Category: Basketball

The 'this game is important' playoff series trick

It’s playoff time in the NBA and NHL, so if you walk into a sports bar or, you know, your living room, you’re likely to bump right into a great basketball or hockey game. The basketball and hockey playoffs follow virtually the same format. Each has four rounds and each round is a seven game series where two games play each other for up to seven games. The first team to win four games wins the series. Once a team has won four games, the series is over (they don’t play seven games no matter what) and one team advances to the next round of the playoffs and the other team is eliminated. The games in a series are referred to by number: Game One, Game Two, etc. When you watch a playoff game on TV, you’ll almost invariably hear the announcers talk about a statistic that goes something like this:

Teams that win Game X win the series Y percent of the time.

This statistic bugs me because it’s misleading and a transparent ploy on the part of the television networks to retain viewers. Here’s why it’s misleading.

When we hear a percentage, we’re used to evaluating it as if either 0% or 50% is the baseline. If I hear that “people who eat apples at 2:03 p.m. get hit by cars within the next two hours 54% of the time” I’m going to assume the baseline is close to 0% and go out of my way to avoid apples at that time. If I hear that “teams that wear green win 49% of the time,” that sounds to me like the baseline is 50% and green is a slight disadvantage. The difference with this statistic is that the baseline is not 50%. Not even close! One win in a seven game series is a big deal! Teams only need to win four games to win the whole series. A victory in any game is a 25% contribution to the final goal. I don’t know exactly what the math is here (math friends, help!) but I’m going to say, since they’re 1/4 of the way to winning, let’s add 12.5% (1/4 of 50) to 50% and use that as the baseline. Just by winning a game (no matter what number game it is) a team has materially contributed to its own task of winning the series. Fine, you say, “but the statistics you hear are even higher than 62.5%.” Just wait, there’s more.

The next tricky trick trick in this misleading statistic is a problem with how the data is selected. In my last post about misleading statistics, the one on runs in basketball, I described a trick about including too little data in a statistic. Here we have the opposite problem. Instead of excluding data, the clever (and dramatic) people who create these statistics include too much data. Almost every year, there are at least a few seven game series in the NHL and NBA playoffs that are mismatches. The playoffs are actually designed to create this. The way they work is that the best team in the regular season (the #1 seed) plays the worst qualifying playoff team (the #8 seed) in the first round. #2 plays #7, #3 plays #6, and #4 plays #5. Now, these are professional sports, so usually the difference between a #1 and an #8 is not as great as you might see in March Madness. Still, some #1 teams are just way, way better than the #8 team they face. Maybe the #8 wins one game but loses the series 4-1. Not infrequently, a superior team will actually win four straight games, which is called a sweep.

Sweeps are legitimate playoff series, but they’re not usually all that suspenseful. In a matchup between a clearly superior team and a clearly inferior team, use of one of these statistics would be silly because the number of the game is immaterial next to the fact that one team is better. In the NBA, the Cleveland Cavaliers just swept the Boston Celtics. The Cavaliers have the best basketball player in the world, LeBron James, and their second and third best players are almost unanimously thought of as better than anyone the Celtics have on their team right now. The Cavaliers are better. The big problem with this, is that the data gets lumped in with all the rest of the data. When you add their data in, it’s going to inflate the correlation between winning Games One through Four with winning the series.

What the statistic is really trying to convince us of is that the specific number of the game is important — that this game is more important than the one before it or after it in the series. To do that, it uses too much data (including series between teams of very different skills) and also our own assumption about what the baseline of a percentage statistic should be. It’s possible that some number games do have more impact on the result of a series between two evenly matched teams than others and I’d be very interested in seeing a true analysis of that. Until then, ignore what any commentator tells you about the importance of a game. Unless, of course, that game is Game Seven, in which case, even I can tell you that the team that wins Game Seven wins the series 100% of the time.

Change is coming in sports but it's slow, hard work

As with the rest of the world, sports cultures are constantly in flux. Nowhere is free from the push and pull battle between honoring and conserving the past and pushing the present towards what we think the future should look like. These three stories show different elements of that battle from sport to sport, region to region, and issue to issue. 

A Tactical Shift Sweeps Soccer, Only It Comes From the Police

by Sam Borden for the New York Times

For at least the past fifty years, soccer matches across the world have been popular vehicles through which to fight political or cultural battles. All to often these fights have literally been fights — mass mob violence. In an attempt to prevent violence at soccer matches, police have traditionally sought to overwhelm any trouble-makers with large numbers of well-armed and armored police. Just recently, some police forces have begun to take a more gentle and perhaps ultimately more effective approach.

The most dangerous factions of fans, security officials said, are generally the splinter groups or unaffiliated organizations that support a particular team. Many of these groups have political affiliations or ideologies, which can make their interactions more combustible.

While some cities — particularly in Eastern Europe, Mr. Martins said — have stuck to the older philosophy of using loads of officers carrying lots of weapons, a more peaceful strategy is growing in popularity. Instead of using “batons and barking dogs” to keep the peace, Mr. O’Hare said, the goal is to shepherd visiting fans to a particular area of the city and then help accompany the fans to the stadium.

The National Women’s Hockey League: Impatience Is A Virtue

by Kate Cimini for The Hockey Writers

Women’s sports have made an amazing amount of progress since 1972 when Title Nine went into affect, forcing all federally funded institutions (basically all schools) to provide equal opportunities for women. One of the largest deficits remaining is in the ranks of professional leagues for women’s team sports. The most successful of women’s leagues has been the WNBA which from its start was operated and subsidized by the men’s league, the NBA. None of the other major men’s sports leagues have followed suit by supporting a women’s league in their sport. Recently a group of people decided not to wait any longer for the NHL to initiate a women’s league but to do it themselves. I wish them luck and am excited that one of the original four franchises will be located in my new home town of Boston. I will be a fan!

The National Women’s Hockey league held its launch party Monday night at Chelsea Piers in New York City.

One thing was clear: the NWHL was born out of impatience. Impatience for women’s sports to be recognized as important, impatience for the next step, for women not only to have a place to continue to play hockey (as the CWHL allows) but to give them the ability to dedicate more of their time to it, as money affords time and opportunity.

Five gay college basketball coaches speak from the closet

by Cyd Zeigler for Out Sports

Despite rapid change in the outside world, the plight of homosexual men and women in the sports world remains annoyingly, frustratingly stagnant. Believe it or not, despite more than 300 schools competing in both men’s and women’s college basketball, there isn’t a single openly gay head coach. Cyd Zeigler, who does a wonderful job covering the gay sports beat, got a group of closeted gay coaches together and wrote their stories (while protecting their identities) of fear and anxiety with empathy and indignation.

Why would a closeted gay coach take a job where he had to sign an anti-gay lifestyle contract? College basketball coaching jobs aren’t exactly plentiful. There’s stiff competition for each opening from the head coaching spots on down the line. For someone recently out of college with no coaching experience, that first job is essential to his career.

Plus, his head coach knew Thomas was gay.

“It was the first question my coach asked me when he interviewed me,” Thomas said. The coach didn’t care as long as Thomas kept it quiet. “He needed a black assistant coach. I played at a high level. My knowledge of the game and skills-training were good. I was the one who related to the kids. He needed me.”

Fear of getting another job was pervasive in all of my conversations with these five coaches. There is a clear assumption — by them and the people in the profession closest to them — that by coming out publicly their chances of advancing in the profession will be dead.

Who had the term "field goal" first, basketball or football?

Dear Sports Fan,

I was surprised to learn that there are field goals in basketball as well as football. What’s up with that? Who had the term “field goal” first, basketball or football?

Thanks,
Ivan

Dear Ivan,

The term field goal refers to one way of scoring in both football and basketball. As we covered in our How does scoring work across sports post, in football, a field goal is when a team kicks the ball between the uprights not directly after a touchdown. In basketball, it’s a more general term that covers the majority of shot attempts. The only way to score in basketball that doesn’t count as a field goal is the free throw, an undefended shot awarded to a team that has been fouled in particular circumstances. As for which sport had the term first, there doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to that question but the smart money is on football as having had it first.

Basketball has a very distinct creation story. The sport was invented by James Naismith, a gym teacher at a YMCA in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891. His 13 rules of basketball are become a treasured document in the sports history. Nowhere in those rules does the term field goal show up, but he uses the word field to refer to the area of play and goals to refer to made baskets. The leap to using the term field goal to refer to a subset of the goals is not a big one, particularly because he did carve out goals that would be awarded in a different way. In the original rules of basketball, a team that was on the receiving end of three straight fouls from the other team would be awarded on goal.

Football is an older sport and came about in a more evolutionary way than basketball. I don’t know exactly when there were first more than one way to score in football but by 1883, safely eight years before basketball was invented, one of the pioneer rule makers, Walter Camp, was already tinkering with how much different types of scoring should be worth, including the field goal. He settled on “four points for a touchdown, two points for kicks after touchdowns, two points for safeties, and five for field goals.”

The only article I could find explicitly addressing your question was this one by Mark Lieberman on the University of Pennsylvania’s Language Log blog. The article is well worth reading, as is the discussion in the comments section.

In terms of why the distinction matters in basketball, one main reason that it helps generate the commonly used statistic of field goal percentage. Field goal percentage is roughly the number of shots made divided by the number of shots attempted. This stat is a traditional one used to express how efficiently a player scores. Free throws (which are not counted as field goals) are excluded from this calculation. On one hand, this makes the statistic more useful because it isolates one skill (shooting within the flow of the game) from another (converting free throws.) On the other hand, points from free throws are worth just as much as points from other shots, and a possession that ends with a player being fouled is usually thought of as an offensive success, but in terms of field goal percentage would not show up at all. This type of gap between statistic and reality is why we have had so many new statistics invented in the past ten years.

Thanks for reading,
Ezra Fischer

What are bench points in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What are bench points in basketball? Sounds like they earn points for quietly sitting on the bench?

Thanks,
Amshula

Dear Amshula,

Bench scoring is a statistic that expresses the number of points scored in a basketball game by players who did not start the game. As with any statistic, the questions we want to answer to understand it are: how is it calculated, what is it meant to express, how well does it express it, and what can we learn about the sport, in this case basketball, from the statistics existence.

In basketball, as in other sports, when the game starts, only some of the players on each team are on the court. Others sit on the bench at the start of the game, prepared to play, but not playing yet. These players may be called substitutes or bench players. During the course of the game, they may play or they may not — it’s entirely up to the coach who makes his decision based on an understanding of his players’ strengths and how the game is going. Any points these substitute or bench players score will be added together to create the cumulative statistic of bench points.

Bench points is meant to express the relative strength of a team’s substitutes. This is an important thing to try to measure, even in basketball where the strength of individual players is so influential to the game’s outcome. Unfortunately bench scoring only does a moderately good job of expressing this. Part of the problem is that pure scoring is not as important as scoring more than the other team. A team’s bench may score 40 points but if they allow 60 points while they are doing it, that’s not very good. Another troubling element is that the statistic doesn’t necessarily compare apples to apples. There are no rules about how much a coach needs to play his starters or his substitutes. For some teams, the starters might play virtually the whole game. On other teams, the substitutes may play close to half the game. Comparing the bench points between a team whose starters play the whole time and a team whose starters only play a little more than half is patently unfair. Although it may seem ideal to have the best five players start each game, on some teams that is not possible or not desired. A team may have two very good players who play identical positions. Bringing one of those players off the bench might be better than trying to play two incompatible players. Some teams may tactically prefer to have their third best scoring option play as a substitute so that there’s never a time when all three of their best scorers are resting simultaneously. That’s the case with the current Boston Celtics who bring two of their best offensive players, Isaiah Thomas and Kelly Olynyk of the bench.

The existence of the bench points statistic gives us a glimpse into one of the most important debates in basketball. Is winning in basketball about having the best player or the best team? For proponents of the best player approach, bench points would be an almost meaningless statistic. Who cares which team’s sixth through tenth best players score more than the others, these folks might think, what matters is whether my top dog is better than yours. People who believe that basketball games are inevitably decided by which group of players plays better together might point to bench points as a helpful way of expressing which team is deeper and more playing more collectively.

Keep watching and questioning,
Ezra Fischer

 

NBA Playoff Companion, April 18, 2015

The playoffs are a wonderful time in sports but they can be hard to follow, even for the most die-hard fan of a playoff team. They’re virtually impossible for a non-fan or casual observer! No matter who you are, Dear Sports Fan’s Playoff Companion can help. Sign up to get text updates each day for your favorite team or teams or just for the team or teams you feel you need to know about in order to be able to have a decent conversation with your wife, husband, son, daughter, parent, colleague, or friend.

Toronto Raptors vs. Washington Wizards — Game 1, 12:30 p.m. ET on ESPN — Series is 0-0

Toronto Raptors fans – We’ve got the best home-court advantage in the league. Time to use it.
Toronto Raptors interested parties – After five years without playoffs, Raptors fans went nuts last year when their team made it. This year should be no different.

Washington Wizards fans – Time to wipe the slate clean. Ignore the last few weeks/months of terrible play. This team can flip the switch, right?
Washington Wizards interested parties – The Wizards started the year off playing great and have steadily looked worse and worse. Fans will be hoping they can return to their winning ways.

Golden State Warriors vs. New Orleans Pelicans — Game 1, 3:30 p.m. ET on ABC — Series is 0-0

Golden State Warriors fans – Time to get back in gear after a coupe weeks of meaningless games.
Golden State Warriors interested parties – After an incredible year in which the Warriors won the most games in the league by far, the slate is wiped clean for the start of the playoffs.

New Orleans Pelicans fans – We can’t match up with their guards but they can’t match up with our Brow. Let’s steal game one.
New Orleans Pelicans interested parties – Virtually any scenario that leads to the unlikely upset of the Warriors begins with a win today.

Chicago Bulls vs. Milwaukee Bucks — Game 1, 7 p.m. ET on ESPN — Series is 0-0

Chicago Bulls fans – Forget about all the injuries and struggles this year. The team is healthy today and that’s all that matters.
Chicago Bulls interested parties – If you had told a Bulls fan before the year that they would enter the playoffs healthy facing Milwaukee, they would have taken it. Although the season has been a struggle with lots of injuries, the team got where it was trying to go.

Milwaukee Bucks fans – We’re the best kept secret in the league. And that secret is about to be broken over the backs of the Bulls.
Milwaukee Bucks interested parties – The Bucks are underdogs in this series but they’re a dangerous type of underdog — young, gifted, and athletic.

Houston Rockets vs. Dallas Mavericks — Game 1, 9:30 p.m. ET on ESPN — Series is 0-0

Houston Rockets fans – There’s really no reason to be worried about the Mavs, so why do I have a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach?
Houston Rockets interested parties – Rockets fans should be confident, but there’s always something about playing a veteran team that’s had success like the Mavs had to make you uneasy.

Dallas Mavericks fans – The first game will tell us a lot. If Rondo can slow down Harden, then all his nonsense might have been worth it.
Dallas Mavericks interested parties – The Mavericks gambled mid-season by trading for Rajon Rondo. So far it hasn’t seemed like a good trade but the playoffs will be the true test.

Tragedy through the lens of sports

When people ask me why I’m so interested in sports, one of my stock replies is that I love games. I’m just compelled by competition driven tactics. I could easily have found myself as interested in politics or chess or Settlers of Catan or poker. And if I had found myself with a different passion, one of the key rewards I get from following sports would have been equally present: learning about the lives of very interesting people. If you get deep enough into any avocation, you follow what is written about it quite closely. If there are talented writers working on the topic, as there are in almost every area, but particularly in sports, it seems, then what you often get are amazing stories about people’s characters, about their lives, the things they create and the things that happen to them. This week, the two articles that popped through my screen and into my head were both articles about tragedies that ended in death. Both are fascinating and emotional but rewarding to read.

Jason Rabedeaux was here

by Wright Thompson for ESPN

We all know what happens to you if you succeed in sport; the champagne, the adulation, the screamingly high salaries, the respected position in society. What’s less frequently seen is what happens if you fail, especially after having some early success. Falling from grace in this way is always painful but for some people, it can be downright dangerous. That’s how it was for basketball coach Jason Rabedeaux whose life ended recently.

Saigon can be a dangerous place, not only because of what someone might do to you there but because of what you are allowed to do to yourself. People and their intentions come whole and leave broken. Every vice is for sale: cheap beer, snake liquor and easily scored hard drugs; private clubs where women are for rent hide above parking garages, and streetwalkers stand alone in the neon rot of crumbling doorways. There are still opium dens, like something from a 19th-century travel novel. Shame and regret grow faster than the mold creeping in wide tongues up the narrow slum alley houses. This is where the universe, with its vicious sense of humor, summoned Jason Rabedeaux in late 2011. It was the only coaching job in the world he could get.

War, Auschwitz, and the tragic tale of Germany’s Jewish soccer hero

by Brian Blickenstaff for Vice Sports

Sometimes people can be overwhelmed by events, like in our first story. Other times events strike with such force that personal character, strengths, weaknesses, even achievements like fame and wealth are swept away like they meant nothing. World War II and the Holocaust were events that swept through people’s lives and destroyed them with virtually no consideration for their individuality. We know that to be true but its still incredible to read about it happening to a true German soccer hero like Julius Hirsch.

Over the next five years, Hirsch, Fuchs, and another KFV player, Fritz Förderer, would become the country’s most famous attacking unit. They’d win titles and, with them, the loyalty of thousands of fans. They’d represent Germany in international matches across Europe, playing against some of their country’s biggest rivals, past and present. By World War I, they’d rank among Germany’s greatest ever sportsmen—and they’d return from that war as heroes both on and off the soccer field. But by World War II, Hirsch and Fuchs would be almost completely forgotten, their accomplishments erased, their lives discarded.

Fuchs and Hirsch were, respectively, the first and second Jewish players to ever represent the German national team. There have never been any others. Fuchs would escape the Holocaust. Hirsch would not. For years after his death, it was almost like he never existed at all.

 

What is traveling in basketball?

Dear Sports Fan,

What is traveling in basketball? Can you explain the traveling rule? I know it has something to do with a player walking instead of dribbling but I don’t quite understand how it works.

Thanks,
Traci

Dear Traci,

Like you said, traveling is a rule in basketball that dictates how a player can move with the ball. A traveling violation is called when a player moves in an improper way. When this happens, a ref blows his or her whistle and the ball is given to the team that had been defending. Beyond this, I have to admit that I’m probably about as unclear as you are. Traveling has officially flummoxed me! It’s a strange feeling. Usually, when I get a question, I have a pretty good idea of how to answer it. Other times, I have to dig into the internet and do some research before I can come up with an answer. Even with the hardest questions, it’s rare for me to be stumped, even after reading up on a subject. Traveling is just one of those semi-unfathomable mysteries in life, like the nature of black holes or why breakfast is so satisfying when eaten at non-traditional times. Still, your question deserves an answer, so I’ll do my best.

From an overly simplified vantage point, traveling is easy to understand. Imagine teaching a child to play basketball. The first thing you establish would probably be the goal of the game — to get the ball through the basket in a top-down direction. Great! The kid gets it, grabs the ball, runs down the court and tries to score. “No, no” you might say, “you can’t just run with the ball, it’s not like football.” Then you’d explain the second most obvious rule in basketball — that you have to bounce the ball on the floor while moving with it. Traveling is the name given to a violation of this second rule. In principle, it’s simple. In reality, it’s complicated. I think the best way to delve into the complications is in the form of a question and answer session.

Q: Does it matter how many steps you take between bounces while you’re dribbling?
A: No! As long as you are dribbling, you can pretty much do whatever you want — you can take giant tall dribbles with lots of steps between bounces or tiny small ones.

Q: Can you start dribbling, stop, and then start again?
A: No! Once a player starts dribbling with the ball, she has to keep dribbling to keep moving. If she stops, another player on either team (or the rim) has to touch the ball before she can start dribbling again.

Q: Do you have to start dribbling right away, once you get the ball?
A: No! If a player gets the ball and comes to a stop (or maybe he was already standing still) without dribbling, he can stand still with the ball without dribbling. He can even move around a little as long as one foot remains still on the ground. This foot is called the “pivot foot.”

Q: What’s the deal with squirming around on the ground? I’ve seen that sometimes called traveling.
A: You’re right! If a player is on the ground, she may not “gain an advantage” by sliding while holding onto the ball.

Q: Okay, got it. This doesn’t seem so complicated. So, how many steps can a player take without dribbling?
A: Ah. There’s the rub. I don’t really know. The traditional, basketball-folk story has been that only two steps were allowed. In recent years though, particularly in the NBA (all our discussion today has been about NBA rules, although NCAA rules are not so different) this has obviously not been the case. Some of this is due to a culture of leniency when it comes to how referees enforce the traveling rules. Perhaps the league instructed them to err on the side of allowing play to continue undisturbed unless the traveling violation were particularly offensive. That’s possible. But it’s also true that the rule seems to almost intentionally obfuscate the issue. Instead of simply talking about steps, the rule uses the word “counts.” For example, “A player who receives the ball while he is progressing or upon completion of a dribble, may use a two-count rhythm in coming to a stop, passing or shooting the ball.” It then goes on, in great and almost incomprehensible detail to try to define what counts as a “count.” Some of the sub-definitions refer to the number of steps a player can take, some don’t. It’s almost as if the NBA wanted to make the traveling rule so complicated that fans (and maybe even players) would simply have to take the referees word as the truth.

Q: Hmm. So when you watch a basketball game, you really have no idea when traveling is going to be called?
A: No — that’s the funny thing. I generally do know when traveling is and isn’t going to be called. It’s as if, over the hundreds of hours I’ve spent watching basketball, I’ve developed an instinct for traveling as defined by NBA refs collective judgement. I know it when I see it (most of the time) but I can’t properly explain it. This is frustrating to me because it goes against my theory that with proper explanation, non-sports fans would be able to understand and enjoy sports much more than they do today.

Q: So what do I do now? How can I learn more about traveling?
A: Well, I guess the best thing to do is to understand the basic principles, which I hope this blog post has helped with, and then understand that even the most die-hard basketball fans probably don’t actually understand much more than that. Sometimes just knowing that other people don’t know either is all you need to know. You know? Armed with that understanding, you should feel free to watch lots of basketball and build your own sense of what should and shouldn’t be a travel. There are also lots of YouTube compilations of basketball plays which people think should have been called travels but weren’t. Here’s one good one.

Thanks for the questions,
Ezra

March Madness Final Four Previews, April 4, 2015

I know, I know, it’s not even March anymore. How can it still be March Madness? Truth be told, aside from the very first day of this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament, it hasn’t been very mad at all. There have been relatively few major upsets and this is reflected in today’s two games between the last four teams remaining. Of the four teams remaining, three are 1 seeds, which means the committee that selected teams for the tournament and ranked them before the tournament began accurately predicted three of the four best teams. The only surprise, 7 seed Michigan State, is only kind of a surprise. Although they weren’t predicted to do this well this year, their coach and program has an incredibly strong recent history of success. For some reason beyond my comprehension, these games — as exciting and high profile as they are

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #7 Michigan State Spartans vs. #1 Duke Blue Devils, 6:09 p.m. ET on TBS.

This game is definitely the undercard or less anticipated game of the two. This is mostly because it doesn’t feature Kentucky, the team that virtually every narrative in this tournament is focused on. Putting narratives aside for a minute though, this is a very attractive basketball game. Duke has the most polished offensive big man in the game this year, a player named Jahlil Okafor who is likely to be the first overall draft pick in the NBA this coming year. Watch for him — he’s the enormous dude who wears number 15 – when he gets the ball near the basket. He’s surprisingly graceful for someone who is 6’10” and 270 lbs at age 19. One of the most effective motivations for a sports team to over-achieve seems to be the sense that the world did or does not believe they can succeed. Michigan State has gleefully taken up that mantle and, because they were given a relatively poor 7 seed for this tournament, it fits to a degree. Michigan’s coach, Tom Izzo, is well-known for being able to whip together some tactics that will work to counter-act whatever the opposing team does best. If Michigan State has a chance in this game, it’s because coach Izzo will be able to outsmart Duke’s coach. The problem with that is that Duke’s coach, Mike Krzyzewski, is the most well-respected coach in college basketball. Duke has the clear edge in this game but not by enough to make it worth skipping.

NCAA Men’s Basketball – #1 Wisconsin Badgers vs. #1 Kentucky Wildcats, 8:49 p.m. ET on TBS.

All roads lead to Kentucky in this tournament. They are two wins (this game and the finals on Monday) away from completing the first undefeated season for a men’s college basketball team since 1976. (The University of Connecticut women’s basketball team has had four undefeated seasons since then including a streak of 90 straight games which included two complete undefeated seasons and championships in 2008/9 and 2009/10.) The primary fascination for this tournament revolves around whether or not Kentucky will be able to complete the undefeated season and win the championship. To do that, they’ll need to beat a Wisconsin team that’s had it out for them since Kentucky eliminated them from March Madness last year. That’s right — these two teams played last year in the Final Four as well. In that game, Kentucky beat Wisconsin 74-73 on a last second three-point shot. By most accounts, these two teams are both better this year than they were last year, so this should be a heck of a game. I’m looking forward to it!

Why runs in basketball are a lie

During virtually every basketball game you watch, men’s or women’s, college or professional, at some point a little graphic seems to float up onto the screen and an announcer will note its content to reinforce it’s message. “The UC-Irvine Anteaters are on a 9-2 run in the last three minutes and 26 seconds,” the announcer will say. What this means is that in the last X time Team A has scored Y points while Team B has scored Z points and Z is always significantly less than Y. This is supposed to be surprising and impressive. “Wow” the viewer is meant to think, “Team A is really beating up on Team B in a significant way. Scoring Y points and only allowing Z points must mean that Team A is way better than Team B.” This conclusion is certainly true sometimes but not nearly as often as you’re meant to think.

I have a book on my shelves called How to Lie with Statistics. It’s a classic and one of its lessons applies to this situation. A great way to lie about statistics, and one that must be used every time one of these runs statistics pops up in a basketball game is selection bias. Selection bias is a great way of lying with statistics. Wikipedia defines it as:

Selection bias refers to the selection of individuals, groups or data for analysis such that proper randomization is not achieved, thereby ensuring that the sample obtained is not representative of the population intended to be analyzed.

In this case, the way that the selection is biased is in its starting point. It’s end point is always the current moment of the basketball game. That’s an essential element of the con — “In the last X minutes…” The starting point is not random though, it’s carefully chosen. I guarantee that the second before the television station chooses to start the period, Team B (the one that seems to be losing terribly) scored a basket. Otherwise, why not extend the period further back? The longer it is, the more impressive it is.

If we assume that Team B scored right before the run started, than every time we see or hear about a run, we should add two (or three) points to Team B’s score. A 9-2 run becomes a 9-4 (or 5) run in our heads. A 7-0 run would more fairly be seen as a 7-2 (or 3) run. The reason why I say to add two or three points is the source of another form of trickery. Single points can be scored in basketball but by far the more common forms of scoring involve either two or three points being scored at once. That means a 9-2 run probably only involves four scores on the part of the team with 9 and one from the team with 2. (There’s lots of other ways this could happen, but this is the most likely. A 4-1 run seems less unlikely and therefore significant than 9-2. Basketball’s scoring system makes runs seem more crazy than they actually are.

The other piece of selection bias is this: the television station only points out a run when it happens. I know, that sounds utterly stupid, but it’s true. We don’t notice when the last 11 points have been split relatively evenly between two teams because no one points out that this has just happened.

I suspect that even if basketball were totally random — by which I mean that you could replace the basketball game in this scenario with someone flipping a coin a couple hundred times and marking down every Heads as a score for Team A and every Tails as a score for Team B — that you would expect to see runs worth noting by a commentator in almost every game. After all, a basketball game has around 140 possessions in college and around 190 in the NBA. If you think of it as 140 or 190 coin flips in a row, doesn’t it seem pretty likely that we’d see at least one run of four or five or six or even seven Heads with only one or two Tails mixed in?

I’m quite sure that there’s a mathematician out there who can help with the statistics in our coin flipping game. How likely are what types of runs in a game of 140-190 coin flips? If we can find that mathematician and pair her with a basketball statistics junkie who can find out what runs show up how often in real games, then we’ll be able to figure out whether the runs in basketball are actually notable or simply sleight of hand used by television producers to keep us glued to our seats. My money is on the magic trick.

— — —

Note 1: I use this trick all the time on this blog. I know it’s deceptive, but it is how most sports fans think about games — “this is an important game for my team because they’ve lost six of the last seven (of 82 or 162) regular season games. They need to break the streak!” I even think about games that way when it’s my favorite team involved. Sports fandom is not always or even often rational.

Note 2: The simple way to fix this would be to think about scoring in terms of arbitrary splits — what has the score differential been in the last two minutes or four minutes? This gets rid of one form of selection bias — the starting point — but it would still be vulnerable to the other kind of selection bias where commentator only note the split when it seems unusual.

Sports Lives, March 2015

Obituaries are a wonderful source of amazing stories about people you wish you had known more about when they were alive. That’s true in sports as in so many aspects of life. This week, I read three amazing pieces about recently departed sports figures.

The Hit

by Stefan Fatsis for Slate

In today’s climate of concern about brain injuries in football, it’s hard to remember that football’s culture was exactly the opposite for many years. Football glorified its violence for decades and in doing so, it made heroes out of players who injured another player in a particularly epic way. Chuck Bednarik became one of those heroes after he hit Frank Gifford in 1960. Gifford was injured so badly on the play that he missed the rest of that season and all of the next. Bednarik was glorified. This one incident became Bednarik’s main claim to fame and was (quite literally as we found out last week) in the first paragraph of his obituary. The hit unquestionably caused a terrible injury, but for the most part, the idea that it was a brutal hit remained unquestioned until Steven Fatsis researched it and wrote about it this week. What he found may surprise you.

So was it a blindside tackle to the chest? A right shoulder under the chin? Or a forearm to the chest? Was Bednarik moving at full speed? Did the blow itself knock Gifford out? Was it one of the hardest hits ever?

Let me respond to those questions: no, no, no, no, no, and no.

Patrick McDarby, Sport Logo Designer, Is Dead at 57

by Margalit Fox for The New York Times

Sports logos are so ingrained into the fabric of the teams that they represent that they’re almost invisible. You can’t think about the Toronto Maple Leafs without the leaf or the Oakland Raiders without their eye-patch festooned pirate. If we rarely think about the logos themselves, we almost never think about the people who design them. Patrick McDarby was one of those people.

Over the years, Mr. McDarby designed more than 200 logos. For each, he received a flat fee, no royalties and, by the nature of his craft, little public recognition…

The design of sports logos entails singular challenges. In a small space, and only two dimensions, the artist must convey a sense of movement, excitement and power. The design must be simple enough to be immediately interpretable but evocative enough to be enduringly memorable. Ideally, it should distill the very essence of the thing it represents.

Dean Smith requested $200 be sent to each of his former players in will

in Sports Illustrated’s Extra Mustard column

When legendary North Carolina basketball coach, Dean Smith, died last month, the sports world poured out an unbelievable slew of tributes to him. He was, by all accounts, a good person as well as a great coach. He was an early leader in integrating college basketball in his area. One of the things that made him special was the tight connection he developed with his players, which continued throughout his and their lives. This week we found out that it actually continued a little bit past Dean Smith’s life.

In the letter Smith’s former players received from Miller McNeish & Breedlove, PA, it was revealed that Smith requested each of his former players be sent a $200 check with the message, “enjoy a dinner out compliments of Coach Dean Smith.” The enclosed checks also included the notation, “Dinner out.”