Category: Sports
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.
Talent rules in the NBA
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:
With the basketball playoffs starting this week, it is worth asking what can be learned from the NBA’s more recent history. This year the NBA story is one of talent — extreme talent. Talent so plentiful that even the middling teams are full of strong players. The broader lessons for the world economy are very optimistic.
Consider the three players competing for the Most Valuable Player award — Nikola Jokic, Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo. Their play and statistics have been stratospheric. Embiid, for instance, led the league scoring, is a leading rebounder and defender, and his team is in contention for an NBA title. Yet he is not favored to win the award because the other contenders are (at least in my eyes) better yet. My pick is Jokic, who is the first NBA player with 2,000 points, 1,000 rebounds and 500 assists in a season.
Other top players, such as Jayson Tatum, Luka Doncic and Ja Morant, might in other years be obvious MVP winners. But this year they don’t stand a chance. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Stephen Curry — the best players from the recent past — are still amazing but are practically also-rans.
And:
The lessons and implications for the broader economy and society are insanely bullish. If the NBA can do this, other parts of the world can, too. Just imagine business and science (and maybe politics?) all improving at the rate of professional basketball. The most important form of wealth today is human capital. As the world moves further from a brute-force economy, human capital is also the major force driving productivity.
The NBA shows that it is possible, over time, to do a much better job of both finding and mobilizing talent. Granted, most parts of the world are not as well-run as the NBA, so the process will be slower than it ought to be. But it is underway.
The implications are staggering. Yes, global problems are piling up at an alarming rate. On the other hand, global talent is more accessible than ever. Which phenomenon is likely to turn out to be of greater consequence? As the co-author of a forthcoming book on the importance of talent, I suspect you can guess my view.
And I am still picking the Milwaukee Bucks to win the NBA title this year.
How heritable are various sports abilities?
Let us start with data from identical twins:
Take wrestling. Of 6,778 Olympic wrestling athletes, there have been something like thirteen pairs of identical twins. This implied that the identical twin of an Olympic wrestler has a better than 60 percent chance of becoming an Olympic wrestler himself.
That is from the forthcoming Seth Stephens-Davidowitz Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life. From such reasoning you can divine the relative import of genetic factors for success in various sports. Here are the derived calculations, with the number indicating “Percent of Same-Sex Siblings Who Are Identical Twins” (when both make the Olympics, or achieve some other status):
Track and field: 22.4%
Wrestlers: 13.8%
Rowers: 12.4%
NBA players: 11.5%
Boxers: 8.8%
Gymnasts: 8.1%
Swimmers: 6.5%
Fencers: 4.5%
Shooters: 3.4%
NFL players: 3.2%
MLB players: 1.9%
Alpine skiers: 1.7%
Divers, equestrian riders, and weightlifters: All zero percent.
My Conversation with Chuck Klosterman
Excellent stuff, we had so much fun we kept on going for an extra half hour, as he decided to ask me a bunch of questions about economics and personal finance. Here is the audio and transcript. Here is the CWT summary:
Chuck joined Tyler to discuss the challenges of writing about recent history, the “slow cancellation of the future” that began in the aughts, how the internet widened cultural knowledge but removed its depth, why the context of Seinfeld was in some ways more important than its content, what Jurassic Park illustrates about public feelings around scientific progress in the ’90s, why the ’90s was the last era of physical mass subcultures, why it’s uncommon to be shocked by modern music, how his limited access to art when growing up made him a better critic, why Spin Magazine became irrelevant with the advent of online streaming, what made Grantland so special, what he learned from teaching in East Germany, the impact of politics on the legacies of Eric Clapton and Van Morrison, how sports often rewards obnoxious personalities, why Wilt Chamberlain is still underrated, how the self-awareness of the Portland Trail Blazers undermined them, how the design of the NFL makes sports rivalries nearly impossible, how pro-level compensation prevents sports gambling from corrupting players, why so many people are interested in e-sports, the unteachable element of writing, why he didn’t make a great editor on his school paper, what he’d say to a room filled with ex-lovers, the question he’d most like to ask his parents, his impressions of cryptocurrency, why he’s trying to focus on what he has in the current moment rather than think too much about future plans, the power of charisma, and more.
Whew! Here is one excerpt:
COWEN: I see the world as follows. Every decade, to me, is super weird, but the 1980s and ’90s pretended they weren’t weird. The ’80s pretended to be good versus evil. The ’90s pretended that good won. But when crypto comes and persists, you have to drop all pretense that the age you’re living in isn’t totally weird.
You have internet crypto, and everyone admits, right now, everything’s weird. And that, to me, is the fundamental break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that Seinfeld was your dose of weird, right? Jason Alexander — that’s a very manageable weird.
KLOSTERMAN: Oh, absolutely.
COWEN: Some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes — like, whoop-de-do.
And:
KLOSTERMAN: …this guy, Mark Fisher, who’s dead now, had this idea about the slow cancellation of the future. I feel like that’s one of the most profound ideas that I’ve come across in the last 10 years of my life, and it seems so palpable that this is occurring.
An example I will often use is, if you take, say, 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with no major actors, and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous, and you show anyone these 10-minute clips, they will have no problem whatsoever figuring out which one came first. Even a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other.
But if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 — again, an obscure film where you don’t recognize the actors — you’re just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second. It’s almost impossible.
This phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture…
And:
KLOSTERMAN: Before I did this podcast, I listened to your podcast with Žižek.
COWEN: Oh yeah, that was hilarious.
KLOSTERMAN: Are you friends with him? It sure seemed like it. And if you are, what is it like to be with him when he is not in a performative scenario?
Recommended. And again, here is Chuck’s new book The Nineties.
My Israel-only Conversation with the excellent Russ Roberts
Here is the audio, video, and transcript, here is the CWT summary:
In this special crossover special with EconTalk, Tyler interviews Russ Roberts about his new life in Israel as president of Shalem College. They discuss why there are so few new universities, managing teams in the face of linguistic and cultural barriers, how Israeli society could adapt to the loss of universal military service, why Israeli TV is so good, what American Jews don’t understand about life in Israel, what his next leadership challenge will be, and much more.
We didn’t shy away from the tough stuff, here is one question:
COWEN: Let me ask you another super easy question. Let’s say we think that under current circumstances, a two-state solution would not lead to security either for Israel or for the resulting Palestinian state. Many people believe that. Let’s say also, as I think you believe, that a one-state solution where everyone votes would not lead to security for a current version of Israel or even a modified version of it.
Let’s say also that the current reliance of the Palestinian territories on the state of Israel for protection, security, intelligence, water — many important features of life — prevent those governing bodies from ever attaining sufficient autonomy to be a credible peace partner, guaranteer of its own security, and so on. From that point of view, what do we do? We’re not utilitarians. We’re thinking about what’s right and wrong. What’s the right thing to do?
Do read Russ’s answer! (Too long to excerpt.) And:
COWEN: Now, the United States has about 330 million people, yet there are more Israeli TV shows I want to watch than American TV shows. There’s Srugim, there’s Shtisel, there’s Prisoners of War, there’s In Judgment, there’s Tehran. There’s more. Why is Israeli TV so good?
ROBERTS: I’m glad you mentioned Prisoners of War, which doesn’t get enough — Prisoners of War is in my top five. If I had to list my top five, I’d pick Shtisel, Prisoners of War, The Americans, probably The Wire, and The Crown. Do you have a top five that you could reel off?
COWEN: The Sopranos would be my number one. Srugim and Prisoners of War plausibly would be in my top five.
We then consider the Israeli topic at hand. Interesting throughout, a very good dialogue.