The Times magazine has a _fantastic_ article on basketball statistics, using Shane Battier as a case study. I enjoyed this article so much that I would make love to it if I had it in hardcopy, nevermind the messiness and social awkwardness that would result. The piece discusses intelligently a topic that is almost never discussed intelligently, which is what makes a good basketball player. The problem is that the answer is so counter to intuition.
I’ve posted on this topic a number of times before, and never satisfied the only person who pays any attention at all to those posts. So this article won’t satisfy him either, but that’s only because there’s something wrong with him. But not only him. It’s just so damn easy to pay attention to the obvious things:
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.
The stats they measure in basketball are the stats it is possible to measure in basketball with the naked eye and a piece of paper, in real time. But those stats aren’t the ones that win games. They’re only a proxy for winning games, and are problematic because sometimes they seem like a very good proxy. Since the team with the most points wins, for instance, people automatically conflate point-scoring with being good. Obviously, all else being equal, it’s better to score 20 points than to score 10. The problem is that all else is never equal.
The secret, then, is to figure out how to measure the things that _actually_ win games, not just the things you _think_ win games; not the things you tend to notice. This is a painstaking process, one that’s been impossible to discuss quantitatively until relatively recently because you just couldn’t compile the data and you couldn’t crunch it. But now, apparently, there’s a statistics renaissance in basketball, and people are being paid to do the job I wish I was doing:
Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”
I knew a guy who played like Battier. His name was Dave Hanenburg, and he was, by far, the worst person to play against that I ever met in my whole life. Everything he did on the court was designed to fuck up the opposing teams in ten different ways: he’d force turnovers, rebound, block shots, push people out of their spots, score when nobody else could but only then. His teams almost always won, regardless of who he was playing with, and at the end, if you’d been keeping stats, you wouldn’t have been awestruck by the numbers he racked up. Usually what happened was that some rather nondescript player would suddenly go from averaging a point a game to scoring six.
Hanenburg beat my team many, many times. Which is what makes this anecdote so sweet:
A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct.
Once Hanenburg’s team was inbounding after a foul. He almost always guarded me, and I always guarded him, except on the rare occasions when he was shooting a lot, in which case I guarded his team’s second-best player because there was no point in wasting my defensive skills on Hanenburg when he was on a scoring binge. The more shots Hanenburg took, even if they went in, the less his teammates would score, which took them a little bit out of the game. A small, statistically hidden point, but sometimes it was all you had to hold onto.
Anyway, his team had the ball, and he was inbounding. Every so often when the person I was guarding was inbounding I would jump randomly in some direction with my hands outstretched. This almost never worked; maybe one time out of twenty I would steal the ball. But this one time, and only this one time, Hanenburg passed the ball to the place where I had jumped, and I stole it. I still remember his infuriated expression; it’s one of the handful of most prized moments from all my playing days, because in that one play I burned Hanenburg with the ultimate Hanenburg move.
The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:
Bryant: 30.
Battier: 0.
Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12.”
I think about that steal all the time. Even now, when I haven’t played for years, I think about it every week, at least. People who know me know that I’m always making basketball metaphors for everything, but this one is probably my favorite, because it seems so clearly about what life is about: doing a series of small, thankless things, over and over, repeatedly, with no real thought to glory, but knowing that without them you’ll never have it.
You jump on the inbounds because one out of twenty times you’ll get the steal. And when you play the numbers long enough, that one out of twenty adds up.