DAV ID AND GOL IAT H
WHAT T HE DOG SAW
OUT L IERS
BL INK
T HE T IPPING POINT
ART ICL ES
ET C.
Game Theory
Posted May 29, 2006 by
M AL COL M GL ADWEL L
& filed under BOOKS , T HE NEW YORKER -
ARCHIV E.
When it comes to athletic prowess, dont believe your eyes.
1.
The first player picked in the 1996 National Basketball Association draft was a slender, six-foot guard from
Georgetown University named Allen Iverson. Iverson was thrilling. He was lightning quick, and could stop and
start on a dime. He would charge toward the basket, twist and turn and writhe through the arms and legs of
much taller and heavier men, and somehow find a way to score. In his first season with the Philadelphia 76ers,
Iverson was voted the N.B.A.s Rookie of the Year. In every year since 2000, he has been named to the
N.B.A.s All-Star team. In the 2000-01 season, he finished first in the league in scoring and steals, led his team
to the second-best record in the league, and was named, by the countrys sportswriters and broadcasters,
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basketballs Most Valuable Player. He is currently in the midst of a four-year, seventy-seven-million-dollar
contract. Almost everyone who knows basketball and who watches Iverson play thinks that hes one of the
best players in the game.
But how do we know that were watching a great player? Thats an easier question to answer when it comes to,
say, golf or tennis, where players compete against one another, under similar circumstances, week after week.
Nobody would dispute that Roger Federer is the worlds best tennis player. Baseball is a little more
complicated, since its a team sport. Still, because the game consists of a sequence of discrete, ritualized
encounters between pitcher and hitter, it lends itself to statistical rankings and analysis. Most tasks that
professionals perform, though, are surprisingly hard to evaluate. Suppose that we wanted to measure
something in the real world, like the relative skill of New York Citys heart surgeons. One obvious way would
be to compare the mortality rates of the patients on whom they operateexcept that substandard care isnt
necessarily fatal, so a more accurate measure might be how quickly patients get better or how few
complications they have after surgery. But recovery time is a function as well of how a patient is treated in the
intensive-care unit, which reflects the capabilities not just of the doctor but of the nurses in the I.C.U. So now
we have to adjust for nurse quality in our assessment of surgeon quality. Wed also better adjust for how sick
the patients were in the first place, and since well-regarded surgeons often treat the most difficult cases, the
best surgeons might well have the poorest patient recovery rates. In order to measure something you thought
was fairly straightforward, you really have to take into account a series of things that arent so straightforward.
Basketball presents many of the same kinds of problems. The fact that Allen Iverson has been one of the
leagues most prolific scorers over the past decade, for instance, could mean that he is a brilliant player. It
could mean that hes selfish and takes shots rather than passing the ball to his teammates. It could mean that
he plays for a team that races up and down the court and plays so quickly that he has the opportunity to take
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many more shots than he would on a team that plays more deliberately. Or he might be the equivalent of an
average surgeon with a first-rate I.C.U.: maybe his success reflects the fact that everyone else on his team
excels at getting rebounds and forcing the other team to turn over the ball. Nor does the number of points that
Iverson scores tell us anything about his tendency to do other things that contribute to winning and losing
games; it doesnt tell us how often he makes a mistake and loses the ball to the other team, or commits a foul,
or blocks a shot, or rebounds the ball. Figuring whether one basketball player is better than another is a
challenge similar to figuring out whether one heart surgeon is better than another: you have to find a way to
interpret someones individual statistics in the context of the team that theyre on and the task that they are
performing.
In The Wages of Wins (Stanford; $29.95), the economists David J. Berri, Martin B. Schmidt, and Stacey L.
Brook set out to solve the Iverson problem. Weighing the relative value of fouls, rebounds, shots taken,
turnovers, and the like, theyve created an algorithm that, they argue, comes closer than any previous
statistical measure to capturing the true value of a basketball player. The algorithm yields what they call a Win
Score, because it expresses a players worth as the number of wins that his contributions bring to his team.
According to their analysis, Iversons finest season was in 2004-05, when he was worth ten wins, which made
him the thirty-sixth-best player in the league. In the season in which he won the Most Valuable Player award,
he was the ninety-first-best player in the league. In his worst season (2003-04), he was the two-hundredand-twenty-seventh-best player in the league. On average, for his career, he has ranked a hundred and
sixteenth. In some years, Iverson has not even been the best player on his own team. Looking at the findings
that Berri, Schmidt, and Brook present is enough to make one wonder what exactly basketball experts
coaches, managers, sportswritersknow about basketball.
2.
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Basketball experts clearly appreciate basketball. They understand the gestalt of the game, in the way that
someone who has spent a lifetime thinking about and watching, say, modern dance develops an understanding
of that art form. Theyre able to teach and coach and motivate; to make judgments and predictions about a
players character and resolve and stage of development. But the argument of The Wages of Wins is that this
kind of expertise has real limitations when it comes to making precise evaluations of individual performance,
whether youre interested in the consistency of football quarterbacks or in testing claims that N.B.A. stars
turn it on during playoffs. The baseball legend Ty Cobb, the authors point out, had a lifetime batting average
of .366, almost thirty points higher than the former San Diego Padres outfielder Tony Gwynn, who had a
lifetime batting average of .338:
So Cobb hit safely 37 percent of the time while Gwynn hit safely on 34 percent of his at bats. If all you did
was watch these players, could you say who was a better hitter? Can one really tell the difference between
37 percent and 34 percent just staring at the players play? To see the problem with the non-numbers
approach to player evaluation, consider that out of every 100 at bats, Cobb got three more hits than
Gwynn. Thats it, three hits.
Michael Lewis made a similar argument in his 2003 best-seller, Moneyball, about how the so-called
sabermetricians have changed the evaluation of talent in baseball. Baseball is sufficiently transparent, though,
that the size of the discrepancies between intuitive and statistically aided judgment tends to be relatively
modest. If you mistakenly thought that Gwynn was better than Cobb, you were still backing a terrific hitter.
But The Wages of Wins suggests that when you move into more complex situations, like basketball, the
limitations of seeing become enormous. Jermaine ONeal, a center for the Indiana Pacers, finished third in
the Most Valuable Player voting in 2004. His Win Score that year put him forty-fourth in the league. In 200405, the forward Antoine Walker made as much money as the point guard Jason Kidd, even though Walker
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produced 0.6 wins for Atlanta and Boston and Kidd produced nearly twenty wins for New Jersey. The Win
Score algorithm suggests that Ray Allen has had nearly as good a career as Kobe Bryant, whom many consider
the top player in the game, and that the journeyman forward Jerome Williams was actually among the
strongest players of his generation.
Most egregious is the story of a young guard for the Chicago Bulls named Ben Gordon. Last season, Gordon
finished second in the Rookie of the Year voting and was named the leagues top sixth manthat is, the best
non-starterbecause he averaged an impressive 15.1 points per game in limited playing time. But Gordon
rebounds less than he should, turns over the ball frequently, and makes such a low percentage of his shots that,
of the s top thirty-three scorersthat is, players who score at least one point for every two minutes on the
floorGordons Win Score ranked him dead last.
The problem for basketball experts is that, in a situation with many variables, its difficult to know how much
weight to assign to each variable. Buying a house is agonizing because we look at the size, the location, the back
yard, the proximity to local schools, the price, and so on, and were unsure which of those things matters most.
Assessing heart-attack risk is a notoriously difficult task for similar reasons. A doctor can analyze a dozen
different factors. But how much weight should be given to a patients cholesterol level relative to his blood
pressure? In the face of such complexity, people construct their own arbitrary algorithmsthey assume that
every factor is of equal importance, or randomly elevate one or two factors for the sake of simplifying matters
and we make mistakes because those arbitrary algorithms are, well, arbitrary.
Berri, Schmidt, and Brook argue that the arbitrary algorithms of basketball experts elevate the number of
points a player scores above all other considerations. In one clever piece of research, they analyze the
relationship between the statistics of rookies and the number of votes they receive in the All-Rookie Team
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balloting. If a rookie increases his scoring by ten per centregardless of how efficiently he scores those points
the number of votes hell get will increase by twenty-three per cent. If he increases his rebounds by ten per
cent, the number of votes hell get will increase by six per cent. Every other factor, like turnovers, steals,
assists, blocked shots, and personal foulsfactors that can have a significant influence on the outcome of a
gameseemed to bear no statistical relationship to judgments of merit at all. Its not even the case that high
scorers help their team by drawing more fans. As the authors point out, thats only true on the road. At home,
attendance is primarily a function of games won. Basketballs decision-makers, it seems, are simply irrational.
Its hard not to wonder, after reading The Wages of Wins, about the other instances in which we defer to the
evaluations of experts. Boards of directors vote to pay C.E.O.s tens of millions of dollars, ostensibly because
they believeon the basis of what they have learned over the years by watching other [Link] they are
worth it. But so what? We see Allen Iverson, over and over again, charge toward the basket, twisting and
turning and writhing through a thicket of arms and legs of much taller and heavier menand all we learn is to
appreciate twisting and turning and writhing. We become dance critics, blind to Iversons dismal shooting
percentage and his excessive turnovers, blind to the reality that the Philadelphia 76ers would be better off
without him. One can play basketball, the authors conclude. One can watch basketball. One can both play
and watch basketball for a thousand years. If you do not systematically track what the players do, and then
uncover the statistical relationship between these actions and wins, you will never know why teams win and
why they lose.
2 01 5 Malcolm Gladwell.
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