Optimal NBA team strategy

Is there a way to measure the optimal NBA roster construction and playing strategy? Nima Shaahinfar has proposed one of the more convincing arguments that there is.

Shaahinfar did regressions and looked at the standard deviation of specific statistical categories (e.g. assists or rebounds) among the players on a team. Then he looked at what type of standard deviation produced the highest offensive efficiencies (so it's rate-adjusted).

What Shaahinfar found was that the job of initiating the offense should be limited to a few players, with the role of each narrowly defined, but that three point shooting should be more evenly distributed among the team. The mid-range jumpshot should be a last resort behind getting a shot at the rim or shooting the three-pointer, a philosophy often dubbed "3 or key".

My research, interpreted here with regard to half-court offense, makes two primary arguments: (1) teams should take more threes and evenly distribute them among the players in each lineup (e.g. teams should spread the floor with multiple shooters) and (2) the role of initiating the offense should be narrowly defined, limited to few players.

Ultimately, the evidence is compelling that teams should follow one overarching principle for maximizing offensive efficiency: narrowly focus the role of initiating the offense where they can create the greatest advantage and threat to score (whether at the rim off penetration or through the post), and surround that facilitator/ball-handler with capable three-point shooters with the athleticism to rebound as well as attack and finish strong at the rim with the space created through ball movement.  

In a presentation given at the NCSSORS (that stands for the Northern California Symposium on Statistics and Operations Research in Sports. I'm not sure what's more wonderous: that something like that exists or the awfulness of the name and acronym), Shaahinfar went further to note that teams perform better when rebounding is a job everyone takes seriously, as opposed to shooting and passing.

Based on all this, Shaahinfar proposes an ideal roster.

The ideal lineup might include one, two if possible, of the best possible facilitators, who can defend, rebound, and hit the three well (or some combination of those skills if all three are not possible) and surround him/them with high-character, high-effort unselfish athletes whose strengths include defending, shooting the three reliably and consistently, and the athleticism and skill to rebound well and, with space created through ball movement, get the ball to the rim to finish or get to the line.  

Shaahinfar holds the dribble drive motion offense to be the closest to the ideal prescribed by his analysis.

Based on this, one can see how the San Antonio Spurs have been so successful for so long, and why players like James Harden and Manu Ginobili are so rare and precious, not to mention the obvious example of LeBron James. Look at the Heat roster this year and it seems close to an ideal, with three point shooters Ray Allen, Shane Battier, James Jones, Mike Miller, and and Rashard Lewis surrounding offense initiators like James, Wade, and Chalmers. The Heat lead the NBA in 3 point shooting % right now at 43.2%. The only thing standing between them and the NBA title this year is health.

SAD FOOTNOTE: Meanwhile, as applied to my hometown Chicago Bulls, one can see why this season will be a long and ugly one. Gone are three point shooters Kyle Korver and CJ Watson and staunch defenders Omer Asik and Ronnie Brewer. In their effort to go cheap, the Bulls now have a roster without a single player who is shooting 3-pointers above 37.5%. Last year's Bulls second team was the best in the NBA: Watson, Brewer, Korver, Gibson, Asik dominated the opposition. As good as it was last year, that's how bad it is this year. If Tom Thibodeau can shape a winner from this assemblage, he deserves all the honors headed his way. This Bulls roster will struggle hard to put the ball in the basket.

Recall the Bulls championship teams of old. It helped, of course, to have a Jordan and Pippen, but a key to many of those teams were the three point shooters who could make teams pay for doubling Jordan: John Paxson, Craig Hodges, B.J. Armstrong, Trent Tucker, Toni Kukoc, Jud Buechler, and Steve Kerr, to name the most prominent. The first three Bulls championship teams didn't attempt a ton of 3-point shots (424, 454, and 669 for those 91, 92, and 93 championship teams), but as Jordan and Pippen grew older and relied less on their pure athleticism, they began to alter their offensive attack to be more efficient, and that meant incorporating the 3-point shot in greater volume. The 96, 97, and 98 championship teams attempted 1,349, 1,403, and 962 3-pointers.

Football's narrative edge

One thing football does better than baseball and basketball (and here I'm focused in particular on the pro level, the NFL, MLB, and the NBA) is give viewers semi-filtered peeks behind the curtain. I say semi-filtered because the footage is still edited to bleep out curse words and remove inappropriate content, but it's still bypassing the sports journalists who ask the same questions and dutifully transcribe the same responses in a mutually agreed upon ritual of cliche.

The NFL distributes this content through a multitude of partners. On Showtime, they have Inside the NFL, a weekly recap that features sideline and on-the-field sounds and dialogue. Chris Berman runs a weekly segment (I think it's at halftime of the Monday Night Football game) that's called something like "sounds of the game" or something like that with similar access to audio not heard during live game broadcasts.

In the preseason, the NFL invites HBO to follow one team in the preseason for its show Hard Knocks. It's one of the great sports shows ever, and its given unbelievable access. One of the most poignant moments on HBO this season was not on one of its dramatic series but on Hard Knocks, when Miami Dolphins head coach had to cut Chad Johnson. Imagine seeing footage of Tim Cook firing Scott Forstall (err, "asking him to resign"). I have a perverse fascination with the scenes of players being cut on Hard Knocks. Who will deliver the news, the head coach or one of the assistant coaches? How will the player take it? Plenty of tech company managers could learn a lot from watching these scenes about how to let someone go professionally.

Behind-the-scenes footage isn't always compelling. Some of the making-of segments on DVDs are interesting only to those with a passion for the craft of filmmaking, for example. Hearing an actor discuss how they prepared to play a character really bursts some of the magic of the movie's fictional universe. Most often we'd prefer to be kept behind that fourth wall (veil).

The difference between movies and sports, however, is that sports drama needn't be manufactured. As you learn in fiction writing, all story is rooted in conflict, and sports is pure conflict, each sport just a different form of pure competition. The behind-the-scenes access the NFL grants its viewers actually feels more real and dramatic precisely because athletes are usually so zombie-like when speaking with the press, and that whole charade is dull and tiring and leaves most athletes seeming robotic. In contrast, hearing what the players are saying to each other on the sidelines and on the field, hearing what coaches say to the players before, during, and after games, it all both humanizes and mythologizes them at the same time.

Thanks to Hard Knocks, we have a much deeper relationship with NFL players and coaches given lots of screen time, like Rex Ryan or Chad Johnson. We have a first-person grasp of their personalities, and they become three dimensional characters in our minds. These are personifications that linger in the back of our minds as we watch them play on TV.

In production technique, the NFL has appropriated filmmaking techniques to enhance the grandeur and emotional intimacy of its competition. In these behind-the-scenes segments, the NFL makes heavy use of slow-motion, often running video in slow motion while running the commentary audio in real-time, snipping the video and audio footage so they still roughly line up. Rather than use the usual sideline camera view, the long shot, that we see during live broadcasts, they use close-ups of players hitting each other and bring in on-the-field audio so we can hear each brain-damaging hit in vivid clarity. Watch any Hollywood war scene and you'll see the same camera angles and shot lengths. The NFL also plays with frame rates, and instead of just using the traditional sports frame rate of video (30fps), it mixes in some filmic 24fps footage in these shows, which as any viewer knows intuitively from watching both movies and TV shows lends a more dream-like sensation to the footage due to the increased motion blur. Much of this stylistic vocabulary was developed by Steve Sabol and NFL Films. In heaven, your sports highlights will all be voiced by Harry Kalas.

HBO's 24/7 series is another standout in this elevation of sports as an entertainment product, and it borrows much from NFL Films in style. A boxing match gains from the 4-episode 24/7 arc leading up to the big fight, showing each gladiator in training, amplifying the feud between the two fighters. More than a few times, the series is more interesting than the fight itself.

If you wonder why the NBA and MLB are most often slotted behind the NFL as America's favorite sport, this marketing edge for the NFL is one reason. There is a dearth of regularly scheduled behind-the-scenes mythmaking footage from MLB and the NBA.

Baseball has made some strides. In the preseason, MLB has its own version of Hard Knocks called The Franchise (I missed it because I didn't have Showtime at the time). During the World Series, MLB caught my eye with its super slow motion camera shots of bats contacting balls, and it caught a gem when Hunter Pence's bat broke and contacted the ball three times in one swing. Seeing wooden bats warp in slow motion is beautiful in a Bill Viola-esque way.

But we still almost never hear mound conversations between coaches and pitchers, or dugout conversations, or even chatter between players of opposing teams as when a player singles and lands at first base. It wouldn't have to be live; most of the NFL footage I reference above is shown sometime after the game has ended. MLB has a dearth of compelling superstars (Derek Jeter and, uh...) and much of it is due to the fact that we really don't know any of them. How do TV shows sink their hooks into us? A huge inflection point is that moment when we adopt the characters as our own.

For sports, there is another level to its relationship with a spectator, and that is achieved with understanding of the sport itself. That is, beyond empathy with the player as a person, there is empathy with the player as an athlete and what they are trying to accomplish on the field of play.

I have a greater appreciation for watching sports I play myself. This is one reason I have a tough time watching hockey or soccer, two sports I never played much. I don't understand all the rules, I can't appreciate the moment-to-moment tactics or skill, and often it's like watching a foreign arthouse film with the subtitles turned off.

Organized football is actually quite complex, but the NFL has done a good job simplifying it for the layman. John Madden was a pioneer in this for using the telestrator on replays to diagram how a play broke down, and graphical innovations like the yellow first-down overlay line make it easier to comprehend, in real time, whether a team has accomplished its immediate goal.

This season, the NFL started offering something I've long wanted which is alternate camera angles of the action. The high sideline camera angle which is the standard on TV is not the easiest way to understand the spacial geometry of each play, and in particular, the battle between what the QB sees and what the defense sees. For that, I prefer the high end zone camera (familiar to all NFL fans from the Madden video game series), or what coaches often use, which is the All-22 view. Now you can access that footage through NFL Game Rewind. I've learned a bit about football by playing it, but I've learned most of what I know of organized football from reading books like this, playing Madden, and watching coaches film footage.

That leaves the NBA. Its a league that has more compelling characters than the MLB and arguably even the NFL, but much of that heavy lifting is done by the players themselves, the recent paragon being Shaquille O'Neal. Sadly, the NBA has always been so buttoned-up about its image that it seems the least likely league to open the kimono. Perhaps the NBA fears a bunch of footage of NBA stars sitting around the house smoking pot and playing their XBox. Perhaps after David Stern retires, things will change.

At best, today we occasionally eavesdrop in on a timeout speech from head coach in the huddle, but those are typically cliche-ridden and notable for how uninspiring they are. What I wish we'd hear: on-court trash talking and play-calling, players hanging out with each other in their off-hours, coaches training and chewing out players in practices. Even NBA players Twitter accounts can be muzzled by the league, which is a shame. I find regular season NBA games to be distractingly dull, but there are subnarratives of interest woven throughout if the NBA would just do the work of surfacing them.

This is especially important because the NBA tends to have less variation than any of the other two major sports in the U.S. Luck just isn't as prevalent. In baseball, it's dubious whether the winner of the World Series was really the best team, and in the NFL, with its low volume of plays per game and high potential scoring total per play, luck can swing a single game. But in the NBA, in a best of 7 series, given the high volume of plays and the concentration of playing time in the hands of so few players, skill differentials tend to be impervious to the variances of luck.

If outcomes are so certain, then the quality of narrative becomes even more important to the enjoyment of the contest. Think of the NBA as a genre film. You know when you watch a Western that the good guys will win in the end, but it's about how you get there.

ASIDE 1: I still hold out hope that someday, we'll have the option of watching a broadcast of a sports contest that features unfiltered live audio from on the court or field. It would surely come with a language warning, but that's what pay cable is for, right? I'd pay some absurd premium for that. Can you imagine hearing Michael Jordan trashtalking the opposition in his heyday? You often hear that Kevin Garnett is one of the most hated players in the NBA by the opposition and most beloved by teammates, but without on court audio or behind-the-scenes footage, the audience has no firsthand evidence why.

ASIDE 2: This whole post was spurred by watching this behind-the-scenes video of Stanford's 17-14 win over Oregon. I'm a Stanford fan, of course, but that first minute would give me goosebumps no matter who was wearing the uniforms. Even at the collegiate level, football is cranking out this type of cinematic fare.

The persistence of poverty

A long-standing economics puzzle is why people who are less well off engage in behaviors that cement them to that condition: dropping out of school, doing drugs, committing crimes, having children in their teen years. By the law of marginal utility, the benefits of going to college, for example, would be worth far more to someone in poverty than someone really well off.

Charles Karelis believes it's because our economic models of poverty are incorrect.

When we're poor, Karelis argues, our economic worldview is shaped by deprivation, and we see the world around us not in terms of goods to be consumed but as problems to be alleviated. This is where the bee stings come in: A person with one bee sting is highly motivated to get it treated. But a person with multiple bee stings does not have much incentive to get one sting treated, because the others will still throb. The more of a painful or undesirable thing one has (i.e. the poorer one is) the less likely one is to do anything about any one problem. Poverty is less a matter of having few goods than having lots of problems.

Poverty and wealth, by this logic, don't just fall along a continuum the way hot and cold or short and tall do. They are instead fundamentally different experiences, each working on the human psyche in its own way. At some point between the two, people stop thinking in terms of goods and start thinking in terms of problems, and that shift has enormous consequences. Perhaps because economists, by and large, are well-off, he suggests, they've failed to see the shift at all.

If Karelis is right, antipoverty initiatives championed all along the ideological spectrum are unlikely to work - from work requirements, time-limited benefits, and marriage and drug counseling to overhauling inner-city education and replacing ghettos with commercially vibrant mixed-income neighborhoods. It also means, Karelis argues, that at one level economists and poverty experts will have to reconsider scarcity, one of the most basic ideas in economics.

Karelis theory has interesting implications for welfare programs. Rather than robbing the poor of their motivation to work, the primary concern of many welfare critics, welfare programs can shrink the list of problems faced by the poor, creating a greater incentive to work.

Much of Karelis' ideas are based on intuition rather than data, so his work has come under its share of criticism. His ideas are covered in depth in his book The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can't Help the Poor.

Does the marginal utility curve slope the other way in poverty? The idea is an interesting one. I'm reminded of something I heard once which has always felt true: being rich doesn't necessarily make you happy, but being poor can make you unhappy. Karelis' idea deserves more empirical stress testing.

ADDENDUM: Professor Karelis wrote me a note after reading this post. I'll tack it on here at the bottom. I agree that the idea that those in painful situations might become more risk-loving rather than risk-averse feels very intuitive. I don't think you need to have lived in poverty to understand the impulse, either. Anyone who has taken a few bad beats at the poker or blackjack table and then started pressing has hoisted themselves off the optimal risk-reward curve in a fit of emotion.

Thanks for blogging my book on poverty. I couldn't figure out how to comment on your post so am trying this route. There has been empirical work supporting my theory. Here is one reference, from October 2010 journal Frontiers in Neuroscience. Experimental subjects were (as I predicted, without knowing about the lab work) risk loving when they started in pain and were confronted with the choice of remaining in their original state and taking a bet that would either alleviate their pain by a certain amount or make it worse by that amount. I have to say I consider that pretty obvious and unsurprising, and as I argued in my book it has only escaped economists because the accidents of intellectual history caused them to pose the question in a misleading way. 

Regards, Charles

The 130 million pixel camera

We all have them. Forget Apple's, the original retina display is still the best: the human eye.

The article is fascinating throughout. For example, the focal length of lens that best approximates human vision is not 50mm, as is commonly supposed, but 43mm. Its aperture is roughly f3.2 to f3.5. Since the human retina is curved, it is sharper in the corners than a camera sensor, which is flat and causes the corners of the sensor to be further away from the center. Of the human eyes' roughly 130 million pixels, only 6 million see color.

We are still waiting for some new type of connector or bus that will allow us to use retina displays larger than those on Macbook Pros today. The amount of data to transmit is beyond that of the existingThunderbolt connectors.

So how does your brain deal with 130 million pixels of information being thrown at it in a constant stream? The answer is it doesn't.

The subconscious brain also rejects a lot of the incoming bandwidth, sending only a small fraction of its data on to the conscious brain. You can control this to some extent: for example, right now your conscious brain is telling the lateral geniculate nucleus “send me information from the central vision only, focus on those typed words in the center of the field of vision, move from left to right so I can read them”. Stop reading for a second and without moving your eyes try to see what’s in your peripheral field of view. A second ago you didn’t “see” that object to the right or left of the computer monitor because the peripheral vision wasn’t getting passed on to the conscious brain.

If you concentrate, even without moving your eyes, you can at least tell the object is there. If you want to see it clearly, though, you’ll have to send another brain signal to the eye, shifting the cone of visual attention over to that object. Notice also that you can’t both read the text and see the peripheral objects — the brain can’t process that much data.

The brain isn’t done when the image has reached the conscious part (called the visual cortex). This area connects strongly with the memory portions of the brain, allowing you to ‘recognize’ objects in the image. We’ve all experienced that moment when we see something, but don’t recognize what it is for a second or two. After we’ve recognized it, we wonder why in the world it wasn’t obvious immediately. It’s because it took the brain a split second to access the memory files for image recognition. (If you haven’t experienced this yet, just wait a few years. You will.)

ADDENDUM: The way human vision works, always putting the center of your vision in focus and blurring the edges so as to avoid overwhelming your brain with data, is somewhat replicated in form by these hyperphotos. That is, you are presented a photo with some baseline of resolution, but as you drill in on particular sections, the photo zooms and increases the resolution.

Acquerello carnaroli rice

If you are making risotto, accept no substitutes for Acquerello carnaroli rice. Many use arborio rice, but carnaroli has an even shorter grain, and Acquerello ages their rice for a year and then seals it from the moisture in the can until you are ready to use it.

In true risotto, you should taste the integrity of each rice grain. Stirring too vigorously shatters grains and produces porridge. Not bad, but not risotto.

I learned this and some other useful tips in a cooking class with Chef Thomas McNaughton at Flour + Water on Monday night. I remade the risotto again tonight, and it came out great. An easy dinner party centerpiece as the preparation is not strenuous, and you and your guests can sip some wine while you stir.