum: I hadn’t known that Steve Kerr, the coach, was son of Malcolm Kerr, a well-known university professor and then university president (American University in Beirut) who was killed by terrorists in Lebanon in 1984.
“A political football” takes on new meaning (MIE)
The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.
Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.
The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.
The deal was born when both of Winn’s agents, Dale and Sam Hutcherson, came up with the idea and presented it to him, he told Front Office Sports.
“I’ve been lifelong friends with Colin. He’s always supported me,” he said. From there, it was an easy decision to sign with the candidate.
As part of the partnership, Winn said he wore a campaign shirt during a football camp that he ran last weekend. On Monday, his announcement on Twitter included photos of himself and Johnson — both of whom were wearing campaign apparel — spending time on a football field. The tweet encouraged voters to ensure they were registered for the August election.
As for future promotions, Winn said they’re going to “see how things go from here.”
Winn declined to disclose financial terms of the deal.
America! Here is the full story, via Daniel Lippman.
Insurance markets in everything
In many golf circles, it was (and still is) customary for the lucky golfer to buy drinks for everyone in the clubhouse after landing a hole-in-one. This often resulted in prohibitively expensive bar tabs.
And an industry sprouted up to protect these golfers.
A newspaper archive analysis by The Hustle revealed that hole-in-one insurance firms sprouted up as early as 1933.
Under this model, golfers could pay a fee — say, $1.50 (about $35 today) — to cover a $25 (~$550) bar tab. And as one paper noted in 1937: “The way some of the boys have been bagging the dodos, it might not be a bad idea.”
Though the concept largely faded away in the US, it became a big business in Japan, where golfers who landed a hole-in-one were expected to throw parties “comparable to a small wedding,” including live music, food, drinks, and commemorative tree plantings.
By the 1990s, the hole-in-one insurance industry had a total market value of $220m. An estimated 30% of all Japanese golfers shelled out $50-$70/year to insure themselves against up to $3.5k in expenses.
Here is the full story, via Mathan.