The internet is full of rumor that the Boston Celtics intend to waive Paul Pierce, thus paying him only $5 of his $15 millon on the last year of his contract:

 

This is not to begin mourning the death of his Celtics life, but to understand what it all meant if reports today from Greg Dickerson are true. 

“I don’t think they will (bring Pierce back),” Dickerson said Sunday on CSNNE. “And I know that the company that Paul Pierce hangs around in, they do not believe – and I don’t think Paul Pierce believes – that he is going to be brought back next year at $15 million. I know for a fact that people around Paul Pierce have pretty much resigned themselves to the fact that he’s played his final game in a Boston Celtics uniform. Again, Paul wants to stay – obviously for $15 million, but he wants to finish his career in a Celtics uniform.”

I find this interesting because, first, even at his age, Pierce is basically Boston's best player, and second, it's an expiring contract, and lastly, the Celtics will probably spend the money somewhere else anyway.

Let's first address the question of whether Pierce is worth $15 million next year. And the answer, at his age, is very likely no. Pierce is certainly still a good player, and likely will be next year, but it is simply not likely that he will return to the levels he played at when Boston made consecutive NBA finals; when age starts taking its toll, performance rarely makes a comeback, which is why I ridiculed folks that were talking about how great Jermaine O'Neal looked in workouts last summer (although, yes, Kobe and Timmy both bucked this trend last year).

But then let's consider that the Celtics don't save $15 million by waiving him -- they only save $10 million. They must pay him the $5 million guaranteed portion of his contract. In essence, the Celtics would be paying Pierce $5 million to play for someone else. So, the question, from the celtics perspective, is whether Pierce is worth $10 million. And there....well, it's pretty damn close.

If you take a look at above-average-but-not-superstar wings in the NBA, you'll find a lot of names in the 8-11 million range: Danillo Gallinari, Loul Deng, Shawn Marion (who's still really good), Aaron Afflalo, Kevin Martin, Andrei Kirilenko, Nicolas Batum (ok those last two are pretty firmly stars). Then you look at guys who are crazy overpaid, like Caron Butler, Ben Gordon, Tayshaun Prince, Rip Hamilton, Richard Jefferson, Metta World Peace and Boston's own Jeff Green (I am ignoring both over- and fairly paid max-contract players, to keep the price-range comparison).

So, frankly, when you compare Pierce to that crowd, he certainly appears worth $10 million. Again, they have to pay $5 of his $15 million whether they release him or not, so this is classic economics here. It's essentially a question of fixed and marginal costs. A shop owner deals with this question every time he decides whether to stay open at night when business is slower, or on Sundays when foot traffic downtown is lower, etc. The rent, etc, do not matter, only the marginal costs (increased electricity, employee pay, etc) do. It costs the Celtics $10 million to keep Paul Pierce, not $15. When you add in to the equation that Pierce's $15 million dollar expiring contract might have some trade value before the deadline, it seems obvious to me that Pierce is worth the investment.

Which brings me to my final point. Certainly, there will be a few productive and cheap players on the market (I am hoping Flip Saunders is smart enough to throw $5+ million at Kyle Korver, for example). But given Ainge's history, do you trust him to replace Pierce with a guy like Korver, Dunleavy, Dorell Wright, etc on the cheap, or do you think he's more likely to use the money to overpay for somebody like OJ Mayo? Given his history, especially last season, I wouldn't feel good at all about whether he uses the money wisely. And even if he does, this means that the Celtics only save a few million when all is said and done.

Then you add one more factor -- if they let Pierce go, Garnett might hang it up.  I guess it's a question of whether you think that's a good thing; if he does it probably saves the Celtics some money but KG is certainly not going to walk away from all of the $24 million left on his contract, so they wouldn't save all of it. And although KG is now about 73 years old and has about 26 million miles on those legs, he is still a very effective player. If I were a Celtics fan, I'd rather see them keep Pierce. Then, they can trade him at the deadline of there are good offers, or let him walk in 2014. KG will likely retire then. There isn't a big opportunity cost here; it's not as though jettisoning Pierce and having KG retire frees up space and gets Dwight Howard or Chris Paul to sign.

In the end, it is a complete mystery to me why Boston wants to do this. Anyone else have any insight?

Categories: Paul Pierce, Boston Celtics

There are a lot of articles going around about how Flip Saunders is essentially blowing shit up:

 

Saunders has quickly made his mark as the new POBO of the Timberwolves. Per Jerry Zgoda, he has dismissed all Wolves scouts whos contracts expired this year (Pete Philo, JT Prada, Curtis Crawford, Steve Gordon and Will Conroy) Yes, that's Will Conroy the player and Brandon Roy's buddy, who was made a special assignment scout after being waived from the roster at the beginning of the year.

I don't really have a ton of opinion yet on Saunders as a GM, except to say that this is a very good sign. It's a sign that Saunders believes that whatever the hell the Timberwolves scouts have done in the last 10 years isn't working.

Given that since Kevin Garnett, the only draft picks the Timberwolves have gotten right are Rubio and Pekovic, and the scouts had nothing to do with Rubio's selection (Rubio was a consensus pick that every GM in the league would have taken around #5/6), this is frankly the only rational opinion to hold.

Remember how we kept making fun of Kahn, Dumars, and others, and how they kept trying the same shit over and over, expecting different results? Well, this is a strong indicator that Flip knows at the very least, that if he expects different results, he can't just keep doing the same stuff and he's going to have to do things differently. Whether the new way will be better is up in the air, but this is the prerequisite.

Categories: Minnesota Timberwolves, Flip

I feel like it is an insanely obvious statement to say that, all other things being equal, height is a huge advantage in basketball. If LeBron James had exactly the same athletic gifts and basketball skills, but was 5 foot 10 instead of 6 foot 9, it's virtually impossible that he'd be the MVP of the NBA, and it's even entirely likely that he wouldn't even be in the NBA at all. And gifted and skilled as Shaq is, at 6'4", he'd never have made the NBA; guys with incredible post footwork and a lot of strength, but who cannot shoot from beyond 6 feet or hit a free throw are not exactly at the top of the draft board. What about Greg Stiemsma? How many looks do NBA scouts give him if he's 6'7" instead of 6'11", let alone "normal" sized? Simply being tall is a huge advantage in basketball.

Unless, that is, if you want to be a head coach.

Don't get me wrong. A lot of coaches are pretty tall people. I'm sure when Randy Whitman is at a cocktail party he's usually able to scout the far side of the room. But 6'5" is not tall for an NBA player.

Let me digress a little. Last week, a great piece by Kareem Abdul Jabaar made the internet rounds. In an Esquire piece, Kareem lists 20 pieces of advice for his younger self:

1. Be more outgoing. My shyness and introversion from those days still haunt me. Fans felt offended, reporters insulted. That was never my intention. When you’re on the public stage every day of your life, people think that you crave attention. For me, it was the opposite. I loved to play basketball, and was tremendously gratified that so many fans appreciated my game. But when I was off the court, I felt uncomfortable with attention. I rarely partied or attended celebrity bashes. On the flights to games, I read history books. Basically, I was a secret nerd who just happened to also be good at basketball. Interacting with a lot of people was like taking someone deathly afraid of heights and dangling him over the balcony at the top of the Empire State Building. If I could, I’d tell that nerdy Kareem to suck it up, put down that book you’re using as a shield, and, in the immortal words of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard (to prove my nerd cred), “Engage!”

Hit that link up and read the rest, because it is really good. Three things struck out at me here: First, Kareem is a very erudite man. If you read that piece, I think you will agree that he's got a gift for language. Second, it really surprised me how smart Kareem is. And third, a final thought hit me: why the hell am I so surprised that Kareem is a pretty bright guy? Kareem was, as he suggests, not a super extrovert giving tons of interviews like Magic, but he's been pretty sociable since his retirement. So this really shouldn't come as any big surprise.

And the answer is that I've got a big ol heap of bias. Essentially, like most of you, my prejudicial brain expects the big athletic guys to be dumb jocks and the small skinny guys to be smart.

What does this have to do with head coaches? Well, I am only speculating here, but doesn't it surprise you how few NBA centers or power forwards became head coaches?

Consider this interesting article on ESPN about seven candidates who are ready to become NBA head coaches:

It’s all about the buy-in: Game management preparation and the whiteboard arts are all indispensable qualities for an NBA head coach, but the ability to earn the faith of a superstar and key rotation players is qualification No. 1. “You can always find a graybeard or a grinder who can come up with coverages,” says an NBA front office exec. “But what most teams are looking for now is someone who knows how to build a culture and get the stars to buy in.”

Their list:

Name	Position Played
David Fizdale	PG (high school)
David Joerger	PG*
Fred Hoiberg	SG
Steve Kerr	SG
Alex Jensen	F
Robert Pack	PG
David Blatt	PG (at Princeton! Under Pete Carril!)

*Man, l looked a lot. Tons of pieces say that he played at Moorhead State, and the site only has rosters going back to 2008. BUT he holds the single game assists record (15), so I guessed.

Notably absent from this list are NBA big men, especially the hall-of-fame caliber big men, many of whom are assistant coaches right now: Kareem, Hakeem, Bill Lambier, Patrick Ewing, etc. Kareem, in particular, is puzzling. Can you imagine a point guard or shooting guard with a similar player resume remaining an assistant coach? Kareem is easily in the top 5 centers of all time. The top 5 (retired) point guards of all time are something like Magic, Stockton, Oscar, Frazier, and Cousy. You can disagree on some of this and there are lots of names like Kevin Johnson, Fat Lever, Mark Price, TIm Hardaway, Sid Moncrief, Nate Archibald, Gary Payton, Isiah Thomas (although y'all know I think he was overrated, right?). The point is...if you look at that list, and any of them said, "I want to be an NBA coach," who really doubts that they'd have gotten a head coaching job within 3 years? Maybe some of them might have to put in a year as an assistant (MAYBE).

Kareem? He's been trying since 2005. And sure, he had a reputation as a sullen guy. But hell, Michael Jordan was by many accounts a pretty big ass to a lot of his teammates, and how fast would he have won a coaching job if that had been his chosen path? Ewing has been trying since 2007. The Dream probably gave up on it when he realized he could just charge a fortune to practice with some big men in the offseason. 

It's funny how playing for Princeton under Carill makes you a highly desirable coaching candidate, but a completely undesirable player prospect. Also, playing point guard is surely the best way to start an NBA head coaching career. I think we all have a prejudice that we assume the tall players are not very knowledgable about the game, but I think it's rather unlikely that there is any real correlation between position and basketball smarts (although I have no idea how one would measure it to find out!).

Food for thought? Am I nuts?

Categories: Biases

At Sloan one of the most interesting guests was Prasad Setty. Prasad Setty is responsible for making models that do talent evaluation for software engineers at Google. He is a Billy Beane of the software world! And you'd assume that unlike sports clubs that software companies would be more open to data. And that's where you'd be wrong! Here is Prasad's recap of a story from Google:

I lead a group called people analytics and the intent behind our formation was: we make thousands of people decisions as an organization -- every large organization does. We are now at 40,000 people. And we wanted to make sure that we had the same level of rigor in making people decisions as we do in making our business decisions.

And so, when I started I said ‘All these software engineers out there, they are working on these very complex algorithms!’ -- that return all the results you folks get when you type something into the search engine. So I said ‘These folks must be used to algorithmic models to making people decisions as well.’ So I said ‘All people decisions should be made by data and analytics.’

One of the processes that we take very very seriously at Google is how we promote our software engineers -- how do you get from one level to the next level, right? And it’s a very intense process. What we do right now is we fly in hundreds of our senior most engineers from around the world. Twice a year we form these committees so that it’s not just the engineers’ managers who are making these decisions but these independent committees so that remove bias. But it’s very intensive -- we fly hundreds of engineers in, and they form these committees, and they’re reviewing these promotion packets, uh, twice a year!

And we said ‘Can we make this a simpler format, can we reduce the load?’ So my team built this really complex algorithm based on empirical data. And we said ‘For 30% of these promotion cases, with 95% accuracy, we can come up with the same decision that the committees would have made.’ So we went to the engineers very excited. We told them ‘We can reduce your load by 30% and over time our models will keep getting better and better, right? And we’ll reduce your load and now can make promotion decisions without human intervention!’ We thought they’d be excited. They hated it. They hated it. They said ‘We don’t want to hide behind a black box with something so serious as people decisions’ right? So that the changed the nature of what I thought my team was all about. I don’t think anymore it’s about replacing humans to make decisions. Instead it is to make sure that the human decision makers that we have are free of bias. And so now all the analytics that we do at Google is now shaped towards ‘How do we reduce bias from the decision makers eyes?’

When it comes to using data, we find that software engineers can be as stubborn as "old boy networks" that run professional sports teams! And the reason why is very simple. People just want data to augment their expertise. In sports I find many people love to use the numbers but only as a supporting argument to a forgone conclusion. Let me give you a classic problem but phrased two ways:

1. What makes Kobe such a great player?
2. Is Kobe a great player?

In the first question, I take the role as expert. I know the answer! The data just exists to help my point And that's why people will find lists of "advanced stats" like PER that show Kobe is great. The already knew Kobe was great, they just needed a number that lined up with their assessment. And this often means they don't actually understand the numbers. The second question is much different. I cease to be the expert. I now let the data and the process answer the question. And it seems universal to sports teams and mathematically inclined software engineers to distrust that the data can subvert our own expertise!

I was a bit sad to hear Prasad's final thought about how he changed his approach. You see, the biggest bias we have is actually our belief in our own abilities! One of the hardest questions to ask ourselves is "Am I wrong about this?" And that's where the data helps tremendously! Sure, we should make sure to understand what the data is doing and communicate it properly. But to simply hate the data because we think a problem is important and that we're an expert? Well that should be unforgivable in all fields. As Sloan shows though, it's much more common than we'd like.

-Dre

Categories: Kobe Bryant, Google, People Analytics, Prasad Setty

Got an email from a loyal reader today about an article on NBA Fines:

I recently published a data visualization on NBA fines. It is very in-depth and has lots of charts and graphs. Find the link to the post below.

http://blog.seatcrunch.com/nba-fines/

Let me know what you think, and have a great day!

I thought I would pass on the link, because, well, CHART PORN. I LOVE me some CHARTS. It's mildly NSFW because there is a picture of a woman's posterior -- the one J.R. Smith got in some trouble for. If you follow the NBA, you've seen it a bunch, but your co-workers might not have!

Categories: Fines