Doin’ stats for the C’s
A New York Times piece by the Freakonomics guys about Mike Zarren, the 32-year-old numbers guy for the Boston Celtics. While statistics has become more-or-less mainstream for baseball, the same isn’t quite true for basketball or football (though that’s changing too). They have better words for it than me:
This probably makes good sense for a sport like baseball, which is full of discrete events that are easily measured… Basketball, meanwhile, might seem too hectic and woolly for such rigorous dissection. It is far more collaborative than baseball and happens much faster, with players shifting from offense one moment to defense the next. (Hockey and football present their own challenges.)
But that’s not to say that something can be gained by looking at the numbers:
What’s the most efficient shot to take besides a layup? Easy, says Zarren: a three-pointer from the corner. What’s one of the most misused, misinterpreted statistics? “Turnovers are way more expensive than people think,” Zarren says. That’s because most teams focus on the points a defense scores from the turnover but don’t correctly value the offense’s opportunity cost — that is, the points it might have scored had the turnover not occurred.
Of course, the interesting thing about sports is that at their most basic, they cannot be defined by statistics or numbers. Take the Celtics, who just won the first round of the playoffs. Given their ability, the Celtics should have dispensed with the Hawks more quickly, rather than needing all seven games of the series to win the necessary four. The coach in the locker room of any Hoosiers ripoff will tell you it doesn’t matter what’s on the stat sheets, it matters who shows up that day. It’s the same reason that owners cannot buy a trophy even in a sport that has no salary cap. Or, if you’re like some of my in-laws-to-be (all Massachusetts natives), you might suspect that the fix is in (“How much money do those guys make per game?”) Regardless, it’s the human side of the sport, not the numbers, that make it worth watching. (And I don’t mean the soft-focus ESPN “Outside the Lines” version of the “human” side of the sport. Yech.)
In the meantime, maybe the Patriots or the Sox are hiring…
