predicting success in the NBA

[Kestutis.Kveraga@dartmouth.edu (Kestutis Kveraga)]

--- You wrote:
> I think he has very short arms, but except in truly freakish cases (KG) I 
> think long arms are a major disadvantage for ballhandling. 

Hmm, I think it'd be just the opposite. The longer the arms, the relatively
lower to the floor the dribble is, the easier it is to control, and harder to
steal, the ball (within limits).
While it's confounded with selection (survivorship) bias, in general shorter
players are better dribblers than taller players.

> Very interesting. You would think that the Chicago NBA pre-draft camp would 
> incorporate "vertical reach" measurements, given that Chicaco is known as 
> the "city of broad bi-acromial width". ;-)

Well, I used the term 'bi-acromial width' because it's a skeletal (i.e.,
unchanging in adults) measure. The subjective shoulder width (how wide one's
shoulders *appear* to be) depends on how developed or atrophied one's deltoids
(especially the side/medial deltoids) are. 

> I have a feeling if someone did do that kind of analysis, they would not 
> uncover much useful data to better predict success. I'll bet there are more 
> variables involved than goes into any quantitative analysis to predict 
> stock prices (none of which work consistently enough to be useful).

I don't know much about modelling the stock market, but as I understand it,
it's a chaotic (i.e., inherently unpredictable) process. Not so with sports, or
academics, for that matter. If you define success as good grades in college or
graduate school, than the SAT and the GRE scores, respectively, are very good
predictors of that. In more 'purely' physical sports, especially in the former
Soviet Block countries, they employed this one measure of athleticism  called a
'caber toss' or something like that, where you throw a heavy object in a
scooping fashion backwards over your head as far as you can. It was
spectacularly predictive of the athlete's  future success in sports such
Olympic weightlifting, the power events of track and field, and others.
Obviously, basketball is more complex, but you could throw every possible
physical and mental measure, HS & college stats, scores and grades, and the
proverbial kitchen sink, into the analysis, and see which of these measures
predict success (or just as importantly, failure) in the NBA. Heck, I'd do it
pro bono for the Celtics, if they provided me with the data. SOMETHING useful
must emerge from it, because success in the NBA is not randomly determined
(although of course there's a large component of randomness involved). 
Because if it were, the NBA players would be average in every respect, and
they're clearly not, with height being only the most noticeable of many
differences from the population.  

> If I were going seat-of-the-pants, I would avoid nice, well-adjusted guys 
> like Sidney Wicks, Curtis Rowe etc. I'd even say the dorkier, uglier and 
> anti-social you are, the better I'd feel about drafting them to play 
> winning Celtics basketball with a vengeance. Granted some of the older 
> Celtics teams were full of good looking, articulate and well-adjusted 
> players, but they were mostly black guys and America was a different 

Well, you could say the same thing about Kobe, Grant Hill, Duncan, David
Robinson, Jordan and many others. Or do you claim that a burning desire to
succeed is not a trait that  "well-adjusted" people possess? It's not just the
Iversons and Rodmans that do well in the NBA. McHale was also 'normal' in all
respects, except for his body proportions, of course :) 
And I always felt that the supposed importance of Bird's difficult family
situation to his basketball skill development was poetic license by writers
reaching for the reason why Bird became great. Overall, I think it's an
exception to the rule when societally maladjusted players do well in the NBA,
not vice versa. 
Kestas