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The Case for Kevin Garnett

Here's an excerpt from a recent post by David Berri, one of the Wages of Wins guys, on his blog.

dberri.wordpress.com

Anyone who believes in the conventional, adhoc methods of valuing basketball players has to answer for the injustice done this year to Kevin Garnett:

I  analyzed the 2005-06 season and the player who led the league in Wins Produced was Kevin Garnett. Garnett finished the season with 26 Wins Produced. This marks the fourth consecutive season Garnett has been the most productive player in the NBA. Yet the sportswriters didn’t show KG any love when it comes to the MVP voting. Not a single sportswriter named him on an MVP ballot. He also wasn’t named to the All-NBA First Team, Second Team, or Third Team.

The problem for KG is not his game, but his teammates. In 2002-03 Garnett produced 31.5 wins. The rest of his team produced 15.1. The next season Garnett produced 30.5 wins while the rest of the T-Wolves produced 25.3 victories. The increased productivity of his teammates allowed the writers to notice Garnett and give him the league MVP award.

In 2004-05, as we note in the book, Garnett was essentially the same player who won the MVP. He produced 30 wins, but his teammates only produced 14.8 victories. This past season, just to make life even less fun, his teammates only produced 9.4 wins. So over the past four seasons, Garnett’s teammates have averaged 16.1 wins per year. Although Garnett is averaging close to 30 wins per season, it is not enough to overcome the performance of his co-workers.

This past season no player in the league had less productive teammates. Only two of his fellow T-Wolves posted an above average wins production per-minute played – Wally Szczerbiak and Eddie Griffin – and one of these was traded away during the season. And Griffin was only barely above average.

And that is the tragedy of Kevin Garnett. Year after year he is the most productive player in the league. And year after year he plays with many players who are not only not average, but quite a bit below average.

Basketball By The Numbers

A couple of extra points about my piece in this week’s New Yorker on “Wages of Wins.”

www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?060529crbo_books1.

For those of you who haven’t read the article, it was a review of a book by three economists—David Berri, Martin Schmidt, and Stacey Brook—who have come up with an algorithm for assessing the value of professional basketball players. Simply put, they rank players according to what they call a Win Score—which is the number of wins that player alone can be said to have been responsible for in a given season.

Here’s the amazon link to the book:

The author’s website is: www.wagesofwins.com

I’ve noticed, in reading reactions to the book around the blogosphere, a certain residual skepticism, particularly among hard-core basketball fans. Someone wrote in to point out, for instance, that Shawn Marion’s Win Score this past season was higher than Steve Nash’s, when common sense would suggest that the team would suffer far more from the loss of Nash than Marion.  I think that's right. Nash is more ultimately more valuable to the Suns than anyone else.

Basketball is tricky. No statistical formula can adequately measure the series of intangible factors that are so critical to a team’s success: a player’s impact on his teammates, for example, or attitude, or willingness to play hurt, or grace under pressure or—most important of all—how well a player plays defense. Nash’s particular, largely unquantifiable; genius is that he manages to make everyone around him much better. As Bill Simmons (world’s greatest sportswriter) points out in his column today, Tim Thomas was traded to the Suns this season after nine years of disappointment, and all of a sudden he played like a star.  Is that a conincidence? I don't think so.

Similarly, the Wages of Wins algorithm tells us that over the course of his career Ray Allen has been “worth” nearly as much to the teams he has played for as Kobe Bryant. Does that mean Allen is as good as Bryant? Of course not. Bryant is one of the greatest on-the-ball defenders of his generation and Allen is, well (let’s be nice here) not.  Perhaps the best part of Kobe's game doesn't—and probably can't—show up in any kind of statistical analysis.

But the Wages of Wins guys aren’t arguing that their formulas are the only and best way to rate players. They are making a more sophisticated—and limited—claim: for those aspects of basketball performance that are quantifiable (steals, turnovers, rebounds, shots made and missed, free throws etc) are the existing statistical measures we use to rate players any good? And if not, is there a better way to quantify the quantifiable?

To the first question, “Wages of Wins” argues—convincingly—no. For instance, they show that the correlation between a team’s payroll and a team’s performance, in the NBA, is surprisingly weak. What that tells us is that the people charged with evaluating and rewarding ability and performance in the NBA do a lousy job. In particular, they argue, traditional talent evaluation over-rates the importance of points scored, and under-rates the importance of turnovers, rebounds and scoring percentage. Wages of Wins also obliterates the so-called NBA Efficiency rating, which is the official algorithm used by the league and many basketball experts to rank the statistical performance of players. The Efficiency rating, they argue, makes the same error. It dramatically over-rewards players who take lots and lots of shots. 

Okay: part two. Is the Wages of Wins algorithm an improvement over the things like the NBA Efficiency system? To make the case for their system, the authors “fit” their algorithm to the real world. For the 2003-04 season, they add up the number of wins predicted by their algorithm for every player on every team, and compare that number to the team’s actual win total. Their average error? 1.67 wins. In other words, if you give them the statistics for every player on a given team, they can tell you how many wins that team got that season, with a margin of error under two wins. That’s pretty good.

Here’s what I think the real value of the Wages of Wins system is, though. It gives us a tool to see those instances where our intuitive ratings of players may be particularly inaccurate. In my New Yorker piece, I focused on how the algorithm tells us that Allen Iverson isn’t nearly the player we think he is. But here’s a more interesting finding. The best player, by this measure, hands down, over the past five years has been Kevin Garnett. No one else comes close. I had the authors update their numbers for this season, and Garnett is again number one (with Jason Kidd second, Shawn Marion third and LeBron James fourth). Why wasn’t Garnett’s name mentioned in the MVP voting? I know it’s fashionable these days to rag on Garnett for not making his teammates better or some such. But as David Berri told me, what the Wins Score numbers say is that every year Garnett gets better and better, and every day the quality of the players that Kevin McHale surrounds him with gets worse and worse. (Can you say Ricky Davis?)

Just for fun, here are some Wins Scores numbers for this season. Here are the players who’s Wins Score rankings differ the most from their NBA Efficiency rankings—that is, the players who’s “true” value diverges greatest from conventional wisdom, according to the Wins Score system.

Most under-rated, in order:

1. Josh Childress
2. Tyson Chandler
3. Eddie Jones
4. Chris Duhon
5. Mike Miller
6. Delonte West
7. Antonio Daniels
8. Shane Battier
9. Luther Head
10. Drew Gooden

Here are the ten most over-rated.

1. Al Harrington
2. Carmelo Anthony
3. Zach Randolph
4. Richard Hamilton
5. Chris Webber
6. Nenad Krstic
7. Allen Iverson
8. Mike Bibby
9. Antwawn Jamison
10. Ricky Davis

    Now argue with that list all you want. Factor in intangibles. Make projections. Move some people up and down. But once you’ve read the book, I promise you won’t be able to dismiss it.

CEO Pay

After reading the article in the New York Times yesterday on the hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation given over the past few years to the CEO of Home Depot, I ran across this: in 1949, the highest paid CEO in America was Charlie Wilson of General Motors, who earned $586,100 in salary, bonus and stock. That's roughly equivalent to what some of the better-compensated CEO's are making today.

But what did Wilson pay in taxes? $430,350.

Times have changed.

The Dog Whisperer

As those of you who read the New Yorker magazine know, I had a profile in last week's magazine on Cesar Millan, who hosts the "Dog Whisperer" show on the National Geographic Channel. (Sorry, the article isn't online). Cesar (everyone calls him by his first name) is a dog behaviorist, whose specialty is helping the owners of aggressive or troubled dogs. The point of my article was to use him as way of examining the idea of presence—that is, the ability of certain kinds of people to create order out of chaos.

I've received a far amount of feedback on the piece. One of the most interesting comments came from Janis Bradley. Bradley is the author of the book "Dogs Bite," which I referenced in an earlier post as one of the best things I've ever read on that issue. She's an instructor at the SPCA's Academy for Dog Trainers in San Francisco and is one of a number of dog behaviorists who are critical—to say the least—of Cesar's methods. Here is an excerpt from an email she sent me:

Here are the basics. On his TV show, the main method Millan uses for aggression is aversives (leash jerks, kicks, snaps of the hand against the neck, and restraint, among others) applied non contingently. The aversives are non contingent because they are so frequent that they're not connected to any particular behavior on the part of the dog—the dog gets popped pretty much constantly. This results in a state called learned helplessness, which means the animal hunkers down and tries to do as little as possible. This is what Millan calls "calm submission." It's exactly the same thing you see in a rat in a Skinner box that is subjected to intermittent shocks it can do nothing to avoid. This can happen quite fast, by the way, shall we say in ten minutes? The dangers to the dog are obvious, ranging from chronic stress to exacerbating the aggression, i.e., some dogs fight back when attacked. This latter is the simplest reason that aversives are a bad idea in treating aggression. Even used technically correctly as positive punishment for specific behaviors like growling and snarling, aversives do nothing to change the underlying fear or hostility, so the best you can hope for, in the words of famed vet and behaviorist, Ian Dunbar, is "removing the ticker from the time bomb." Thus such methods substantially increase the risk to humans of getting bitten.

I was aware, when I was writing the piece, of the controversy over Cesar's methods. I didn't go into it, because I didn't want to write a piece about the specifics of dog training, especially since I'd love published that piece on Pit Bulls. I really wanted to focus on Cesar, and on the broader question of what meaning dogs—and human beings—attach to movement. Nonetheless, I think it's important to acknowledge how controversial Cesar's methods are. Bradley is not alone. On some of the dog blogs, Cesar has attracted quite a bit of criticism. (Try: nationalgeographic.com)

I don't pretend to be an expert on dog training, and I'm inclined to take Bradley's comments quite seriously. But let me make a few small points. This controversy is, in no small part, Cesar's creation. In his book "Cesar's Way," which has been in the top five on Amazon for several weeks, he talks a lot about the importance of humans being behaving as pack leaders, and establishing dominance over their dogs. Along the same lines, his shows feature a number of episodes with quite spectacular footage of Cesar wrestling large and aggressive dogs into submission. That is what the critics are responding to.

What you see on the Dog Whisperer, though, are highly edited snippets of Cesar's interactions with problem dogs. In the course of researching my article, I watched a good deal of unedited footage of Cesar in action, and I also accompanied Cesar on a number of his "house-calls." What you see, when you observe the unabridged Cesar, is something quite different. For instance, Cesar's "aversives"—to use Bradley's language--don't seem non-contingent when you see him in context: on the contrary, over the course of an hour or more with a particular dog, he might only "touch" the dog once or twice, and only in response to very specific behaviors. What you also realize is that Cesar's overwhelming focus is nearly always on the owners of dogs—not on the dog's themselves. He spends most of his time trying to teach owners how to create a healthy environment for their dog: the importance of regular exercise, of clarity and consistency in communication, and so on. And despite all his talk about dominance and being a pack leader, what is striking about Cesar viewed in full context (and this is one of the major themes of my article) is how paradoxically gentle he is. That's why, in the piece, I compare the way he relates to troubled dogs with the way movement therapists work with autistic children.

I should reiterate that this is not an area in which I'm an expert. There may well be legitimate issues about how the kinds of methods Cesar uses, under some circumstances. I think as well that Bradley and others are quite right in worrying about the impact of an unsophisticated reading of Cesar's approach on the way we treat dogs. If you do what he says, and not what he does, I think you miss what makes him effective.

I guess I'd be curious to see what people like Janis Bradley think of Cesar if they observed him in operation first hand.

U.S. versus U.K.

Last week, in his New York Times column , Paul Krugman wrote about a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association , and the study is fascinating enough that it’s worth a second look. It was conducted by a group of epidemiologists at University College London (my parent’s alma mater!). The point was to compare the health of the United States and the United Kingdom. It’s an interesting question for a number of reasons, but principally because the United States spends $5274 per person, per year, on health care and the United Kingdom spends $2164, or substantially less than half as much. The question is—what do we get, in terms of health, that for extra $3100 a year?

Comparisons between countries are pretty tricky. So the study takes a number of precautions. Obviously the United States has a much larger percentage of immigrants, particularly Latino, and a large and (relatively poor) black population. So the comparison is limited to non-Hispanic whites in both countries. Health also differs, dramatically, by socio-economic status, so that everyone in the study was broken up into one of three groups by income and education. It was also limited to men and women between the ages of 55-64, and the age distribution of the two countries was identical.

So what do they find?

The first conclusion is that Americans are really, really sick compared to the British. In every socio-economic group, for instance, the prevalence of diabetes is roughly double in the United States than it is in the United Kingdom. Rates of hypertension, heart disease, heart attacks, stroke, lung disease and cancer are also all higher in the United States. And not just a little big higher. Much higher. So, for example, 2.3 percent of the English have had a stroke, versus 3.8 percent of the Americans.

Is that because Americans have unhealthier lifestyles? Not really. Levels of smoking, in the two countries, are pretty similar. Americans are much more likely to be obese (31.3 versus 23 percent). But then 30 percent of the British were heavy drinkers, versus 14.4 percent of Americans. (One of the curious facts in the study:  in both the United States and the United Kingdom, the more money you make and the more education you have, the more you drink. There are roughly twice as many heavy drinkers in the best educated English cohort as there are in the least educated English cohort. So much for class assumptions about alcohol.) The study’s author did a statistical exercise, where they assumed that the British group had exactly the same lifestyle risk factors as their American counterparts. The result? Nothing much changes. Americans were still far sicker than the British. 

Krugman argues that this is evidence of how much more stressful living in America is than living in England. I think that's absolutely right. I would simply add that it is one more nail in the coffin of the notion that good health is something that can be purchased through fancy, high-tech drugs and doctors and hospitals,.I know the idea that health care is just another consumer good is pretty popular at the moment. But its very hard to read the JAMA study, see what our $5274 actually buys us--and still believe in that notion. Our health is in reality a function of the broader society in which we live--the pressures and conditions and environments in which we find ourselves. The next time we have a debate about, say, how much to tax the rich, or how to structure old age pensions, it would be nice if someone in Washington had the courage to make this point.

All right, all right, all right

Okay. It seems like absolutely no one bought my last post.  So I'm going to do the only prudent thing and concede defeat.

I was wrong.

But before I give up entirely, let me say two things. First, a quick note from my editor at the New Yorker. He points out that the piece I wrote for the magazine on plagiarism a year and a half ago—which I linked to in the last post—was a far more subtle and sophisticated version of the half-baked argument I came up with this time around. So if you really want to know how I feel about plagiarism and intellectual property, please take the time to read it.

www.gladwell.com/2004/2004_11_25_a_borrowed.html

Second, a small attempt at defending myself. I didn't mean to be condescending towards teen-lit or any other kind of genre fiction. I'm a spy novel nut. I have read every thriller in the airport bookstore. My point was simply that genre fiction is by definition derivative. So you can't judge a work of genre fiction simply on the extent to which it resembles other genre fiction—because of course  it does. In the spy thriller I just read, the bad guy is torturing the hero and getting no where.  He tells this to the head bad-guy who says—and I'm guessing that everyone who has ever read a thriller will know what's coming next: "Don't worry. He'll talk. They always do."

Does the fact that I've read that exact line in at least five other thrillers spoil the fun? Not really. Did the writer "steal" that line from someone else? Sure. That's what a cliche is: it's what we call plagiarism the sixth or seventh time around. The issue is what else the writer did with the story: did he take that cliche and the conventions of the genre and add something to it of value or  originality? I guess that's what I want to know about the "Opal" book before I condemn it.

One more thing about my ill-fated post. Come on. The Kinkos line was kind of clever—no? :-)