Before I even get started, let me acknowledge that I have not read
Moneyball, or anything else by
Billy Beane, er Michael Lewis. However, I absolutely respect and agree with the changes his work have had in the ways that sports are analyzed and broken down. I'm not enough of a baseball head to really get in to the nuts and bolts of
VORP et al, but I do know basketball pretty well and now that Lewis, and by extension Daryl Morey*, current General Manager of the Houston Rockets, is introducing new statistical methods into breaking down player impact in basketball, I feel comfortable in challenging his assertions.
Again, I in no way want to come across as the basketball Joe Morgan, but in reading Lewis' recent article in the
New York Times, several manipulations of data and omissions of other obvious influential factors in results were glaring to me.
The article opens with a discussion of Rockets forward Shane Battier, the primary subject of the article and how in analyzing certain statistical data, a fairly forgettable player can be shown to be a very important factor in winning games.
The first example Lewis uses is how Battier smothered Kobe Bryant to a sub-par night and held him to 24 points in a
Rockets win. It then says,
"Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to."Red flag #1.
Yes, he has a reputation as a great defender, but I had watched the games since Battier has been in Houston, beginning in the 2006-07 season, and I had a hunch that Lewis was doing a great job in making a point while ignoring facts. Here are the averages for
LeBron and Kobe against Battier (and I threw in Dirk
Nowitzki too because I always hear how Battier "gives him trouble" - and I'm a
Mavs fan). Check it (the W or L indicates the Rockets result)
Dirk
Nowitzki:
2006-07: 24
pts (W), 15 (L), 30 (L), 26 (L)
2007 - 08: 19 (L), 18 (L), 20 (L)
LeBron James:
2006 - 07: 21 (W), 32 (L)
2007 - 08: 32 (W), 26 (W)
2008 - 09: 27 (L)
Kobe Bryant:
2006 - 07: 53 (W), 20 (W), 23 (L), 53(L)
2007 - 08: 45(W), 30 (L), 24(W)
2008 -09: 33 (L)
Avgs:
Dirk: 22
PPG, 6-1 record.
LeBron: 27.6
PPG, 2-3 record.
Kobe: 35.1
PPG, 4-4 record.
Those numbers are hardly "ineffectual." Battier
was pretty much an average defender at best. In fact, he should be called the "Anti-Defender"
as his team was 3-3 when
Battier's primary mark scored more than 30 points. Perhaps Battier's best move would be to take the court in a wheel chair.
"They all think his reputation exceeds his ability.” Even as Battier was being introduced in the arena, Ahmad Rashad was wrapping up his pregame report on NBA TV and saying, “Shane Battier will try to stop Kobe Bryant.” This caused the co-host Gary Payton to laugh and reply, “Ain’t gonna happen,” and the other co-host, Chris Webber, to add, “I think Kobe will score 50, and they’ll win by 19 going away.”Lewis puts that quote in there to make NBA observers look silly, but they weren't too far from the truth.
Lewis then offers
Battier's stint as a Memphis Grizzly as a testament to his influence on turning teams around:
The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team.In a throwaway sentence, Lewis leaves the reader thinking, "Wow! Battier is SUCH a difference maker!" There were a myriad of other factors that had FAR more of an impact on the improvement of the
Grizz:
-They hired Jerry West as their GM.
-They jettisoned their "coach" Sidney Lowe and hired Hubie Brown.
-
Pau Gasol was a rookie in 2001-02, and had matured greatly by his third year, the season that the Grizzlies went 50-32.
-West had added Mike Miller, Wesley Person, James
Posey,
Bonzi Wells and Earl Watson to the team.
Lewis forgot to mention these very relevant non-statistical factors.
In the next section of the piece, Lewis asserts the following ridiculous, and very non-data cruncher type of statement:
"Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win."Magic? Really? He has been surrounded by other stars every time he has been on a winning team -
Gasol, Tracy
McGrady,
Yao Ming, Ron
Artest - yet, incredibly,
Battier's team has experienced five straight first round ousters in the playoffs. Not a single playoff series win for any team that Shane Battier has been a part of. That's a curse, not magic.
Later, Lewis reveals that the Rockets, and Morey, greatly value plus/minus for a measure of a player's impact. I found the following line in that paragraph to be contradictory to the whole point of the article:
At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.
The whole point of this piece is to discuss how
Battier's seeming complete devotion to team ball has made him a far more important player than his numbers show. Then he brings up how good his plus/minus was last year (at the time Lewis cited
Battier's +/-, the Rockets had just finished their mirage of a 22-game winning streak, so
Battier's numbers were artificially inflated). The three other players that are offered as being equals to
Battier's mark, Carter, Anthony and
McGrady, are overwhelmingly regarded as being selfish
chuckers only out for their own numbers and whose selfishness has damaged their team's chances to win.
Also, whenever I hear the term "plus/minus" in NBA talk, all I think of is how the Mavericks used to try and quell the anti-Shawn Bradley cries in Dallas and justify resigning him to a larger contract by saying that Bradley was one of the tops in the league in plus/minus. Which
he was.
The article goes back to discussing
Battier's effect on Bryant, and how the Rockets have created a "
Battier's Eyes Only" dossier on controlling the future Hall of
Famer:
"He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, “the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.”
Bryant is a career 84% free throw shooter and has had 5 seasons over 85%. He is, by all statistical analysis, a very good free throw shooter.
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
As I said before, Bryant averages 35.1
PPG against the Rockets when Battier is guarding him. In scoring so much, Bryant probably causes his teammates to drift from the game, and thereby might damage his team's chances to win, but the
Lakers are 4-4 in the regular season, and more importantly, the Rockets have never made it far enough in the playoffs to face Kobe and the
Lakers when it really counts.
Later, it is revealed that
"the Rockets’ front office has picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s shooting percentage."
Selfish douche!
And now we discuss why such an
Anti-Battier movement is out there, and has been since
his days at Duke. He was viewed as damn near sent to Earth as a basketball angel by Dick
Vitale and all of the other college basketball pundits. He could do no wrong. It was disgusting.
Dan Wetzel, currently a columnist for Yahoo! Sports, followed Battier around for five years before he went to Duke effused, “There’s this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like Shane Battier.”
“I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
Holy shit. Why not just call him Jesus and get it over with. Well, Battier does have a white mother too...
After a lengthy knee-pad-clad discussion of
Battier's high school career, Lewis again offers a suspect stat:
The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in the N.B.A.
Really? Isn't a dunk more efficient? 99% of 2 points is more efficient than 33% of 3 points.
And finally, the article finally ends with:
Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.
Wow. I've never heard a loss put so poetically.
*"In the third grade he stumbled upon the work of the baseball writer Bill James." Morey could actually read an understand James' statistical work in the third grade? Come on.
**By the way, in the Rockets first game after this article came out, Vince Carter scored 30 against Battier. Obviously it was exactly what the Rockets wanted as they won the game 114-88.
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Those things looked like total horseshit in '95, and South Park hadn't even been invented yet. Now, with us all having seen a full decade of paper-cutout animation, those uniforms look even more ridiculous. They look like the South Park Cows basketball team... but even worse, 'cause they're purple.
