Re: predicting success in the NBA

["j.hironaka" <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

At 11:42 21/06/01 -0400, you wrote:
>--- 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.

That just doesn't seem empirically true to me. A key to dribbling is 
natural knee bend and great coordination, and it seems to me that people 
with normally sized and proportioned bodies (including most NBA guards) are 
more successful at it than gangly athletes. I don't know if its true, but 
that's my strong overall impression. Sort of like how it is easier to use 
shorter chopsticks than those that are 3-feet long. Besides, don't long 
legs cancel out the benefit of long arms? ;-)

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.

Okay, I didn't realize this fact about the SAT but I'll make the following 
point. The SAT and GRE probably aren't meaningfully useful for predicting, 
say, future MIT professors or presidents/captains of industry or Nobelists. 
In other words, many people with great test scores won't be these things.

In terms of the overall probability of achievement, I think that's a more 
appropriate analogy to predicting NBA success. First of all, you can be so 
spectacularly dumb and still make good scores on the SAT and good grades at 
an Ivy League school. Getting accepted into Ivy league schools is FAR 
easier than getting a basketball scholarship to Duke. And making the 14-man 
roster at Duke still puts you miles away from NBA success, just as 
graduating from MIT leaves you miles away from a future Nobel Prize in 
chemistry.

>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.

Again, you make a very interesting observation, but I don't think this 
particular example has great relevance on predicting the success of a 
hockey, baseball, golf, soccer player, quarterback etc. As you seem to 
agree, there is a clear difference between skill sports and pure athletic 
prowess.

Now, of course, Paul Pierce applied this very same scooping motion to hit a 
half court shot in practice so maybe there is at least some truth to it. 
;-)  But in basketball a lot of success comes from the intangibles. For 
example "court sense" is almost totally intangible as far as I'm concerned.

On this note, I think it would be great to have full participation in the 
Chicago pre-draft camp, like they generally do at the NFL combine in 
Indianapolis. But compared to even american football, there would probably 
be even less predictive value in the 40-times, height and weight 
measurements and agility drills. I'm sure it would be a lot nicer than the 
situation we have now, where none of the lottery picks and very few 
first-round picks bother to attend. What irks me the most actually is how 
there isn't sufficient time for Boston to work out any of the projected 
top-half of the lottery. Basically Boston worked out a ton of guys 
projected in the 21 over-or-under zone and that's it.

>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).

I think if someone compiled all the date it's predictive value would be 
really great compared to "randomness", but not nearly accurate enough to be 
that useful as a tool. You'd probably be better informed but still arrive 
at your final player selection in the same apples-and-oranges fashion. 
That's just my view.

>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?

You got me there, Kestas. I don't know how "well-adjusted" Jordan is, or 
how traditionally handsome the others are (they are all pretty funny 
looking IMO). The important thing is there should be no complacency or 
easy-way-out in the makeup of a great player. A guy like Wicks was 
movie-star handsome, mild-mannered and could charm birds out of trees. You 
can't grow up thinking (with good reason) that nice things come your way 
too easy, because once you're paid guaranteed NBA millions you might slack 
off a bit. You've got to be more than slightly over-competitive, apart from 
your natural skills and endowment. But yeah,  you are right on this point. 
I admit it is silly to advocate drafting only sociopaths with major 
physical deformities. ;-)

>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