Basketball's analytical revolution

Zach Lowe's breakdown earlier this week of what the Toronto Raptors are able to do with SportsVU data is incredible. Using expected point value from the each player on the opposing team and where they are situated on the court, the Raptors are able to simulate ideal defensive positioning for each player on the court. By comparing the ideal to the actual defensive positioning, the Raptors are able to coach their players on why they should play where on the court.

Lowe's analysis of the computer's recommended positioning of the Raptors' defense on several pick and rolls run against them by the Knicks offers insight into why the Bulls are so good on defense. The computer recommendation on defending the pick and roll always seems to be to send more help sooner on the strong side. Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau has always preached that, even when he was the defensive coach of the Celtics.

The other strategy the computer recommends almost universally is that teams shoot more 3-pointers. ​Granted, if you don't have good 3-point shooters, it's no guarantee of success, but the salient point is that most teams should swap out more mid-range jump shots for 3-pointers.

​Baseball has changed a lot due to better analysis, but the sport that has made the greatest strides the past several years is basketball. SportsVU being used to simulate ideal player movement takes it to another level, it feels like SimCity but for sport.

I wonder how long it will be before we see a version of SportsVU used for analyzing football. If you can simulate the ideal defense in basketball, there's no reason you couldn't also simulate the ideal defense against various offensive formations and personnel packages.

Movie as dance

Bilge Ebiri has a beautiful and insightful interpretation of Terrence Malick's To the Wonder. I ​caught the movie at the Toronto Film Festival last September and enjoyed it. Many have criticized To the Wonder as being slight in scope as compared to The Tree of Life, but one could have said that about just about any movie that came after a movie that sought to understand the meaning of life and the universe. That criticism feels simply like a matter of sequencing.

Ebiri's insight is that Malick's desire to structure his movies more like musical pieces, with movements, rather than using the traditional act-based narrative structure of classical screenwriting, extended in a very unique way to To the Wonder.

"When I first saw To the Wonder, it seemed clear that Malick had gone further in this direction. The movie unfolded more like a piece of music than anything else, rhythmic and fluid and concerned more with the emotional valence of a given scene rather than its narrative value. The second time I saw the film, however, I was floored. Yes, Malick had furthered his approach, but I hadn’t realized to what extent. And I think that herein lies the key to the film.
The fact is, the performers in To the Wonder are not acting; they’re dancing.
I don’t mean that metaphorically, either. They are almost literally dancing. The movie is, for all intents and purposes, a ballet."

To the Wonder has not opened yet, but watch the trailer.​ Observe the choreography of movement of camera and human bodies just in select shots and you'll understand what Ebiri means. The Tree of Life stayed with me longer, but To the Wonder was rapturous in its own way.

​Ebiri's discussion of movie and dance spurred a memory of another movie where music and image came together, for just a scene, as dance. Given how rarely movies attempt to become a dance (I'm excluding movies that are explicitly musicals here), I wanted to revisit that movie and that scene.

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Things I like

  • The rotisserie chickens from Costco. I dread my monthly or bi-monthly visits to Costco because of the human crush and the four trips I have to make back and forth to my garage to carry all the giant-sized items to my apartment (it's a long walk), but one reward is the juicy $5.99 rotisserie chicken. It's not hard to roast a chicken at home, and you'll get a crispier skin and more control over the flavor, but it won't be as cheap or convenient. It's often perverse economics when unhealthy food is cheaper than preparing a meal from fresh ingredients, but in this case we're just talking about a chicken.
  • Hang Up and Listen​. I started listening to podcasts on my commute about a half year ago, and the one I find myself queuing up the quickest as soon as it drops into Downcast on my iPhone. As a modern information omnivore, I'm very impatient at sluggish information delivery rates, and often I find myself skipping or speeding up podcasts that have too much dead space. Stefan Fatsis, Josh Levin, and Mike Pesca have the information and idea flow set just right for me, and the fact that they bring a bit of a geeky outsider's perspective to sports (often contrarian) may make it appealing even to non-sports-buffs.
  • ​Electronic gear shifting for bikes​. The default reaction among cycling purists is to turn their nose up at electronic gear shifting. My last road bike was purchased in 1999, but when I went shopping to build a new road bike I found not a lot had changed. The one very noticeable change was the development of electronic gear shifting. Shimano and Campagnolo both have their own solutions now, though Shimano led the way and had a long head start into market. I ride the Campy system now, and I can't see going back to mechanical shifting. Perfect shifts every time, faster shifts, and the ability to shift under higher torque are great. You can't go wrong with Shimano or Campy's systems, I've ridden both. I chose Campy because the hoods fit my hands better, I like the longer travel of the shifting levers, and you can hold down the shifting lever to shift multiple gears in sequence.
  • Boa closure system. Along the lines of advances in bike technology, I recently upgraded my snowboard and boots, also over 10 years old (outside of my computing technology, primarily my phone and my laptop, I don't like to upgrade my stuff too frequently). Snowboards have new shapes now which are nice, but the technology which has changed my life the most is the Boa closure system, employed on both my new snowboard boots and my new bike shoes. The Boa system consists of a wire that is run through the shoe and that can be tightened with one hand using a circular reel. It tends to distribute the pressure more evenly through the shoe, eliminating pressure points, and it doesn't loosen on its own during your day on your board or bike. Someone should win some prize for inventing this. Can we get Boa closures for my jeans, too?
  • ​NBA.com's new Stats section. You can find all sorts of new statistics available on NBA.com/stats​. Finally, we can see statistics adjusted for pace, shooting zone data, and a lot more. It's a treasure trove I haven't had time to fully explore. A few tidbits: look at Kevin Durant's amazing shooting chart and you'll understand what a smart offensive player he is. His shot volume distribution shows he really knows his own most efficient and valuable shooting locations on the floor. Rajon Rondo led the league, before he went down, in AST, or the number of passes per game that led directly to a basket by a teammate. Top player on that list who isn't a point guard? Lebron. After baseball, no sport has had a statistical renaissance quite like basketball, and this is another step to mainstreaming the vocabulary. If you're a basketball numbers geek, you can kill lots of time there.

The value of the internet, quantified

Measuring the economic impact of all the ways the internet has changed people’s lives is devilishly difficult because so much of it has no price. It is easier to quantify the losses Wikipedia has inflicted on encyclopedia publishers than the benefits it has generated for users like Ms Mollica. This problem is an old one in economics. GDP measures monetary transactions, not welfare. Consider someone who would pay $50 for the latest Harry Potter novel but only has to pay $20. The $30 difference represents a non-monetary benefit called “consumer surplus”. The amount of internet activity that actually shows up in GDP—Google’s ad sales, for example—significantly understates its contribution to welfare by excluding the consumer surplus that accrues to Google’s users. The hard question to answer is by how much.

The headline grabbing figure from this article on measuring the value of the Internet is $2,600. That's the consumer surplus per user per year of the Internet as measured by two researchers at MIT who looked at how much time the average American spent online and assumed that consumers valued that time online more than their alternatives.

​Does that figure sound right? I guess the easiest way to assess that is to ask yourself if you'd pay $2,600 a year for the Internet or not. That sounds like a lot of money, but I reluctantly concede that I probably would.

Maybe it could be included in Amazon Prime?​

The simulator

I think we all have a little built-in simulator in which we run miniature copies of all the people in our lives. These are the brain equivalents to computer games like The Sims. When you get to know someone, you put a copy of them in the simulator. This allows you to model their behavior, and thus to attempt to predict it. The simulator lets us guess which of our fellow humans is likely to be trustworthy, which ones might mate with us, which ones might beat us to a pulp if they get the chance.

That's Cory Doctorow on where fictional characters come from.

This, I think, is what happens when you write. You and your simulator collaborate to create your imaginary people. You start by telling your simulator that there’s a guy named Bob who’s on the run from the law, and the simulator dutifully creates a stick figure with a sign called ‘‘Bob’’ over his head and worried look on his face. You fill in the details as you write, dropping hints to your simulator about Bob, and so Bob gets more and more fleshed out. But the simulator isn’t just adding in the details you tell it about: it’s guessing about the details you haven’t yet supplied, so that when you go back to your imagination and ask it about Bob’s particulars, some of those answers come from the simulator – it’s a kind of prejudice that affects imaginary people, a magic trick where your conscious and subconscious minds vie to fool each other with compounded lies about fake people, each building on the last in a feedback loop that runs faster and faster as you go.

That’s why your characters eventually ‘‘come to life.’’ Eventually, your characters’ details contain so much data gleaned from things the simulator ‘‘knows’’ – because it has supplied them, after guessing about them – that they come to seem real to you, and to it (which is the same thing).