The Moneyball opportunity in basketball

Aren't we over all this analytics crap yet? All those damned numbers and charts and tables and the biggest impact the "analytics movement" had was proving Steph Curry right—a 3-pointer is worth more than a 2-pointer.

The Moneyball opportunity in basketball is different.

I don't care about starting a movement. I'm not interested in optimizing the game into some boring, predictable thing. I want my team to win. I want them to win it all. 🏆 I want the people who run my team to think like tech founders—stay hungry, stay foolish, find every advantage to win.

If my team can gain a massive edge against competition, I want them to exploit the hell out of it. And I don't want them to invite Michael Lewis over to write a book when they do.

It's a truism in tech that founders of successful companies get replaced by the bean counters and the optimizers. Intuition and bold moves get replaced by the diminishing returns from decision by spreadsheet. Too much abstraction, too little feel for the game.

But here is a trick with basketball—there is still a massive founder-like edge for a team to grab and the right numbers help. How do I know? Listen to one of the sport's founders, Howard Hobson. Coach of the first NCAA champs in 1939, innovator of the shot clock, goaltending, the "home run of basketball," the three-pointer, and many of the most enduring stats.

Not only did Hobson implement most of the core rules that transformed James Naismith's YMCA winter sport into the modern game we know, he applied his insight to winning games for his teams, and then he wrote a book complaining about how fans don't it.

Hobson wanted fans to see the game with the same appreciation for winning that he could. (How democratic of him.)

He didn't believe he could just stare hard at such a fast-paced game to see everything that mattered, so he applied the scientific method to measuring important events, especially ones related to possession of the ball and shooting efficiency, then visualized those things in new ways. Take his single-game player sheet for example and its lack of emphasis on points.

Or look at how he focused on the ebb and flow of slim leads and deficits by introducing a game flow chart.

Hobson cared so much about possession of the ball, he even tracked 8 statistics for it!

Reading Hobson today, you realize we crib his charts but not his insight. He'd still be complaining about the fans (and front offices). We haven't learned. Take this excerpt:

In a crucial Madison Square Garden game that will never be forgotten, Oregon led Long Island by a 15-point margin at the start of the second half. Long Island had several great “ball hawks” and their timely interceptions resulted in goals that cut down the Oregon lead. With ten seconds to play, Oregon still held a two-point lead. Out of nowhere came a “ball hawk” who intercepted a pass and fed the ball to a teammate who tied the score. Long Island went on to win in overtime 56-55. Who received the credit?--the player who scored the basket. The interception was soon forgotten.

This is the "Moneyball" opportunity Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta exploited for the Oakland A's benefit in baseball. The A's did it, then made the mistake of drawing too much attention to their edge, inviting competition.

In basketball, no team did anything close to what the A's did. Instead of Moneyball, we got Moreyball (3 > 2 points) and an avalanche of unscientific spreadsheets, vanity metrics, and pretty charts by people jockeying for front office jobs. (I know, I got caught up in it.) It didn't move the needle.

One founder-ike economist did reproduce Hobson's core insights in the 2000s. He scienced the shit out of basketball, only he didn't take a front office job, he wrote a book about it first. Like Hobson, he wanted fans to appreciate the game more fairly. Trouble is, Moneyball insights go against conventional wisdom. (People don't like that.)

To paraphrase tech innovator Alan Kay, "The basketball analytics revolution hasn't happened yet." We skipped the revolution part. Heck, we don't even need numeric analysis to figure some of this out. We could just look back to a founder's insight, and his reasons for the rules and stats that drive the modern game.

One team could exploit the heck out of this. I hope it's mine.