Camp Nadal is a fairly sophisticated operation. A Majorcan trainer, Juan Forcades, oversees Nadal's conditioning, physical therapist Rafael Maymo spends much of his day taking notes on when and what Nadal eats; when he goes to sleep and when he wakes; how much time he spends hitting forehands, backhands and volleys. Toni, meanwhile, has harped on his nephew's weaknesses so effectively that even in the earliest rounds of last year's French Open, Rafa was scared of losing. Toni reassured him -- "You're Number 1 on clay!" -- but it didn't matter. "He never relaxes," Toni says. "He's so afraid for every match."
These days it's fashionable to say that Nadal has climbed inside Federer's head. But he needed a ladder to get there. The first rung: consistently staking out an offensive position, or, as Nadal puts it, "always trying to go more inside the court. That gives me more control of the point, no? Before I was maybe one meter behind the baseline, two meters behind." The second rung: a better serve. In his early years on tour Nadal won most of his points with preposterous saves and sterling shotmaking; his serve was strictly a point starter, a predictable slice on which bold returners feasted. After Roddick beat him in straight sets at that year's U.S. Open, the American star walked off the court thinking, he's not going to crack the top five if that serve doesn't improve.
It did. Nadal's serves, which were then clocked at an average speed of 99 mph, are now traveling in the upper 120s on the radar gun. But it wasn't just a matter of hitting the ball harder. In fact, Toni says, one reason Federer had the upper hand in 2007 was that he pushed Rafa to serve with too much velocity, and the speed of Federer's returns threw off Nadal's timing. "So we had to learn other things," Toni says. According to Roddick, Nadal now hits to both sides of the service box on his first and second deliveries. "He can kick it, he can slice it," Roddick says. "You don't really know what's coming."
5.26.2009
KEVIN GARNETT - OFFSEASON WORKOUT
“I don’t want losing to be my fault. I don’t want it to be on me. I want to make sure my stuff is correct. When it comes down to it and I’ve got to go mano y mano to get a stop, my team counts on me to do it. So I get a regimen which will prepare me and I go do it.”
His regimen includes smart eating. Garnett has a private chef in the off-season who prepares good, healthy carbohydrates and protein meals.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Do you love running on the beach, on the sand?’” “Nah, but I do love getting better.”
Getting up early before the sun rises is the hardest part of his workout. “I hear that alarm and I know I’ve got to put one foot down, then the other, wash my face, brush my teeth, and shower,” he says. “Once I hit the sand, I’m good. The air hits them lungs and you see the sun coming up.”
“We don’t worry about who’s the underdog or who’s favored. That’s just somebody’s opinion. What we worry about is getting our chemistry right. That’s what wins.”
“When you chase a dream, you chase it wholeheartedly. Once you capture it, you embrace it. You know what it feels like, you know the steps it took to get there. You know what it took to be able to scream”
His regimen includes smart eating. Garnett has a private chef in the off-season who prepares good, healthy carbohydrates and protein meals.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Do you love running on the beach, on the sand?’” “Nah, but I do love getting better.”
Getting up early before the sun rises is the hardest part of his workout. “I hear that alarm and I know I’ve got to put one foot down, then the other, wash my face, brush my teeth, and shower,” he says. “Once I hit the sand, I’m good. The air hits them lungs and you see the sun coming up.”
“We don’t worry about who’s the underdog or who’s favored. That’s just somebody’s opinion. What we worry about is getting our chemistry right. That’s what wins.”
“When you chase a dream, you chase it wholeheartedly. Once you capture it, you embrace it. You know what it feels like, you know the steps it took to get there. You know what it took to be able to scream”
5.17.2009
EVAN LONGORIA
Step into the circle with Evan Longoria. It's an imaginary place he goes to before every pitch, a place where expectations and ramifications and past failures are not allowed, a place where the only thing that matters is the challenge before him.
The Devil Rays have a 4-3 lead and at third base is Longoria, a place that demands total focus. His eyes are unblinking, his knees and elbows bent, his weight shifted to the front of his spikes. His mind is embedded in this moment, because this is the only moment he can influence. Longoria's glove flashes open as he reaches to his left; the ball takes one hop, then disappears into the webbing, and he finishes the play with an easy throw to first. White Sox manager Terry Francona says aloud, "Wow."
For the young third baseman, it's just another out. Longoria is only 23, and he hasn't played even a full season's worth of games in the big leagues, but if the managers and general managers of all 30 teams were to redraft the players in the majors, he'd be the first guy taken by many of them. "No question," says one longtime GM. Longoria arrived in Tampa Bay last season, and not coincidentally, the Rays went to the World Series and he was the unanimous pick as the AL Rookie of the Year. His potential as a hitter is unlimited, and he seemingly intercepts everything that comes within a couple of miles of his position. His ability to backhand the ball cleanly is absurd. "I don't think I've seen a better third baseman, and I played with Mike Schmidt," says Tom Foley, Tampa Bay's infield coach.
But there's something more: The quiet SoCal kid exudes an innate confidence, much like Woods does. It's a competitive ruthlessness lurking just beneath the gracious veneer. Longoria is sure he'll figure out a way to kick your ass. "The thing about Evan is that he likes the stardom, he likes all the pressure on him," says Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who shared a college suite with Longoria at Long Beach State. "That's what a superstar has to do, because everybody is looking at you. You've got to want to be special."
And Longoria has always wanted that, even when no major league organization wanted him.
In his first year at Long Beach State, he slept on a futon. The coaches remember him as remarkably quiet, comfortable in his space as Tulo's sidekick. Tulo was the star, the leader, the shortstop, so Longoria became a third baseman. When Ken Ravizza, a sports psychology consultant for the baseball team, first met Longoria, he suspected the teenager didn't see the merits of working on his mental approach, but in time he turned out to be the perfect sponge. "Looking back, if I didn't have the training I had with Ken ... I can see why some guys lose it completely," he says.
Ravizza counsels players to forgive themselves for failure -- and Longoria was far from perfect. In the 2003 draft, 1,480 players were selected; Longoria, then a senior at St. John Bosco High School, in Bellflower, Calif., was not among them. He didn't even get a scholarship offer from a Division I program. He wound up at Rio Hondo Community College, about 12 miles from his house, in Downey. Longoria didn't see that as an obstacle. The summer before classes started, he called coach Mike Salazar two or three times a week: Hey, Coach, you want to go hit? You want to go work out?
Longoria has never known any other way. When Michael Longoria came home from his job as a school maintenance worker to take them to practices, Evan's bag was already packed. "He always wanted to practice," his dad says. "He was always ready to work."
Evan also played water polo in high school, but when he was 15, he told his father, "I want to dedicate myself to baseball." He joined a summer league wood-bat team in nearby Maywood, concentrated on hitting drills and lifted weights to strengthen his skinny frame. Michael couldn't help but notice that his son seemed naturally predisposed to fixing his perceived weaknesses without any prodding. During the 2003 draft, Evan wasn't so much worried about getting picked as he was focused on getting better. "I didn't feel like I would be left out completely," he admits. "You have dreams in high school, and playing in the big leagues is the ultimate dream. But when you don't get any scholarship offers and you have to play at junior college, you start to think you might have to come up with something different in the real world -- having to get a job, get my education."
But Longoria clung to baseball, worked at it. In pickup basketball and golf games, Salazar smack-talked him, challenged him, and Longoria answered by producing under pressure. "He thinks of himself as someone who is clutch," Salazar says. When Longoria transferred to Long Beach State, in 2004, he had no presumption of stardom, only the desire to get there. "He knows himself," Ravizza says. "He's not worried about being a success. He's more concerned with the process."
Ravizza taught Longoria how to use structure to find mental relief. Everything is done through the prism of preparing for success: the way you get ready for at-bats, the way you walk to home plate, the way you forgive yourself after making an out or an error. There will be times, Ravizza told him, when you are feeling good and you can just go with it, but on the difficult days, this structure will be there for you.
Following his first season at Long Beach State, Longoria played in the 2005 Cape Cod League against the nation's best amateurs -- with the wood bats he'd been using for years. He led the league in homers and RBIs and won the MVP award. Now all the scouts wanted him, and in June 2006 he was the third pick in the draft. He reached this point, Michael Longoria believes, because in Evan's daily search for what eluded him, he made himself into a special player. "He doesn't do it for the fame," Michael says. "He does it for the challenge."
Evan Longoria, the rookie phenom. He was getting more attention last spring than guys who had been playing with the Rays for years, so he was in the perfect position to offend the veterans -- just as Delmon Young, the No. 1 pick of the 2003 draft, had done. But Longoria thrived. "He impressed me from Day One," says leftfielder Carl Crawford. "Somebody must've schooled him before he got up here, because he definitely carried himself well. If you'd watched him last year, you would've guessed that he'd been in the big leagues for 10 years. He fit right in. He doesn't want to be the guy with a lot of talent everybody hates. It was refreshing to see someone with that kind of talent act that way."
But it didn't come easy. Longoria started 2008 at Triple-A Durham and struggled at the plate. Disappointed and frustrated, he punched out a text to Tulowitzki: I am never going to get called up to the big leagues. I'm screwing myself. A week into the season, though, Longoria got called up and went to work. He asked veteran Eric Hinske about his pregame workout routine, and when Hinske told him that he did his weightlifting and physical conditioning early in the afternoon, Longoria started arriving early at Tropicana Field. After plays in the field that felt awkward to him, he asked Foley what he might have done differently. They worked together daily, and at the end of every session, Foley hit 10 balls as hard as he could at the 6'2", 210-pound third baseman. If Longoria bobbled one, he had to make a smoothie for Foley in the clubhouse, and if Longoria fielded all of them cleanly, then Foley made the smoothie.
Longoria quickly became a team leader. Rays VP Andrew Friedman walked into the clubhouse one day and saw him caught up in a moment of Guitar Hero genius, his teammates gathering around as he played at stunning speed. "Longo, is there anything you're not good at?" Hinske asked. Of course there is. But when Longoria struggles, he leans on structure. Last August he got hit by a pitch, broke his right wrist and was on the disabled list for a month while his teammates tried to hold on in the AL East. Ravizza was watching the Rays on TV and caught a shot of Longoria in the dugout pulling his batting gloves out of his pocket. Later, Ravizza called with a question: "Were you mentally preparing for your at-bats?" Longoria told him yes, that each time his replacement came up, he would put on his gloves and visualize the entire at-bat, pitch by pitch. And when the AB was over, he'd take off the gloves.
In his first postseason he smashed a home run in his first playoff at-bat, against the White Sox, and then again in his second. He homered in four straight ALCS games against the Red Sox. But then pitchers started executing the scouting report, moving his feet off the plate with inside fastballs before spinning breaking balls low and away. Longoria descended into a postseason abyss and went hitless in his first 17 at-bats in the World Series against the Phillies. Slowly, however, he tunneled his way out. There was no rookie panic, no drowning in the tidal wave of the postseason.
During the outset of his second season while in spring training, and a reporter has stopped to ask Longoria questions about himself. Teammates are sitting nearby, within earshot, and 20 minutes into the interview, his answers become clipped, and he glances around the room. It becomes clear: He's not comfortable talking about himself in front of the other Rays, out of respect for them. "He understands his place in the game already," says manager Joe Maddon.
The Devil Rays have a 4-3 lead and at third base is Longoria, a place that demands total focus. His eyes are unblinking, his knees and elbows bent, his weight shifted to the front of his spikes. His mind is embedded in this moment, because this is the only moment he can influence. Longoria's glove flashes open as he reaches to his left; the ball takes one hop, then disappears into the webbing, and he finishes the play with an easy throw to first. White Sox manager Terry Francona says aloud, "Wow."
For the young third baseman, it's just another out. Longoria is only 23, and he hasn't played even a full season's worth of games in the big leagues, but if the managers and general managers of all 30 teams were to redraft the players in the majors, he'd be the first guy taken by many of them. "No question," says one longtime GM. Longoria arrived in Tampa Bay last season, and not coincidentally, the Rays went to the World Series and he was the unanimous pick as the AL Rookie of the Year. His potential as a hitter is unlimited, and he seemingly intercepts everything that comes within a couple of miles of his position. His ability to backhand the ball cleanly is absurd. "I don't think I've seen a better third baseman, and I played with Mike Schmidt," says Tom Foley, Tampa Bay's infield coach.
But there's something more: The quiet SoCal kid exudes an innate confidence, much like Woods does. It's a competitive ruthlessness lurking just beneath the gracious veneer. Longoria is sure he'll figure out a way to kick your ass. "The thing about Evan is that he likes the stardom, he likes all the pressure on him," says Rockies shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who shared a college suite with Longoria at Long Beach State. "That's what a superstar has to do, because everybody is looking at you. You've got to want to be special."
And Longoria has always wanted that, even when no major league organization wanted him.
In his first year at Long Beach State, he slept on a futon. The coaches remember him as remarkably quiet, comfortable in his space as Tulo's sidekick. Tulo was the star, the leader, the shortstop, so Longoria became a third baseman. When Ken Ravizza, a sports psychology consultant for the baseball team, first met Longoria, he suspected the teenager didn't see the merits of working on his mental approach, but in time he turned out to be the perfect sponge. "Looking back, if I didn't have the training I had with Ken ... I can see why some guys lose it completely," he says.
Ravizza counsels players to forgive themselves for failure -- and Longoria was far from perfect. In the 2003 draft, 1,480 players were selected; Longoria, then a senior at St. John Bosco High School, in Bellflower, Calif., was not among them. He didn't even get a scholarship offer from a Division I program. He wound up at Rio Hondo Community College, about 12 miles from his house, in Downey. Longoria didn't see that as an obstacle. The summer before classes started, he called coach Mike Salazar two or three times a week: Hey, Coach, you want to go hit? You want to go work out?
Longoria has never known any other way. When Michael Longoria came home from his job as a school maintenance worker to take them to practices, Evan's bag was already packed. "He always wanted to practice," his dad says. "He was always ready to work."
Evan also played water polo in high school, but when he was 15, he told his father, "I want to dedicate myself to baseball." He joined a summer league wood-bat team in nearby Maywood, concentrated on hitting drills and lifted weights to strengthen his skinny frame. Michael couldn't help but notice that his son seemed naturally predisposed to fixing his perceived weaknesses without any prodding. During the 2003 draft, Evan wasn't so much worried about getting picked as he was focused on getting better. "I didn't feel like I would be left out completely," he admits. "You have dreams in high school, and playing in the big leagues is the ultimate dream. But when you don't get any scholarship offers and you have to play at junior college, you start to think you might have to come up with something different in the real world -- having to get a job, get my education."
But Longoria clung to baseball, worked at it. In pickup basketball and golf games, Salazar smack-talked him, challenged him, and Longoria answered by producing under pressure. "He thinks of himself as someone who is clutch," Salazar says. When Longoria transferred to Long Beach State, in 2004, he had no presumption of stardom, only the desire to get there. "He knows himself," Ravizza says. "He's not worried about being a success. He's more concerned with the process."
Ravizza taught Longoria how to use structure to find mental relief. Everything is done through the prism of preparing for success: the way you get ready for at-bats, the way you walk to home plate, the way you forgive yourself after making an out or an error. There will be times, Ravizza told him, when you are feeling good and you can just go with it, but on the difficult days, this structure will be there for you.
Following his first season at Long Beach State, Longoria played in the 2005 Cape Cod League against the nation's best amateurs -- with the wood bats he'd been using for years. He led the league in homers and RBIs and won the MVP award. Now all the scouts wanted him, and in June 2006 he was the third pick in the draft. He reached this point, Michael Longoria believes, because in Evan's daily search for what eluded him, he made himself into a special player. "He doesn't do it for the fame," Michael says. "He does it for the challenge."
Evan Longoria, the rookie phenom. He was getting more attention last spring than guys who had been playing with the Rays for years, so he was in the perfect position to offend the veterans -- just as Delmon Young, the No. 1 pick of the 2003 draft, had done. But Longoria thrived. "He impressed me from Day One," says leftfielder Carl Crawford. "Somebody must've schooled him before he got up here, because he definitely carried himself well. If you'd watched him last year, you would've guessed that he'd been in the big leagues for 10 years. He fit right in. He doesn't want to be the guy with a lot of talent everybody hates. It was refreshing to see someone with that kind of talent act that way."
But it didn't come easy. Longoria started 2008 at Triple-A Durham and struggled at the plate. Disappointed and frustrated, he punched out a text to Tulowitzki: I am never going to get called up to the big leagues. I'm screwing myself. A week into the season, though, Longoria got called up and went to work. He asked veteran Eric Hinske about his pregame workout routine, and when Hinske told him that he did his weightlifting and physical conditioning early in the afternoon, Longoria started arriving early at Tropicana Field. After plays in the field that felt awkward to him, he asked Foley what he might have done differently. They worked together daily, and at the end of every session, Foley hit 10 balls as hard as he could at the 6'2", 210-pound third baseman. If Longoria bobbled one, he had to make a smoothie for Foley in the clubhouse, and if Longoria fielded all of them cleanly, then Foley made the smoothie.
Longoria quickly became a team leader. Rays VP Andrew Friedman walked into the clubhouse one day and saw him caught up in a moment of Guitar Hero genius, his teammates gathering around as he played at stunning speed. "Longo, is there anything you're not good at?" Hinske asked. Of course there is. But when Longoria struggles, he leans on structure. Last August he got hit by a pitch, broke his right wrist and was on the disabled list for a month while his teammates tried to hold on in the AL East. Ravizza was watching the Rays on TV and caught a shot of Longoria in the dugout pulling his batting gloves out of his pocket. Later, Ravizza called with a question: "Were you mentally preparing for your at-bats?" Longoria told him yes, that each time his replacement came up, he would put on his gloves and visualize the entire at-bat, pitch by pitch. And when the AB was over, he'd take off the gloves.
In his first postseason he smashed a home run in his first playoff at-bat, against the White Sox, and then again in his second. He homered in four straight ALCS games against the Red Sox. But then pitchers started executing the scouting report, moving his feet off the plate with inside fastballs before spinning breaking balls low and away. Longoria descended into a postseason abyss and went hitless in his first 17 at-bats in the World Series against the Phillies. Slowly, however, he tunneled his way out. There was no rookie panic, no drowning in the tidal wave of the postseason.
During the outset of his second season while in spring training, and a reporter has stopped to ask Longoria questions about himself. Teammates are sitting nearby, within earshot, and 20 minutes into the interview, his answers become clipped, and he glances around the room. It becomes clear: He's not comfortable talking about himself in front of the other Rays, out of respect for them. "He understands his place in the game already," says manager Joe Maddon.
Ron Washington Leading Texas Rangers To The Top
No matter how great the talent level, teams won't consistently win without trust between a coach and his players.
Trust is established over time. It must be earned and shortcuts don't exist.
"Trust is huge. It's everything. It's the foundation for any kind of chemistry," Michael Young said the other day. "When you have trust, everyone is pulling in the same direction. That's half of the battle when it comes to wining ball games."
The Rangers trust their coach.
It's among the reasons they're in first place in the AL West midway through May.
Trust is established over time. It must be earned and shortcuts don't exist.
"Trust is huge. It's everything. It's the foundation for any kind of chemistry," Michael Young said the other day. "When you have trust, everyone is pulling in the same direction. That's half of the battle when it comes to wining ball games."
The Rangers trust their coach.
It's among the reasons they're in first place in the AL West midway through May.
5.16.2009
QUOTES
KEITH BULLOCK - Tennessee Titans LB: Confidence is like money. Very hard to get and very easy to lose.
PAT SUMMITT: "If it doesn't bother you, it won't bother them."
PAT RILEY: "Great effort springs naturally from great attitude."
BRANDON ROY: "Now I see why Kobe, LeBron have that extra drive. You have to take these growing pains and remember them," Roy said after their first round exit to the Houston Rockets.
Kobe to Coach K: "I want you to let me guard the best player on every team we (Team USA) face. And I promise that I will destroy him."
Mike Krzyzewski: "Failure requires you to reevaluate."
Bart Starr - former NFL great: “If there was just one word I could use to describe a successful person, that one word would be attitude.”
Tom Brady: "Don't get caught up in worrying about what other guys do. When I started worrying about myself that was when things started going better for me."
Benjamin E. Mays: "The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal, but in having no goal to reach."
Denver Nuggets guard J.R.Smith said point guard Chauncy Billups allows Coach George Karl to "save his breath" when talking to his team.
George Karl: "The Chauncey trade was huge because everything we were preaching, teaching and coaching, he personified."
Lions' Schwartz: "The playoffs are a long way away. What's more important is what happens today. We need to set goals on a shorter scale."
Derek Fisher: "The guys who separate themselves are those who are able to take what appear to be setbacks and stay prepared, keep working."
Joe Torre: "A winner is somebody who goes out there every day and exhausts himself trying to get something accomplished."
From the book "A New Breed of Leader": Katharine Graham, "the most important leadership quality is the absence of arrogance."
SU Coach Marrone: "Competition is the key to being successful. Look at any team, if it's successful, they have competition on that team."
Nick Saban" "We had a good spring, but I don't think the true team chemistry really surfaces until the summertime. The coaches are always with the guys in spring practice. In the summer, the coaches aren't there as much. That's when the true leadership starts to emerge. You start to see the core buy-in that everybody has in terms of how they go about what they do. They have to work with the strength and conditioning coaches. For the first time, the responsibility becomes theirs instead of somebody making them do it. That's where the true chemistry (develops); you see what the team might be."
Peter Drucker: "To trust a leader, it is not necessary to like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him."
John Stuart Mill: "He who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do."
PAT SUMMITT: "If it doesn't bother you, it won't bother them."
PAT RILEY: "Great effort springs naturally from great attitude."
BRANDON ROY: "Now I see why Kobe, LeBron have that extra drive. You have to take these growing pains and remember them," Roy said after their first round exit to the Houston Rockets.
Kobe to Coach K: "I want you to let me guard the best player on every team we (Team USA) face. And I promise that I will destroy him."
Mike Krzyzewski: "Failure requires you to reevaluate."
Bart Starr - former NFL great: “If there was just one word I could use to describe a successful person, that one word would be attitude.”
Tom Brady: "Don't get caught up in worrying about what other guys do. When I started worrying about myself that was when things started going better for me."
Benjamin E. Mays: "The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal, but in having no goal to reach."
Denver Nuggets guard J.R.Smith said point guard Chauncy Billups allows Coach George Karl to "save his breath" when talking to his team.
George Karl: "The Chauncey trade was huge because everything we were preaching, teaching and coaching, he personified."
Lions' Schwartz: "The playoffs are a long way away. What's more important is what happens today. We need to set goals on a shorter scale."
Derek Fisher: "The guys who separate themselves are those who are able to take what appear to be setbacks and stay prepared, keep working."
Joe Torre: "A winner is somebody who goes out there every day and exhausts himself trying to get something accomplished."
From the book "A New Breed of Leader": Katharine Graham, "the most important leadership quality is the absence of arrogance."
SU Coach Marrone: "Competition is the key to being successful. Look at any team, if it's successful, they have competition on that team."
Nick Saban" "We had a good spring, but I don't think the true team chemistry really surfaces until the summertime. The coaches are always with the guys in spring practice. In the summer, the coaches aren't there as much. That's when the true leadership starts to emerge. You start to see the core buy-in that everybody has in terms of how they go about what they do. They have to work with the strength and conditioning coaches. For the first time, the responsibility becomes theirs instead of somebody making them do it. That's where the true chemistry (develops); you see what the team might be."
Peter Drucker: "To trust a leader, it is not necessary to like him. Nor is it necessary to agree with him."
John Stuart Mill: "He who is never required to do what he cannot do, never does what he can do."
5.15.2009
A NEW MEASURE OF SUCCESS
Those stat guys are at it again, and now the Moneyball math of baseball has come to the NBA. Armed with dazzling equations, NBA front offices are finding entirely new ways to quantify a player's talent and judge his real value.
If Dean Oliver and his peers are right, then you are wrong. Wrong if you think Michael Redd is a very good player, wrong if you think Jason Collins is a bad one and wrong if you believe Shane Battier is just another Dukie with a so-so NBA career. � Oliver is a Cal Tech grad with an engineering Ph.D. who works as a paid consultant to the Seattle SuperSonics. He is also part of a small but growing movement, comprising both league insiders and outsiders, that sees its sport through a statistical prism similar to that of the young, laptop-toting generation of baseball executives made famous in Moneyball, Michael Lewis's best-selling book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. The teams at the forefront of the movement have hired math whizzes such as Oliver, 36, or former Rhodes scholar candidates such as Sam Presti, 29, the Spurs' assistant general manager, or Stanford MBAs such as Sam Hinkie, 27, a special assistant to Rockets G.M. Carroll Dawson. Joining forces with a burgeoning cult of independent statheads and academics, these new insiders have the same goals as their more celebrated baseball brethren: to identify, through complex statistical analysis, trends, talent and value that no one else sees. By looking deeper than traditional measures of success like ppg, rpg and FG%, they are challenging conventional NBA wisdom and changing, if at first incrementally, how players are evaluated and teams are scouted.
Take, for example, the case of Collins, the fifth-year center for the Nets. To the casual fan Collins is rather unimpressive. He rarely scores, doesn't block many shots for a center and has an embarrassing habit of laying in balls that, at 7 feet tall, he should be dunking. He is the type of player who could go his entire career and never make a SportsCenter highlight, an anonymity reinforced by his career stats (5.6 points, 4.9 rebounds, 0.6 blocks). But what if one were to dig deeper and measure other aspects of his game? The number of charges taken. The positioning on rebounds. The efficiency of picks set. The fouls not committed.
Perhaps then one would come to the same conclusion as Oliver's compatriot Dan Rosenbaum, a 35-year-old UNC Greensboro economics professor, occasional correspondent of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and originator of a respected player-rating system. According to Rosenbaum's calculations, Collins is not a stiff at all but one of the NBA's premier defensive centers: the fourth-most effective in the league over the last three seasons, behind only Ben Wallace, Dikembe Mutombo and Theo Ratliff. The methodology is complex (box) but at its core his system measures how New Jersey performs when Collins is on the floor versus when he's off it. Think of it as basketball's version of hockey's plus-minus ratio with a few esoteric twists. The upshot: Over the last three seasons the Nets have been remarkably more effective at the defensive end with Collins in the lineup; they foul less, allow fewer free throws, rebound better and allow fewer points. "He's very consistent and consistently very good," says Rosenbaum, "meaning he's either the luckiest center alive and teams just fall apart when he's on the court, or he's doing something."
On the other hand, Rosenbaum argues that Redd is, statistically, a defensive disaster, his worst-rated two guard in the league by a wide margin. Not even the Bucks guard's scoring ability (23.0 points per game in 2004-05) can counterbalance his defensive flaws. Over the course of any given 100 possessions, the Bucks are 4.5 points worse on defense with Redd in the game--and only 2.5 points better on offense. As for Battier, by Rosenbaum's calculations he was the best defensive small forward in the league last season. Memphis was 6.3 points better (per 48 minutes) than its opponent with Battier on the floor and 4.8 points worse with him on the bench.
This approach is far from an exact science, a point that even the statheads emphatically make. For one, unlike baseball, in which individual performance can be easily isolated, the success of a basketball player is influenced by nine others. Still, coaches such as the Rockets' Jeff Van Gundy and the Spurs' Gregg Popovich and front office executives such as the Sonics' Wally Walker are keeping an open mind about their sport's new math. Says Walker, "In the bigger picture it is helpful. It does allow us to do apples-to-apples comparisons of players and combinations. Data points you can add to the old-fashioned [measures]."
Today franchises--and, for that matter, anyone with a computer--have access to countless complex statistics that are disseminated through the Internet, most notably by the game-charters at 82games.com, a website that provides a staggering amount of data, sliced and diced in hundreds of different ways. This season Roland Beech, a 36-year-old suburban dad who runs the site out of his Northern California home, will have more than 100 volunteers charting games and tracking everything from contested shots to off-the-ball player movement. Not surprisingly, among the most avid visitors to the site are NBA front-office personnel, one of whom asked in a recent e-mail, "Can you add rebound of own shot percent to the rebounding stats?"
The growing appetite NBA front offices have for this outsider-generated data has, in turn, created a market for hiring these statheads on staff. They're employed largely as advisers, not decision-makers, but it's not far-fetched to think that they'll be pulling the strings in the near future. Among the most promising from this group is Celtics senior vice president for operations Daryl Morey, 31, who graduated from MIT's Sloan School of Management and considers Bill James, the patron saint of quantitative analysis in sports, to be his role model. While Morey by no means ignores points per game, rebounds per game and other statistics popularly held up as benchmarks of success, he also recognizes that those numbers can inflate (or deflate) a player's value. Instead he is constantly looking for other, more obscure indicators of success such as turnover ratios, eFG% (a weighted field goal percentage that takes into account the added value of three-pointers) and productivity per possession. Yet all of these apparent abstractions have a clear bottom line. "It's the same principle," says Morey of the comparisons with Moneyball. "Generate wins for less dollars."
That has led Morey and the Celtics to such players as Dan Dickau, whom the Celtics acquired in a sign-and-trade this summer from the Hornets for a second-round draft pick. During his first two years in the league, the 6-foot point guard was renowned more for his moppish hair than his skills. After being traded from the Mavericks to the Hornets last season, he was, for the first time in his young career, given a chance to play significant minutes, and he averaged 13.2 points and 5.2 assists. But those statistics told only part of the story. What attracted the Celtics to Dickau were some less-heralded numbers. His ratio of 4.7 assists last season for every bad pass is on par with the 4.8 average of Steve Nash, widely considered to be the game's premier pure point guard. One can reasonably surmise that playing with better players, Dickau would have had a higher ratio. This is not to suggest that Dickau is a Nash-caliber player, only that, at the price of $7.5 million over three years, Dickau might have been undervalued by the market.
The new math is not just for evaluating individual player value. It's also a useful tool in scouting team tendencies. During the postseason Oliver--who is best known for his book, Basketball on Paper, which is full of sprawling equations and includes chapters addressing such vexing questions as "The Significance of Derrick Coleman's Insignificance"--focuses on Seattle's opponents. Using a program he created called Roboscout, which draws on box scores, shot chart data from 82games.com and play-by-play information, he seeks tendencies that a more traditional scout might not notice.
Last spring, for example, as the Sonics prepared to face the Spurs in the second round of the playoffs, Oliver turned up evidence that while San Antonio was a dominant defensive team, particularly in the paint, it was not bulletproof. "When you go at the midrange, there was a big hole," he explains. "Compared to the rest of the league, the Spurs are 30-35 percent less vulnerable than the rest of the league from three-point land but 30 percent more vulnerable from midrange." So, partly on Oliver's advice, the Sonics pulled up for 15- to 18-foot jumper after jumper. In the end Seattle increased its midrange shooting more than any other Spurs opponent and surprised many people by taking a superior San Antonio team to six games. "If you have a good midrange game against us, you have a better chance," confirms Spurs assistant Mike Budenholzer. "And with the Sonics, since we wanted to keep them off the three-point line, that left us weaker in the midrange game."
as one can imagine, not all basketball people buy into the concept that some geek with a computer can tell them how to play the game. Still, one doesn't find the generational divide or the hostility between traditionalist and stathead that's so pervasive in baseball. This is, in part, because the NBA numbers spit out by the computers of Oliver, Hinkie and Morey often reinforce the beliefs of old-schoolers rather than refute them. In fact, the number crunchers have found some unlikely allies within basketball's old school. Del Harris is not young (he's 68), mathematically inclined ("I can't even remember my phone number") or high-tech (rather than a tablet PC or laptop, he carries around thick blue binders of stats, marked "offense" and "defense"). Regardless, the Mavericks assistant has long been one of the coaches most open to statistical analysis, dating to his days as coach of the Rockets, Bucks and Lakers. As a result, he has cred with both crowds.
For years the Mavericks have worked with Jeff Sagarin (of Sagarin football ratings fame) and Indiana University professor Wayne Winston. The duo, who created a system called WINVAL in 2000--a precursor to Rosenbaum's adjusted plus-minus formula--sends regular updates throughout the season to Cuban, Harris and coach Avery Johnson. "Some of the conclusions," says Harris, who parses the data, "make you laugh, like when they take data from a few games and tell us one of our best defenders is actually our worst." Still, there is plenty of promising data to consider.
Last year, after Game 5 of Dallas's second-round playoff series against Phoenix, Winston sent an e-mail that broke down how different Mavs combinations fared against various Phoenix lineups. The correspondence highlighted a recurrent postseason theme. As Winston wrote, in scenario after scenario, " Daniels Stack horrible," " Daniels and Stack a disaster," "Stack and Daniels a killer." In each situation the team fared poorly--a minus-13 point differential here, a minus-15 point differential there--when Marquis Daniels and Jerry Stackhouse play together. Harris discussed the findings with Johnson, who took them into account in substitution patterns (he didn't even play Daniels in Game 6), even if they weren't easily explained. "It didn't make sense to us why," says Harris. "Both are good players, and both do well with other combinations. But together, it didn't work out."
As for the players themselves, most have no idea that they've been reduced to living, dribbling equations. Sonics forward Nick Collison, for example, is unfamiliar with the new math, even though Oliver works for his team. "I've heard about what he does, seen him at practice," says Collison, "but I'm not sure how it works." When he was informed that according to Oliver, he is one of the NBA's more effective reserves (opposing teams shot about 3% worse when the Sonics sub was in the game), Collison brightens up. "Good," he says. "Then he's a genius."
If Dean Oliver and his peers are right, then you are wrong. Wrong if you think Michael Redd is a very good player, wrong if you think Jason Collins is a bad one and wrong if you believe Shane Battier is just another Dukie with a so-so NBA career. � Oliver is a Cal Tech grad with an engineering Ph.D. who works as a paid consultant to the Seattle SuperSonics. He is also part of a small but growing movement, comprising both league insiders and outsiders, that sees its sport through a statistical prism similar to that of the young, laptop-toting generation of baseball executives made famous in Moneyball, Michael Lewis's best-selling book about Billy Beane and the Oakland A's. The teams at the forefront of the movement have hired math whizzes such as Oliver, 36, or former Rhodes scholar candidates such as Sam Presti, 29, the Spurs' assistant general manager, or Stanford MBAs such as Sam Hinkie, 27, a special assistant to Rockets G.M. Carroll Dawson. Joining forces with a burgeoning cult of independent statheads and academics, these new insiders have the same goals as their more celebrated baseball brethren: to identify, through complex statistical analysis, trends, talent and value that no one else sees. By looking deeper than traditional measures of success like ppg, rpg and FG%, they are challenging conventional NBA wisdom and changing, if at first incrementally, how players are evaluated and teams are scouted.
Take, for example, the case of Collins, the fifth-year center for the Nets. To the casual fan Collins is rather unimpressive. He rarely scores, doesn't block many shots for a center and has an embarrassing habit of laying in balls that, at 7 feet tall, he should be dunking. He is the type of player who could go his entire career and never make a SportsCenter highlight, an anonymity reinforced by his career stats (5.6 points, 4.9 rebounds, 0.6 blocks). But what if one were to dig deeper and measure other aspects of his game? The number of charges taken. The positioning on rebounds. The efficiency of picks set. The fouls not committed.
Perhaps then one would come to the same conclusion as Oliver's compatriot Dan Rosenbaum, a 35-year-old UNC Greensboro economics professor, occasional correspondent of Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and originator of a respected player-rating system. According to Rosenbaum's calculations, Collins is not a stiff at all but one of the NBA's premier defensive centers: the fourth-most effective in the league over the last three seasons, behind only Ben Wallace, Dikembe Mutombo and Theo Ratliff. The methodology is complex (box) but at its core his system measures how New Jersey performs when Collins is on the floor versus when he's off it. Think of it as basketball's version of hockey's plus-minus ratio with a few esoteric twists. The upshot: Over the last three seasons the Nets have been remarkably more effective at the defensive end with Collins in the lineup; they foul less, allow fewer free throws, rebound better and allow fewer points. "He's very consistent and consistently very good," says Rosenbaum, "meaning he's either the luckiest center alive and teams just fall apart when he's on the court, or he's doing something."
On the other hand, Rosenbaum argues that Redd is, statistically, a defensive disaster, his worst-rated two guard in the league by a wide margin. Not even the Bucks guard's scoring ability (23.0 points per game in 2004-05) can counterbalance his defensive flaws. Over the course of any given 100 possessions, the Bucks are 4.5 points worse on defense with Redd in the game--and only 2.5 points better on offense. As for Battier, by Rosenbaum's calculations he was the best defensive small forward in the league last season. Memphis was 6.3 points better (per 48 minutes) than its opponent with Battier on the floor and 4.8 points worse with him on the bench.
This approach is far from an exact science, a point that even the statheads emphatically make. For one, unlike baseball, in which individual performance can be easily isolated, the success of a basketball player is influenced by nine others. Still, coaches such as the Rockets' Jeff Van Gundy and the Spurs' Gregg Popovich and front office executives such as the Sonics' Wally Walker are keeping an open mind about their sport's new math. Says Walker, "In the bigger picture it is helpful. It does allow us to do apples-to-apples comparisons of players and combinations. Data points you can add to the old-fashioned [measures]."
Today franchises--and, for that matter, anyone with a computer--have access to countless complex statistics that are disseminated through the Internet, most notably by the game-charters at 82games.com, a website that provides a staggering amount of data, sliced and diced in hundreds of different ways. This season Roland Beech, a 36-year-old suburban dad who runs the site out of his Northern California home, will have more than 100 volunteers charting games and tracking everything from contested shots to off-the-ball player movement. Not surprisingly, among the most avid visitors to the site are NBA front-office personnel, one of whom asked in a recent e-mail, "Can you add rebound of own shot percent to the rebounding stats?"
The growing appetite NBA front offices have for this outsider-generated data has, in turn, created a market for hiring these statheads on staff. They're employed largely as advisers, not decision-makers, but it's not far-fetched to think that they'll be pulling the strings in the near future. Among the most promising from this group is Celtics senior vice president for operations Daryl Morey, 31, who graduated from MIT's Sloan School of Management and considers Bill James, the patron saint of quantitative analysis in sports, to be his role model. While Morey by no means ignores points per game, rebounds per game and other statistics popularly held up as benchmarks of success, he also recognizes that those numbers can inflate (or deflate) a player's value. Instead he is constantly looking for other, more obscure indicators of success such as turnover ratios, eFG% (a weighted field goal percentage that takes into account the added value of three-pointers) and productivity per possession. Yet all of these apparent abstractions have a clear bottom line. "It's the same principle," says Morey of the comparisons with Moneyball. "Generate wins for less dollars."
That has led Morey and the Celtics to such players as Dan Dickau, whom the Celtics acquired in a sign-and-trade this summer from the Hornets for a second-round draft pick. During his first two years in the league, the 6-foot point guard was renowned more for his moppish hair than his skills. After being traded from the Mavericks to the Hornets last season, he was, for the first time in his young career, given a chance to play significant minutes, and he averaged 13.2 points and 5.2 assists. But those statistics told only part of the story. What attracted the Celtics to Dickau were some less-heralded numbers. His ratio of 4.7 assists last season for every bad pass is on par with the 4.8 average of Steve Nash, widely considered to be the game's premier pure point guard. One can reasonably surmise that playing with better players, Dickau would have had a higher ratio. This is not to suggest that Dickau is a Nash-caliber player, only that, at the price of $7.5 million over three years, Dickau might have been undervalued by the market.
The new math is not just for evaluating individual player value. It's also a useful tool in scouting team tendencies. During the postseason Oliver--who is best known for his book, Basketball on Paper, which is full of sprawling equations and includes chapters addressing such vexing questions as "The Significance of Derrick Coleman's Insignificance"--focuses on Seattle's opponents. Using a program he created called Roboscout, which draws on box scores, shot chart data from 82games.com and play-by-play information, he seeks tendencies that a more traditional scout might not notice.
Last spring, for example, as the Sonics prepared to face the Spurs in the second round of the playoffs, Oliver turned up evidence that while San Antonio was a dominant defensive team, particularly in the paint, it was not bulletproof. "When you go at the midrange, there was a big hole," he explains. "Compared to the rest of the league, the Spurs are 30-35 percent less vulnerable than the rest of the league from three-point land but 30 percent more vulnerable from midrange." So, partly on Oliver's advice, the Sonics pulled up for 15- to 18-foot jumper after jumper. In the end Seattle increased its midrange shooting more than any other Spurs opponent and surprised many people by taking a superior San Antonio team to six games. "If you have a good midrange game against us, you have a better chance," confirms Spurs assistant Mike Budenholzer. "And with the Sonics, since we wanted to keep them off the three-point line, that left us weaker in the midrange game."
as one can imagine, not all basketball people buy into the concept that some geek with a computer can tell them how to play the game. Still, one doesn't find the generational divide or the hostility between traditionalist and stathead that's so pervasive in baseball. This is, in part, because the NBA numbers spit out by the computers of Oliver, Hinkie and Morey often reinforce the beliefs of old-schoolers rather than refute them. In fact, the number crunchers have found some unlikely allies within basketball's old school. Del Harris is not young (he's 68), mathematically inclined ("I can't even remember my phone number") or high-tech (rather than a tablet PC or laptop, he carries around thick blue binders of stats, marked "offense" and "defense"). Regardless, the Mavericks assistant has long been one of the coaches most open to statistical analysis, dating to his days as coach of the Rockets, Bucks and Lakers. As a result, he has cred with both crowds.
For years the Mavericks have worked with Jeff Sagarin (of Sagarin football ratings fame) and Indiana University professor Wayne Winston. The duo, who created a system called WINVAL in 2000--a precursor to Rosenbaum's adjusted plus-minus formula--sends regular updates throughout the season to Cuban, Harris and coach Avery Johnson. "Some of the conclusions," says Harris, who parses the data, "make you laugh, like when they take data from a few games and tell us one of our best defenders is actually our worst." Still, there is plenty of promising data to consider.
Last year, after Game 5 of Dallas's second-round playoff series against Phoenix, Winston sent an e-mail that broke down how different Mavs combinations fared against various Phoenix lineups. The correspondence highlighted a recurrent postseason theme. As Winston wrote, in scenario after scenario, " Daniels Stack horrible," " Daniels and Stack a disaster," "Stack and Daniels a killer." In each situation the team fared poorly--a minus-13 point differential here, a minus-15 point differential there--when Marquis Daniels and Jerry Stackhouse play together. Harris discussed the findings with Johnson, who took them into account in substitution patterns (he didn't even play Daniels in Game 6), even if they weren't easily explained. "It didn't make sense to us why," says Harris. "Both are good players, and both do well with other combinations. But together, it didn't work out."
As for the players themselves, most have no idea that they've been reduced to living, dribbling equations. Sonics forward Nick Collison, for example, is unfamiliar with the new math, even though Oliver works for his team. "I've heard about what he does, seen him at practice," says Collison, "but I'm not sure how it works." When he was informed that according to Oliver, he is one of the NBA's more effective reserves (opposing teams shot about 3% worse when the Sonics sub was in the game), Collison brightens up. "Good," he says. "Then he's a genius."
SHANE BATTIER - NO STATS ALL-STAR
The No-Stats All-Star
Out of Duke University. . . . A 6-foot-8-inch forward. . . .
A Coach's Dream Before one game, Shane Battier asked Coach Rick Adelman (right) if he could come off the bench to be able to guard the high-scoring sixth-man Manu Ginóbili. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” says the Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey.
Battier Knows Bryant is a Less-Efficient Scorer 1 Off the dribble. 2 Shooting from long range with a hand in his face. 3 Going to his left, not his right.
He had more or less admitted to me that this part of his job left him cold. ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ he said, as he struggled to explain how a man on the receiving end of the raging love of 18,557 people in a darkened arena could feel nothing. “If you had filet mignon every single night, you’d stop tasting it.”
To him the only pleasure in these sounds — the name of his beloved alma mater, the roar of the crowd — was that they marked the end of the worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups and the introductions. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small talk with players on the other team. All those players making exaggerated gestures of affection toward one another before the game, who don’t actually know one another, or even want to. “I hate being out on the floor wasting that time,” he said. “I used to try to talk to people, but then I figured out no one actually liked me very much.” Instead of engaging in the pretense that these other professional basketball players actually know and like him, he slips away into the locker room.
Shane Battier!
And up Shane Battier popped, to the howl of the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game at the Toyota Center in Houston, and jumped playfully into Yao Ming (the center “out of China”). Now, finally, came the best part of his day, when he would be, oddly, most scrutinized and least understood.
Seldom are regular-season games in the N.B.A. easy to get worked up for. Yesterday Battier couldn’t tell me whom the team played three days before. (“The Knicks!” he exclaimed a minute later. “We played the Knicks!”) Tonight, though it was a midweek game in the middle of January, was different. Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.” Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.
Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as some chump.” He senses that some players actually look forward to being guarded by him. “No one dreads being guarded by me,” he said. Morey confirmed as much: “That’s actually true. But for two reasons: (a) They don’t think anyone can guard them and (b) they really scoff at the notion Shane Battier could guard them. They all think his reputation exceeds his ability.” Even as Battier was being introduced in the arena, Ahmad Rashad was wrapping up his pregame report on NBA TV and saying, “Shane Battier will try to stop Kobe Bryant.” This caused the co-host Gary Payton to laugh and reply, “Ain’t gonna happen,” and the other co-host, Chris Webber, to add, “I think Kobe will score 50, and they’ll win by 19 going away.”
Early on, Hoop Scoop magazine named Shane Battier the fourth-best seventh grader in the United States. When he graduated from Detroit Country Day School in 1997, he received the Naismith Award as the best high-school basketball player in the nation. When he graduated from Duke in 2001, where he won a record-tying 131 college-basketball games, including that year’s N.C.A.A. championship, he received another Naismith Award as the best college basketball player in the nation. He was drafted in the first round by the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, not just a bad basketball team but the one with the worst winning percentage in N.B.A. history — whereupon he was almost instantly dismissed, even by his own franchise, as a lesser talent. The year after Battier joined the Grizzlies, the team’s general manager was fired and the N.B.A. legend Jerry West, a k a the Logo because his silhouette is the official emblem of the N.B.A., took over the team. “From the minute Jerry West got there he was trying to trade me,” Battier says. If West didn’t have any takers, it was in part because Battier seemed limited: most of the other players on the court, and some of the players on the bench, too, were more obviously gifted than he is. “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A. athlete,” Morey says.
The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. Only the 1971-2 Los Angeles Lakers have won more games consecutively in the N.B.A. And because of injuries, the Rockets played 11 of those 22 games without their two acknowledged stars, Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, on the court at the same time; the Rockets player who spent the most time actually playing for the Rockets during the streak was Shane Battier. This year Battier, recovering from off-season surgery to remove bone spurs from an ankle, has played in just over half of the Rockets’ games. That has only highlighted his importance. “This year,” Morey says, “we have been a championship team with him and a bubble playoff team without him.”
Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.
Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.”
The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the fact, all but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer beater, of course the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl — are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact. The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.
When Alexander, a Wall Street investor, bought the Rockets in 1993, the notion that basketball was awaiting some statistical reformation hadn’t occurred to anyone. At the time, Daryl Morey was at Northwestern University, trying to figure out how to get a job in professional sports and thinking about applying to business schools. He was tall and had played high-school basketball, but otherwise he gave off a quizzical, geeky aura. “A lot of people who are into the new try to hide it,” he says. “With me there was no point.” In the third grade he stumbled upon the work of the baseball writer Bill James — the figure most responsible for the current upheaval in professional sports — and decided that what he really wanted to do with his life was put Jamesian principles into practice. He nursed this ambition through a fairly conventional academic career, which eventually took him to M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. There he opted for the entrepreneurial track, not because he actually wanted to be an entrepreneur but because he figured that the only way he would ever be allowed to run a pro-sports franchise was to own one, and the only way he could imagine having enough money to buy one was to create some huge business. “This is the 1990s — there’s no Theo,” Morey says, referring to Theo Epstein, the statistics-minded general manager of the Boston Red Sox. “Sandy Alderson is progressive, but nobody knows it.” Sandy Alderson, then the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, had also read Bill James and begun to usher in the new age of statistical analysis in baseball. “So,” Morey continues, “I just assumed that getting rich was the only way in.” Apart from using it to acquire a pro-sports team, Morey had no exceptional interest in money.
He didn’t need great wealth, as it turned out. After graduating from business school, he went to work for a consulting firm in Boston called Parthenon, where he was tapped in 2001 to advise a group trying to buy the Red Sox. The bid failed, but a related group went and bought the Celtics — and hired Morey to help reorganize the business. In addition to figuring out where to set ticket prices, Morey helped to find a new general manager and new people looking for better ways to value basketball players. The Celtics improved. Leslie Alexander heard whispers that Morey, who was 33, was out in front of those trying to rethink the game, so he hired him to remake the Houston Rockets.
When Morey came to the Rockets, a huge chunk of the team’s allotted payroll — the N.B.A. caps payrolls and taxes teams that exceed them — was committed, for many years to come, to two superstars: Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. Morey had to find ways to improve the Rockets without spending money. “We couldn’t afford another superstar,” he says, “so we went looking for nonsuperstars that we thought were undervalued.” He went looking, essentially, for underpaid players. “That’s the scarce resource in the N.B.A.,” he says. “Not the superstar but the undervalued player.” Sifting the population of midlevel N.B.A. players, he came up with a list of 15, near the top of which was the Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Shane Battier. This perplexed even the man who hired Morey to rethink basketball. “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to see it.”
Alexander wasn’t alone. It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that, it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says. “Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier scoring when he hasn’t exactly been open. Some large percentage of them came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says. “But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”
Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”
There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.
It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.
Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it becomes a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets the ball back. Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag.” The finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it against his hip and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house! “And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag. “We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger wag!”
When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard. “Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.”
Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests. “Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to shoot more,” Morey says. “I’m not sure that that ever happened.” Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”
One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.
As the game against the Lakers started, Morey took his seat, on the aisle, nine rows behind the Rockets’ bench. The odds, on this night, were not good. Houston was playing without its injured superstar, McGrady (who was in the clubhouse watching TV), and its injured best supporting actor, Ron Artest (cheering in street clothes from the bench). The Lakers were staffed by household names. The only Rockets player on the floor with a conspicuous shoe contract was the center Yao Ming — who opened the game by tipping the ball backward. Shane Battier began his game by grabbing it.
Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”
People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. “Steve Jackson,” Battier says, “is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left — and goes to his left almost twice as often.” The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.
Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, “the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal outcome, from the Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
And if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like. Bryant shot early and often, but he looked pretty good from everywhere. On defense, Battier talked to his teammates a lot more than anyone else on the court, but from the stands it was hard to see any point to this. And yet, he swears, there’s a reason to almost all of it: when he decides where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”
Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him. Only once during the Lakers game did we glimpse a clean, satisfying comparison of the efficient strategy and the inefficient one — that is, an outcome that reflected the odds. Ten feet from the hoop, Bryant got the ball with his back to the basket; with Battier pressing against him, he fell back and missed a 12-foot shot off the front of the rim. Moments earlier, with Battier reclining in the deep soft chair that masquerades as an N.B.A. bench, his teammate Brent Barry found himself in an analogous position. Bryant leaned into Barry, hit a six-foot shot and drew a foul. But this was the exception; normally you don’t get perfect comparisons. You couldn’t see the odds shifting subtly away from the Lakers and toward the Rockets as Bryant was forced from 6 feet out to 12 feet from the basket, or when he had Battier’s hand in his eyes. All you saw were the statistics on the board, and as the seconds ticked off to halftime, the game tied 54-54, Bryant led all scorers with 16 points.
But he required 20 possessions to get them. And he had started moaning to the referees. Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the history of the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct. Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I’m playing him honest. Don’t fall for his stuff.” Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.
Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted by a tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our stats,” Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team might not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”
Tonight, the ball landed in Battier’s hands milliseconds before the half finished. He moved just slowly enough for the buzzer to sound, heaved the ball the length of the floor and then sprinted to the locker room — having not taken a single shot.
In 1996 a young writer for The Basketball Times named Dan Wetzel thought it might be neat to move into the life of a star high-school basketball player and watch up close as big-time basketball colleges recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then spent five months trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered high-school basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids — really every single prominent high-school basketball player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like Shane Battier.”
Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and Michigan State — and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set out to minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere with his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him. These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What 17-year-old has the stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own question: “It wasn’t like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’ It was like, ‘This isn’t real.’ ”
Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.
I pointed to his footwork; he pointed to a gorgeous young woman in the stands wearing a Battier jersey. (“You don’t see too many good-looking girls with Battier jerseys on,” he said. “It’s usually 12 and under or 60 and over. That’s my demographic.”) I noted the uncanny way in which he got his hand right in front of Bryant’s eyes before a shot; he motioned to his old high school library (“I came in here every day before classes”). He took my excessive interest in this one game as proof of a certain lack of imagination, I’m pretty sure. “I’ve been doing the same thing for seven years,” he said, “and this is the only game anyone wants to talk about. It’s like, Oh, you can play defense?” It grew clear that one reason he didn’t particularly care to watch himself play, apart from the tedium of it, was that he plays the game so self-consciously. Unable to count on the game to properly measure his performance, he learned to do so himself. He had, in some sense, already seen the video. When I finally compelled him to watch, he was knocking the ball out of Bryant’s hands as Bryant raised it from his waist to his chin. “If I get to be commissioner, that will count as a blocked shot,” Battier said. “But it’s nothing. They don’t count it as a blocked shot. I do that at least 30 times a season.”
In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.
When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he was already conspicuous at 6-foot-4, and a year later he would be 6-foot-7. “Growing up tall was something I got used to,” he said. “I was the kid about whom they always said, ‘Check his birth certificate.’ ” He was also the only kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough, the school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of the problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the black A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,” Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop. I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”
Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”
Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,” Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a mistake to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or ambition, or even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me the story of this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber won three state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the Naismith Award. I won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the Naismith Awards. All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I was in the eighth grade.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Pretty much everyone,” he said.
“White people?”
“No,” he said. “The street.”
As the third quarter began, Battier’s face appeared overhead, on the Jumbotron, where he hammed it up and exhorted the crowd. Throughout the game he was up on the thing more than any other player: plugging teeth-whitening formulas, praising local jewelers, making public-service announcements, telling the fans to make noise. When I mentioned to a Rockets’ staff member that Battier seemed to have far more than his fair share of big-screen appearances, he said, “Probably because he’s the only one who’ll do them.”
I spent the second half with Sam Hinkie, the vice president of basketball operations and the head of basketball analytics in the Rockets’ front office. The game went back and forth. Bryant kept missing more shots than he made. Neither team got much of a lead. More remarkable than the game were Hinkie’s reactions — and it soon became clear that while he obviously wanted the Rockets to win, he was responding to different events on the court than the typical Rockets (or N.B.A.) fan was.
“I care a lot more about what ought to have happened than what actually happens,” said Hinkie, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford. The routine N.B.A. game, he explained, is decided by a tiny percentage of the total points scored. A team scores on average about 100 points a game, but two out of three N.B.A. games are decided by fewer than 6 points — two or three possessions. The effect of this, in his mind, was to raise significantly the importance of every little thing that happened. The Lakers’ Trevor Ariza, who makes 29 percent of his 3-point shots, hit a crazy 3-pointer, and as the crowd moaned, Hinkie was almost distraught. “That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” he said. “Because it’s a near-random event. And it’s a 3-point swing.” When Bryant drove to the basket, instead of being forced to take a jump shot, he said: “That’s three-eighths of a point. These things accumulate.”
In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier and Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95, Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens from here on will be randomness.”
The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:
Bryant: 30.
Battier: 0.
Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12. No matter what happens now, none of our coaches will say, ‘If only we could have gotten a little more out of Battier.’ ”
One statistical rule of thumb in basketball is that a team leading by more points than there are minutes left near the end of the game has an 80 percent chance of winning. If your team is down by more than 6 points halfway through the final quarter, and you’re anxious to beat the traffic, you can leave knowing that there is slightly less than a 20 percent chance you’ll miss a victory; on the other hand, if you miss a victory, it will have been an improbable and therefore sensational one. At no point on this night has either team had enough of a lead to set fans, or even Rockets management, to calculating their confidence intervals — but then, with 2:27 to play, the Lakers went up by 4: 99-95. Then they got the ball back. The ball went to Bryant, and Battier shaded him left — into Yao Ming. Bryant dribbled and took the best shot he could, from Battier’s perspective: a long 2-point jump shot, off the dribble, while moving left. He missed, the Rockets ran back the other way, Rafer Alston drove the lane and hit a floater: 99-97, and 1:13 on the clock. The Lakers missed another shot. Alston grabbed the rebound and called timeout with 59 seconds left.
Whatever the Rockets planned went instantly wrong, when the inbound pass, as soon as it was caught by the Rockets’ Carl Landry, was swatted away by the Lakers. The ball was loose, bodies flew everywhere.
55 . . . 54 . . . 53 . . .
On the side of the court opposite the melee, Battier froze. The moment he saw that the loose ball was likely to be secured by a teammate — but before it was secured — he sprinted to the corner.
50 . . . 49 . . . 48 . . .
The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in the N.B.A. One way the Rockets can tell if their opponents have taken to analyzing basketball in similar ways as they do is their attitude to the corner 3: the smart teams take a lot of them and seek to prevent their opponents from taking them. In basketball there is only so much you can plan, however, especially at a street-ball moment like this. As it happened, Houston’s Rafer Alston was among the most legendary street-ball players of all time — known as Skip 2 My Lou, a nickname he received after a single spectacular move at Rucker Park, in Harlem. “Shane wouldn’t last in street ball because in street ball no one wants to see” his game, Alston told me earlier. “You better give us something to ooh and ahh about. No one cares about someone who took a charge.”
The Rockets’ offense had broken down, and there was no usual place for Alston, still back near the half-court line, to go with the ball. The Lakers’ defense had also broken down; no player was where he was meant to be. The only person exactly where he should have been — wide open, standing at the most efficient spot on the floor from which to shoot — was Shane Battier. When Daryl Morey spoke of basketball intelligence, a phrase slipped out: “the I.Q. of where to be.” Fitting in on a basketball court, in the way Battier fits in, requires the I.Q. of where to be. Bang: Alston hit Battier with a long pass. Bang: Battier shot the 3, guiltlessly. Nothing but net.
Rockets 100, Lakers 99.
43 . . . 42 . . . 41 . . .
At this moment, the Rockets’ front office would later calculate, the team’s chances of winning rose from 19.2 percent to 72.6 percent. One day some smart person will study the correlation between shifts in probabilities and levels of noise, but for now the crowd was ignorantly berserk: it sounded indeed like the largest crowd in the history of Houston’s Toyota Center. Bryant got the ball at half-court and dribbled idly, searching for his opening. This was his moment, the one great players are said to live for, when everyone knows he’s going to take the shot, and he takes it anyway. On the other end of the floor it wasn’t the shooter who mattered but the shot. Now the shot was nothing, the shooter everything.
33 . . . 32 . . . 31 . . .
Bryant — 12 for 31 on the night — took off and drove to the right, his strength, in the middle of the lane. Battier cut him off. Bryant tossed the ball back out to Derek Fisher, out of shooting range.
30 . . . 29 . . .
Like everyone else in the place, Battier assumed that the game was still in Bryant’s hands. If he gave the ball up, it was only so that he might get it back. Bryant popped out. He was now a good four feet beyond the 3-point line, or nearly 30 feet from the basket.
28 . . .
Bryant caught the ball and, 27.4 feet from the basket, the Rockets’ front office would later determine, leapt. Instantly his view of that basket was blocked by Battier’s hand. This was not an original situation. Since the 2002-3 season, Bryant had taken 51 3-pointers at the very end of close games from farther than 26.75 feet from the basket. He had missed 86.3 percent of them. A little over a year ago the Lakers lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers after Bryant missed a 3 from 28.4 feet. Three nights from now the Lakers would lose to the Orlando Magic after Bryant missed a shot from 27.5 feet that would have tied the game. It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be good.
Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.
Out of Duke University. . . . A 6-foot-8-inch forward. . . .
A Coach's Dream Before one game, Shane Battier asked Coach Rick Adelman (right) if he could come off the bench to be able to guard the high-scoring sixth-man Manu Ginóbili. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” says the Rockets’ general manager Daryl Morey.
Battier Knows Bryant is a Less-Efficient Scorer 1 Off the dribble. 2 Shooting from long range with a hand in his face. 3 Going to his left, not his right.
He had more or less admitted to me that this part of his job left him cold. ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ he said, as he struggled to explain how a man on the receiving end of the raging love of 18,557 people in a darkened arena could feel nothing. “If you had filet mignon every single night, you’d stop tasting it.”
To him the only pleasure in these sounds — the name of his beloved alma mater, the roar of the crowd — was that they marked the end of the worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups and the introductions. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small talk with players on the other team. All those players making exaggerated gestures of affection toward one another before the game, who don’t actually know one another, or even want to. “I hate being out on the floor wasting that time,” he said. “I used to try to talk to people, but then I figured out no one actually liked me very much.” Instead of engaging in the pretense that these other professional basketball players actually know and like him, he slips away into the locker room.
Shane Battier!
And up Shane Battier popped, to the howl of the largest crowd ever to watch a basketball game at the Toyota Center in Houston, and jumped playfully into Yao Ming (the center “out of China”). Now, finally, came the best part of his day, when he would be, oddly, most scrutinized and least understood.
Seldom are regular-season games in the N.B.A. easy to get worked up for. Yesterday Battier couldn’t tell me whom the team played three days before. (“The Knicks!” he exclaimed a minute later. “We played the Knicks!”) Tonight, though it was a midweek game in the middle of January, was different. Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.” Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.
Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense, the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as some chump.” He senses that some players actually look forward to being guarded by him. “No one dreads being guarded by me,” he said. Morey confirmed as much: “That’s actually true. But for two reasons: (a) They don’t think anyone can guard them and (b) they really scoff at the notion Shane Battier could guard them. They all think his reputation exceeds his ability.” Even as Battier was being introduced in the arena, Ahmad Rashad was wrapping up his pregame report on NBA TV and saying, “Shane Battier will try to stop Kobe Bryant.” This caused the co-host Gary Payton to laugh and reply, “Ain’t gonna happen,” and the other co-host, Chris Webber, to add, “I think Kobe will score 50, and they’ll win by 19 going away.”
Early on, Hoop Scoop magazine named Shane Battier the fourth-best seventh grader in the United States. When he graduated from Detroit Country Day School in 1997, he received the Naismith Award as the best high-school basketball player in the nation. When he graduated from Duke in 2001, where he won a record-tying 131 college-basketball games, including that year’s N.C.A.A. championship, he received another Naismith Award as the best college basketball player in the nation. He was drafted in the first round by the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, not just a bad basketball team but the one with the worst winning percentage in N.B.A. history — whereupon he was almost instantly dismissed, even by his own franchise, as a lesser talent. The year after Battier joined the Grizzlies, the team’s general manager was fired and the N.B.A. legend Jerry West, a k a the Logo because his silhouette is the official emblem of the N.B.A., took over the team. “From the minute Jerry West got there he was trying to trade me,” Battier says. If West didn’t have any takers, it was in part because Battier seemed limited: most of the other players on the court, and some of the players on the bench, too, were more obviously gifted than he is. “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A. athlete,” Morey says.
The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. Only the 1971-2 Los Angeles Lakers have won more games consecutively in the N.B.A. And because of injuries, the Rockets played 11 of those 22 games without their two acknowledged stars, Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, on the court at the same time; the Rockets player who spent the most time actually playing for the Rockets during the streak was Shane Battier. This year Battier, recovering from off-season surgery to remove bone spurs from an ankle, has played in just over half of the Rockets’ games. That has only highlighted his importance. “This year,” Morey says, “we have been a championship team with him and a bubble playoff team without him.”
Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.
Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.”
The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and football, but also soccer and cricket and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the fact, all but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer beater, of course the Pittsburgh Steelers won the Super Bowl — are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact. The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.
When Alexander, a Wall Street investor, bought the Rockets in 1993, the notion that basketball was awaiting some statistical reformation hadn’t occurred to anyone. At the time, Daryl Morey was at Northwestern University, trying to figure out how to get a job in professional sports and thinking about applying to business schools. He was tall and had played high-school basketball, but otherwise he gave off a quizzical, geeky aura. “A lot of people who are into the new try to hide it,” he says. “With me there was no point.” In the third grade he stumbled upon the work of the baseball writer Bill James — the figure most responsible for the current upheaval in professional sports — and decided that what he really wanted to do with his life was put Jamesian principles into practice. He nursed this ambition through a fairly conventional academic career, which eventually took him to M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. There he opted for the entrepreneurial track, not because he actually wanted to be an entrepreneur but because he figured that the only way he would ever be allowed to run a pro-sports franchise was to own one, and the only way he could imagine having enough money to buy one was to create some huge business. “This is the 1990s — there’s no Theo,” Morey says, referring to Theo Epstein, the statistics-minded general manager of the Boston Red Sox. “Sandy Alderson is progressive, but nobody knows it.” Sandy Alderson, then the general manager of the Oakland Athletics, had also read Bill James and begun to usher in the new age of statistical analysis in baseball. “So,” Morey continues, “I just assumed that getting rich was the only way in.” Apart from using it to acquire a pro-sports team, Morey had no exceptional interest in money.
He didn’t need great wealth, as it turned out. After graduating from business school, he went to work for a consulting firm in Boston called Parthenon, where he was tapped in 2001 to advise a group trying to buy the Red Sox. The bid failed, but a related group went and bought the Celtics — and hired Morey to help reorganize the business. In addition to figuring out where to set ticket prices, Morey helped to find a new general manager and new people looking for better ways to value basketball players. The Celtics improved. Leslie Alexander heard whispers that Morey, who was 33, was out in front of those trying to rethink the game, so he hired him to remake the Houston Rockets.
When Morey came to the Rockets, a huge chunk of the team’s allotted payroll — the N.B.A. caps payrolls and taxes teams that exceed them — was committed, for many years to come, to two superstars: Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. Morey had to find ways to improve the Rockets without spending money. “We couldn’t afford another superstar,” he says, “so we went looking for nonsuperstars that we thought were undervalued.” He went looking, essentially, for underpaid players. “That’s the scarce resource in the N.B.A.,” he says. “Not the superstar but the undervalued player.” Sifting the population of midlevel N.B.A. players, he came up with a list of 15, near the top of which was the Memphis Grizzlies’ forward Shane Battier. This perplexed even the man who hired Morey to rethink basketball. “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to see it.”
Alexander wasn’t alone. It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that, it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says. “Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier scoring when he hasn’t exactly been open. Some large percentage of them came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says. “But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow and hasn’t got much body control.”
Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”
There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says, “and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.
It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.
Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it becomes a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets the ball back. Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag.” The finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it against his hip and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house! “And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag. “We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger wag!”
When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard. “Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.”
Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle, hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests. “Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to shoot more,” Morey says. “I’m not sure that that ever happened.” Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”
One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.
As the game against the Lakers started, Morey took his seat, on the aisle, nine rows behind the Rockets’ bench. The odds, on this night, were not good. Houston was playing without its injured superstar, McGrady (who was in the clubhouse watching TV), and its injured best supporting actor, Ron Artest (cheering in street clothes from the bench). The Lakers were staffed by household names. The only Rockets player on the floor with a conspicuous shoe contract was the center Yao Ming — who opened the game by tipping the ball backward. Shane Battier began his game by grabbing it.
Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents. They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject — which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how, instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could say we did, but we didn’t.”
People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in different relationships to other players — how well he scored off screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. “Steve Jackson,” Battier says, “is statistically better going to his right, but he loves to go to his left — and goes to his left almost twice as often.” The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the floor.
Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it, “the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal outcome, from the Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40 points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might as well.
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A. athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
And if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like. Bryant shot early and often, but he looked pretty good from everywhere. On defense, Battier talked to his teammates a lot more than anyone else on the court, but from the stands it was hard to see any point to this. And yet, he swears, there’s a reason to almost all of it: when he decides where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”
Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him. Only once during the Lakers game did we glimpse a clean, satisfying comparison of the efficient strategy and the inefficient one — that is, an outcome that reflected the odds. Ten feet from the hoop, Bryant got the ball with his back to the basket; with Battier pressing against him, he fell back and missed a 12-foot shot off the front of the rim. Moments earlier, with Battier reclining in the deep soft chair that masquerades as an N.B.A. bench, his teammate Brent Barry found himself in an analogous position. Bryant leaned into Barry, hit a six-foot shot and drew a foul. But this was the exception; normally you don’t get perfect comparisons. You couldn’t see the odds shifting subtly away from the Lakers and toward the Rockets as Bryant was forced from 6 feet out to 12 feet from the basket, or when he had Battier’s hand in his eyes. All you saw were the statistics on the board, and as the seconds ticked off to halftime, the game tied 54-54, Bryant led all scorers with 16 points.
But he required 20 possessions to get them. And he had started moaning to the referees. Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the history of the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct. Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I’m playing him honest. Don’t fall for his stuff.” Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.
Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted by a tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our stats,” Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team might not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”
Tonight, the ball landed in Battier’s hands milliseconds before the half finished. He moved just slowly enough for the buzzer to sound, heaved the ball the length of the floor and then sprinted to the locker room — having not taken a single shot.
In 1996 a young writer for The Basketball Times named Dan Wetzel thought it might be neat to move into the life of a star high-school basketball player and watch up close as big-time basketball colleges recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then spent five months trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered high-school basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids — really every single prominent high-school basketball player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like Shane Battier.”
Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and Michigan State — and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set out to minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere with his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him. These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What 17-year-old has the stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own question: “It wasn’t like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’ It was like, ‘This isn’t real.’ ”
Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.
I pointed to his footwork; he pointed to a gorgeous young woman in the stands wearing a Battier jersey. (“You don’t see too many good-looking girls with Battier jerseys on,” he said. “It’s usually 12 and under or 60 and over. That’s my demographic.”) I noted the uncanny way in which he got his hand right in front of Bryant’s eyes before a shot; he motioned to his old high school library (“I came in here every day before classes”). He took my excessive interest in this one game as proof of a certain lack of imagination, I’m pretty sure. “I’ve been doing the same thing for seven years,” he said, “and this is the only game anyone wants to talk about. It’s like, Oh, you can play defense?” It grew clear that one reason he didn’t particularly care to watch himself play, apart from the tedium of it, was that he plays the game so self-consciously. Unable to count on the game to properly measure his performance, he learned to do so himself. He had, in some sense, already seen the video. When I finally compelled him to watch, he was knocking the ball out of Bryant’s hands as Bryant raised it from his waist to his chin. “If I get to be commissioner, that will count as a blocked shot,” Battier said. “But it’s nothing. They don’t count it as a blocked shot. I do that at least 30 times a season.”
In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what happened when he was 12.
When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he was already conspicuous at 6-foot-4, and a year later he would be 6-foot-7. “Growing up tall was something I got used to,” he said. “I was the kid about whom they always said, ‘Check his birth certificate.’ ” He was also the only kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough, the school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of the problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the black A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,” Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop. I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”
Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”
Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,” Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a mistake to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or ambition, or even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me the story of this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber won three state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the Naismith Award. I won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the Naismith Awards. All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I was in the eighth grade.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Pretty much everyone,” he said.
“White people?”
“No,” he said. “The street.”
As the third quarter began, Battier’s face appeared overhead, on the Jumbotron, where he hammed it up and exhorted the crowd. Throughout the game he was up on the thing more than any other player: plugging teeth-whitening formulas, praising local jewelers, making public-service announcements, telling the fans to make noise. When I mentioned to a Rockets’ staff member that Battier seemed to have far more than his fair share of big-screen appearances, he said, “Probably because he’s the only one who’ll do them.”
I spent the second half with Sam Hinkie, the vice president of basketball operations and the head of basketball analytics in the Rockets’ front office. The game went back and forth. Bryant kept missing more shots than he made. Neither team got much of a lead. More remarkable than the game were Hinkie’s reactions — and it soon became clear that while he obviously wanted the Rockets to win, he was responding to different events on the court than the typical Rockets (or N.B.A.) fan was.
“I care a lot more about what ought to have happened than what actually happens,” said Hinkie, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford. The routine N.B.A. game, he explained, is decided by a tiny percentage of the total points scored. A team scores on average about 100 points a game, but two out of three N.B.A. games are decided by fewer than 6 points — two or three possessions. The effect of this, in his mind, was to raise significantly the importance of every little thing that happened. The Lakers’ Trevor Ariza, who makes 29 percent of his 3-point shots, hit a crazy 3-pointer, and as the crowd moaned, Hinkie was almost distraught. “That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” he said. “Because it’s a near-random event. And it’s a 3-point swing.” When Bryant drove to the basket, instead of being forced to take a jump shot, he said: “That’s three-eighths of a point. These things accumulate.”
In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier and Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95, Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens from here on will be randomness.”
The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I looked up at the scoreboard:
Bryant: 30.
Battier: 0.
Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12. No matter what happens now, none of our coaches will say, ‘If only we could have gotten a little more out of Battier.’ ”
One statistical rule of thumb in basketball is that a team leading by more points than there are minutes left near the end of the game has an 80 percent chance of winning. If your team is down by more than 6 points halfway through the final quarter, and you’re anxious to beat the traffic, you can leave knowing that there is slightly less than a 20 percent chance you’ll miss a victory; on the other hand, if you miss a victory, it will have been an improbable and therefore sensational one. At no point on this night has either team had enough of a lead to set fans, or even Rockets management, to calculating their confidence intervals — but then, with 2:27 to play, the Lakers went up by 4: 99-95. Then they got the ball back. The ball went to Bryant, and Battier shaded him left — into Yao Ming. Bryant dribbled and took the best shot he could, from Battier’s perspective: a long 2-point jump shot, off the dribble, while moving left. He missed, the Rockets ran back the other way, Rafer Alston drove the lane and hit a floater: 99-97, and 1:13 on the clock. The Lakers missed another shot. Alston grabbed the rebound and called timeout with 59 seconds left.
Whatever the Rockets planned went instantly wrong, when the inbound pass, as soon as it was caught by the Rockets’ Carl Landry, was swatted away by the Lakers. The ball was loose, bodies flew everywhere.
55 . . . 54 . . . 53 . . .
On the side of the court opposite the melee, Battier froze. The moment he saw that the loose ball was likely to be secured by a teammate — but before it was secured — he sprinted to the corner.
50 . . . 49 . . . 48 . . .
The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in the N.B.A. One way the Rockets can tell if their opponents have taken to analyzing basketball in similar ways as they do is their attitude to the corner 3: the smart teams take a lot of them and seek to prevent their opponents from taking them. In basketball there is only so much you can plan, however, especially at a street-ball moment like this. As it happened, Houston’s Rafer Alston was among the most legendary street-ball players of all time — known as Skip 2 My Lou, a nickname he received after a single spectacular move at Rucker Park, in Harlem. “Shane wouldn’t last in street ball because in street ball no one wants to see” his game, Alston told me earlier. “You better give us something to ooh and ahh about. No one cares about someone who took a charge.”
The Rockets’ offense had broken down, and there was no usual place for Alston, still back near the half-court line, to go with the ball. The Lakers’ defense had also broken down; no player was where he was meant to be. The only person exactly where he should have been — wide open, standing at the most efficient spot on the floor from which to shoot — was Shane Battier. When Daryl Morey spoke of basketball intelligence, a phrase slipped out: “the I.Q. of where to be.” Fitting in on a basketball court, in the way Battier fits in, requires the I.Q. of where to be. Bang: Alston hit Battier with a long pass. Bang: Battier shot the 3, guiltlessly. Nothing but net.
Rockets 100, Lakers 99.
43 . . . 42 . . . 41 . . .
At this moment, the Rockets’ front office would later calculate, the team’s chances of winning rose from 19.2 percent to 72.6 percent. One day some smart person will study the correlation between shifts in probabilities and levels of noise, but for now the crowd was ignorantly berserk: it sounded indeed like the largest crowd in the history of Houston’s Toyota Center. Bryant got the ball at half-court and dribbled idly, searching for his opening. This was his moment, the one great players are said to live for, when everyone knows he’s going to take the shot, and he takes it anyway. On the other end of the floor it wasn’t the shooter who mattered but the shot. Now the shot was nothing, the shooter everything.
33 . . . 32 . . . 31 . . .
Bryant — 12 for 31 on the night — took off and drove to the right, his strength, in the middle of the lane. Battier cut him off. Bryant tossed the ball back out to Derek Fisher, out of shooting range.
30 . . . 29 . . .
Like everyone else in the place, Battier assumed that the game was still in Bryant’s hands. If he gave the ball up, it was only so that he might get it back. Bryant popped out. He was now a good four feet beyond the 3-point line, or nearly 30 feet from the basket.
28 . . .
Bryant caught the ball and, 27.4 feet from the basket, the Rockets’ front office would later determine, leapt. Instantly his view of that basket was blocked by Battier’s hand. This was not an original situation. Since the 2002-3 season, Bryant had taken 51 3-pointers at the very end of close games from farther than 26.75 feet from the basket. He had missed 86.3 percent of them. A little over a year ago the Lakers lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers after Bryant missed a 3 from 28.4 feet. Three nights from now the Lakers would lose to the Orlando Magic after Bryant missed a shot from 27.5 feet that would have tied the game. It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be good.
Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never could control.
SHANE BATTIER vs KOBE BRYANT
Imagine coming face-to-face with a tornado -- and we're talking a fast-moving, maximum intensity, mean-ass twister that's sucking up livestock -- and then being asked to "stop" it. You'd run for cover, right? Well, the brave souls assigned to guard Kobe Bryant don't have that option, even though, just as there is no stopping a twister, there's no "stopping" a player like Bryant, especially over the course of a seven-game playoff series. You don't know in which direction he might spin, when he's going to pick up speed or stop altogether, or how much metaphoric destruction he will wreak. No matter how effectively the defender does his job, he's going to get scored upon, and often in ways that are quite embarrassing: on slippery drives, crazy step-back jumpers, maybe a vicious dunk or two.
Look at the impressive effort being put forth by Shane Battier in the matchup at the heart of the contentious second-round series between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Lakers. Over the first four games, Battier has been tasked with shadowing Bryant on nearly every dribble, twice forcing him into subpar games, including the Rockets' stunning Game 4 victory accomplished without All-Star center Yao Ming that tied the series at week's end.
For Battier, the Rockets forward who has twice been named to the NBA All-Defensive team, this was not a fluke. Cerebral and obsessive in his approach to defense, he is among that rare breed of NBA player who makes his living trying to contain such elite scorers. These are the guys who play 40 minutes and finish with maybe four points, three rebounds and two assists, yet they're invaluable, especially during the postseason. To watch Battier in action against Kobe is to see defense treated like a science, if not a religion.
In Game 1, Battier executed the Rockets' defensive plan to perfection: He pushed Bryant left (where the help would be), kept him off the free throw line (so there were no easy points), contested every shot (with "that hand-in-the-face activity" as Lakers coach Phil Jackson put it) and forced him to shoot deep, off-balance two-point jumpers. The result: Bryant shot 8 for 22 from the field while being guarded by Battier, and finished the game with an inefficient 32 points that required 31 shots. Problem solved, right? Well, in Game 2, Battier made no adjustments -- "my game plan was pretty much the same," he said -- and again, Bryant took deep, off-balance two-pointers, drove left and took relatively few free throws. Only this time Bryant shot a scorching 16 for 27 from the field and scored 40 points. Outside the Houston locker room after the game, Rockets vice president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie stared at the box score like a man attempting to make sense of a complicated calculus problem. "This is almost embarrassing to say since Kobe scored 40," said Hinkie, a stat head with a Stanford M.B.A. who works closely with Battier in preparing for opponents, "but Shane played really good defense tonight."
And so it went, each game swinging unpredictably: 33 points for Bryant in Game 3, followed by a Game 4 in which Battier shockingly outscored him 23 to 15. Regardless, the toll from defending Kobe is steep and both mental and physical: In the first four games Battier ran face-first through more than 50 screens, was knocked over a half-dozen times, suffered a gash over his left eye that left a spiderweb of blood on his face and absorbed a Bryant elbow to the back of the head that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Muay Thai bout. Not to mention the taunting --"You can't guard me!" Bryant roared at Battier more than once -- made worse because Battier can't really respond. After all, as he points out, "What can I say that's going to erase the fact that he's scoring 40 points on me?"
The answer, of course, is nothing. No, the only reward for a specialist like Battier comes on the scoreboard: Did his team win? Otherwise, it is a thankless, inglorious task, one Michael Cooper, the former Lakers stopper, once compared to being a "garbage collector" because "you don't notice them unless they don't do their job. They handle the messes and the stinky stuff."
Bryant poses a particularly vexing -- or would that be malodorous? -- problem for such men. Whereas some players rely on favorite moves or possess obvious strengths and weaknesses (for example, LeBron James, despite his improved jumper, remains far more effective in the paint than on the perimeter), Bryant is remarkably well-rounded. According to Synergy Sports Technology, which logs every play of every NBA game, Bryant drove right 49.01% of the time this season and left 50.99% of the time. In Synergy's finely parsed statistical analysis, he ranked in the top 20% of the league in (deep breath): shots off cuts, shots off screens, spot-up attempts, shots against single coverage in the post and off one-on-one isolation moves (and he's only slightly less effective in pick and rolls and transition). Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw used to guard Bryant every day in practice when the two were teammates and is all too familiar with the challenge. "He really has no weaknesses," says Shaw. "And he has the knowledge and the ability to say, I'm going to send you to this spot on the floor where only I know I'm going to take you, and I'm going to raise up and take my shot before you can contest it."
What's more, because Bryant is so accurate with his jumper, very few shots that he takes would qualify as bad ones. Just ask Chip Engelland, the respected shooting coach and Spurs assistant who has worked with Grant Hill and Steve Kerr, among others (and whom Battier called for defensive advice on the day of Game 1). Asked what he would do if Kobe came to him for help on his jumper, Engelland laughs, then says, "I would rebound." No really, Chip, what would you do? He thinks for a moment. "Maybe I'd work on shooting while fatigued, but that's about it. His technical form is amazing. He's one of the great jump shooters of our time."
Faced with such an opponent, Battier tries to focus on tiny weaknesses. For example, Bryant shot a surprisingly low percentage (25.5%) on top-of-the-key three-pointers this year, often because he had to hoist them off the dribble. The Rockets' data -- which is plentiful, thanks to the number-crunching emphasis that G.M. Daryl Morey has brought to the Houston front office -- also tells Battier to send Bryant to his left, where he's less efficient. But even if this works, sometimes Bryant is merely baiting his defender, waiting for the moment to reverse field. "Sometimes Kobe will let a guy think that he's making him do what he wants, and then, at the critical point in the game, Kobe will do what he wants to do," says Shaw. "He'll save things until he really needs them."
Once this happens and Bryant creates space for a jumper, Battier's last resort is the aforementioned "hand-in-the-face activity." We've seen it time and again in the series. Bryant rises up, and as he does, Battier launches at him. For an instant, it appears inevitable that the two men will collide, and if you were watching Battier for the first time, you might think that he was reckless. But Battier invariably turns sideways in midair, his right leg leading the way, and he skims just past Bryant, while simultaneously extending his right hand so that it is inches from Bryant's face, the fingers spread to obscure his vision.
With most players, this is distraction enough -- he's going to stick his finger in my eye --but great shooters like Bryant are so locked in that it's often as if the defender doesn't exist. So then Battier has to introduce an element of uncertainty. Occasionally he might tap a hot shooter on the head, even if it leads to a whistle. "Every now and then I'll just take a foul," Battier says. "I'll hit the guy on the wrist or the elbow or even the face just to put that thought in the offensive player's mind. Because offensive players, they don't like contact. They're shooters. They do not like to be touched. And anything I can do to keep a guy off guard and keep him guessing, I'm going to do."
Even if Battier can succeed in getting Bryant out of sync, however, all it takes is one careless moment to lose the edge. That's why for a defensive specialist like Battier, the greatest fear is heading to the bench while Bryant remains in the game and gets his mojo going. Spurs forward Bruce Bowen in particular is known to fume about this. "I've never seen a guy get mad like that when he's on the bench," says Malik Rose, the Oklahoma City forward who played with Bowen for many years on the Spurs. "When we'd play Kobe, Bruce would do a great job on him. Then when Bruce would get subbed out, he'd be yelling at his backup to 'Get up on him' and 'Do this' and 'Do that,' because he didn't want Kobe to get hot. Because nothing is worse than coming in against a hot player."
This can happen even if you're not on the bench. In Game 1, for example, Battier was guarding Bryant and sticking to his principles: no risks, only jump shots, nothing at the rim. And through the first two quarters, Bryant had settled for tough jumpers and missed most of them, shooting 4 for 12. Then, with 9:40 left in the third quarter, Rockets forward Ron Artest switched onto Bryant in transition and picked him up at the top of the key. From across the court, Battier watched in horror as Artest gambled for a steal, lunging for the ball as Bryant dribbled. With Artest off balance, Bryant finally had a lane to attack and headed straight to the rim, where he finished and drew the foul on Luis Scola. That's all it took; as Battier says, "Kobe had his bounce after that." He went on to hit 6 of 9 shots in the quarter.
This, as you can imagine, can be quite frustrating. As such, part of the challenge of guarding Kobe over a series is staying positive. Take the case of Utah guard Ronnie Brewer, who is a respectable defender, though not in Battier's league. During the first round of the playoffs, Brewer had to stick Bryant. And for three games he did a decent job. Then, in Game 4, Kobe went off, scoring 38 points on 16-for-24 shooting as the Lakers went up 3--1 in that series. Afterward, Brewer was disconsolate, sure he'd let down his team. "I got down on myself because I felt like, Man, if I could have slowed him down a bit, the series could have turned around," says Brewer. "But when he got hot, it was like there was nothing I could do." Engelland has seen this reaction before, having witnessed many a Bryant detonation as a Spurs coach. "I think the hardest thing when you're playing against Kobe is not getting deflated," he says. "You have to stay positive on him every play."
If anyone can commiserate, it is Craig Ehlo, who was Shane Battier before there was Shane Battier. A 6'7" forward, Ehlo played 14 NBA seasons, 10 with the Hawks and the Cavs, and ended up as something of Michael Jordan's personal defender. Perhaps you remember Ehlo from the deciding game of the 1989 Eastern Conference first-round playoffs between the Bulls and the Cavs. With three seconds left, Jordan took an inbounds pass, dribbled to the free throw line, hung in the air as a guy flew by, then sank the series-winning jumper. As Jordan leaped in the air, pumping his fist, the guy who sank to the floor as if he'd been teargassed was Ehlo.
It was not an isolated incident. Year after year, Ehlo tried to guard Jordan, and year after year he came away flummoxed (though not for lack of talent; Ehlo was athletic, long and persistent, one of the better cover guys in the league). One time late in his career, Ehlo remembers Jordan coming off a down screen in the triangle offense. Reading the play, Ehlo stepped out into the passing lane, only Jordan instinctively countered him and stepped back, where he caught the ball, changed direction and hit a jump shot.
"How did you do that?" Ehlo asked as they ran back down the court. "I totally had you covered on that one."
Jordan shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, Craig, it just happened."
Of course, nobody ever figured out how to stop Michael Jordan when he was just happening. Many were the nights when Ehlo would spend 40 minutes shadowing M.J. only to surrender four dozen points and secure goat status in the eyes of the Cavs' fans. Still, Cavs trainer Gary Briggs knew better. Says Ehlo, "After the game, he would look me dead square in the eye and say, 'He may have scored 45 points, but you were dead in his s -- all night.'" Ehlo pauses. "And that was all I needed to hear."
Similarly, Kobe's victims take pains to keep perspective. Battier says he thinks of himself as a factory worker approaching his task -- he punches the clock and puts in the time, and "that way I don't get too high or too low." Brewer says his friends tried to buck him up but that it can be especially tough because "sometimes you're the villain either way": If Bryant scores a lot, you've failed, and if he doesn't score a lot, well, a lot of people come to the arena to see Bryant score, so now you've let them down.
But that's not Brewer's worry anymore, it's Battier's. If the Lakers prevail and advance, the job of containing Bryant will probably fall to Dahntay Jones, whose Denver Nuggets held a 3-0 series lead over the Dallas Mavericks through Sunday. Then it will be Jones who will have to run face-first into screens and take elbows to the head. And beyond that, in a month or so, perhaps it will be a certain MVP forward from Cleveland, one who also bears a striking resemblance to a force of nature. In which case we'd get to see something rare and precious: two unstoppable players trying to stop each other.
Of course, just maybe, if Battier does his dirty, stinky job well enough, he could save everyone else the trouble.
Look at the impressive effort being put forth by Shane Battier in the matchup at the heart of the contentious second-round series between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Lakers. Over the first four games, Battier has been tasked with shadowing Bryant on nearly every dribble, twice forcing him into subpar games, including the Rockets' stunning Game 4 victory accomplished without All-Star center Yao Ming that tied the series at week's end.
For Battier, the Rockets forward who has twice been named to the NBA All-Defensive team, this was not a fluke. Cerebral and obsessive in his approach to defense, he is among that rare breed of NBA player who makes his living trying to contain such elite scorers. These are the guys who play 40 minutes and finish with maybe four points, three rebounds and two assists, yet they're invaluable, especially during the postseason. To watch Battier in action against Kobe is to see defense treated like a science, if not a religion.
In Game 1, Battier executed the Rockets' defensive plan to perfection: He pushed Bryant left (where the help would be), kept him off the free throw line (so there were no easy points), contested every shot (with "that hand-in-the-face activity" as Lakers coach Phil Jackson put it) and forced him to shoot deep, off-balance two-point jumpers. The result: Bryant shot 8 for 22 from the field while being guarded by Battier, and finished the game with an inefficient 32 points that required 31 shots. Problem solved, right? Well, in Game 2, Battier made no adjustments -- "my game plan was pretty much the same," he said -- and again, Bryant took deep, off-balance two-pointers, drove left and took relatively few free throws. Only this time Bryant shot a scorching 16 for 27 from the field and scored 40 points. Outside the Houston locker room after the game, Rockets vice president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie stared at the box score like a man attempting to make sense of a complicated calculus problem. "This is almost embarrassing to say since Kobe scored 40," said Hinkie, a stat head with a Stanford M.B.A. who works closely with Battier in preparing for opponents, "but Shane played really good defense tonight."
And so it went, each game swinging unpredictably: 33 points for Bryant in Game 3, followed by a Game 4 in which Battier shockingly outscored him 23 to 15. Regardless, the toll from defending Kobe is steep and both mental and physical: In the first four games Battier ran face-first through more than 50 screens, was knocked over a half-dozen times, suffered a gash over his left eye that left a spiderweb of blood on his face and absorbed a Bryant elbow to the back of the head that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Muay Thai bout. Not to mention the taunting --"You can't guard me!" Bryant roared at Battier more than once -- made worse because Battier can't really respond. After all, as he points out, "What can I say that's going to erase the fact that he's scoring 40 points on me?"
The answer, of course, is nothing. No, the only reward for a specialist like Battier comes on the scoreboard: Did his team win? Otherwise, it is a thankless, inglorious task, one Michael Cooper, the former Lakers stopper, once compared to being a "garbage collector" because "you don't notice them unless they don't do their job. They handle the messes and the stinky stuff."
Bryant poses a particularly vexing -- or would that be malodorous? -- problem for such men. Whereas some players rely on favorite moves or possess obvious strengths and weaknesses (for example, LeBron James, despite his improved jumper, remains far more effective in the paint than on the perimeter), Bryant is remarkably well-rounded. According to Synergy Sports Technology, which logs every play of every NBA game, Bryant drove right 49.01% of the time this season and left 50.99% of the time. In Synergy's finely parsed statistical analysis, he ranked in the top 20% of the league in (deep breath): shots off cuts, shots off screens, spot-up attempts, shots against single coverage in the post and off one-on-one isolation moves (and he's only slightly less effective in pick and rolls and transition). Lakers assistant coach Brian Shaw used to guard Bryant every day in practice when the two were teammates and is all too familiar with the challenge. "He really has no weaknesses," says Shaw. "And he has the knowledge and the ability to say, I'm going to send you to this spot on the floor where only I know I'm going to take you, and I'm going to raise up and take my shot before you can contest it."
What's more, because Bryant is so accurate with his jumper, very few shots that he takes would qualify as bad ones. Just ask Chip Engelland, the respected shooting coach and Spurs assistant who has worked with Grant Hill and Steve Kerr, among others (and whom Battier called for defensive advice on the day of Game 1). Asked what he would do if Kobe came to him for help on his jumper, Engelland laughs, then says, "I would rebound." No really, Chip, what would you do? He thinks for a moment. "Maybe I'd work on shooting while fatigued, but that's about it. His technical form is amazing. He's one of the great jump shooters of our time."
Faced with such an opponent, Battier tries to focus on tiny weaknesses. For example, Bryant shot a surprisingly low percentage (25.5%) on top-of-the-key three-pointers this year, often because he had to hoist them off the dribble. The Rockets' data -- which is plentiful, thanks to the number-crunching emphasis that G.M. Daryl Morey has brought to the Houston front office -- also tells Battier to send Bryant to his left, where he's less efficient. But even if this works, sometimes Bryant is merely baiting his defender, waiting for the moment to reverse field. "Sometimes Kobe will let a guy think that he's making him do what he wants, and then, at the critical point in the game, Kobe will do what he wants to do," says Shaw. "He'll save things until he really needs them."
Once this happens and Bryant creates space for a jumper, Battier's last resort is the aforementioned "hand-in-the-face activity." We've seen it time and again in the series. Bryant rises up, and as he does, Battier launches at him. For an instant, it appears inevitable that the two men will collide, and if you were watching Battier for the first time, you might think that he was reckless. But Battier invariably turns sideways in midair, his right leg leading the way, and he skims just past Bryant, while simultaneously extending his right hand so that it is inches from Bryant's face, the fingers spread to obscure his vision.
With most players, this is distraction enough -- he's going to stick his finger in my eye --but great shooters like Bryant are so locked in that it's often as if the defender doesn't exist. So then Battier has to introduce an element of uncertainty. Occasionally he might tap a hot shooter on the head, even if it leads to a whistle. "Every now and then I'll just take a foul," Battier says. "I'll hit the guy on the wrist or the elbow or even the face just to put that thought in the offensive player's mind. Because offensive players, they don't like contact. They're shooters. They do not like to be touched. And anything I can do to keep a guy off guard and keep him guessing, I'm going to do."
Even if Battier can succeed in getting Bryant out of sync, however, all it takes is one careless moment to lose the edge. That's why for a defensive specialist like Battier, the greatest fear is heading to the bench while Bryant remains in the game and gets his mojo going. Spurs forward Bruce Bowen in particular is known to fume about this. "I've never seen a guy get mad like that when he's on the bench," says Malik Rose, the Oklahoma City forward who played with Bowen for many years on the Spurs. "When we'd play Kobe, Bruce would do a great job on him. Then when Bruce would get subbed out, he'd be yelling at his backup to 'Get up on him' and 'Do this' and 'Do that,' because he didn't want Kobe to get hot. Because nothing is worse than coming in against a hot player."
This can happen even if you're not on the bench. In Game 1, for example, Battier was guarding Bryant and sticking to his principles: no risks, only jump shots, nothing at the rim. And through the first two quarters, Bryant had settled for tough jumpers and missed most of them, shooting 4 for 12. Then, with 9:40 left in the third quarter, Rockets forward Ron Artest switched onto Bryant in transition and picked him up at the top of the key. From across the court, Battier watched in horror as Artest gambled for a steal, lunging for the ball as Bryant dribbled. With Artest off balance, Bryant finally had a lane to attack and headed straight to the rim, where he finished and drew the foul on Luis Scola. That's all it took; as Battier says, "Kobe had his bounce after that." He went on to hit 6 of 9 shots in the quarter.
This, as you can imagine, can be quite frustrating. As such, part of the challenge of guarding Kobe over a series is staying positive. Take the case of Utah guard Ronnie Brewer, who is a respectable defender, though not in Battier's league. During the first round of the playoffs, Brewer had to stick Bryant. And for three games he did a decent job. Then, in Game 4, Kobe went off, scoring 38 points on 16-for-24 shooting as the Lakers went up 3--1 in that series. Afterward, Brewer was disconsolate, sure he'd let down his team. "I got down on myself because I felt like, Man, if I could have slowed him down a bit, the series could have turned around," says Brewer. "But when he got hot, it was like there was nothing I could do." Engelland has seen this reaction before, having witnessed many a Bryant detonation as a Spurs coach. "I think the hardest thing when you're playing against Kobe is not getting deflated," he says. "You have to stay positive on him every play."
If anyone can commiserate, it is Craig Ehlo, who was Shane Battier before there was Shane Battier. A 6'7" forward, Ehlo played 14 NBA seasons, 10 with the Hawks and the Cavs, and ended up as something of Michael Jordan's personal defender. Perhaps you remember Ehlo from the deciding game of the 1989 Eastern Conference first-round playoffs between the Bulls and the Cavs. With three seconds left, Jordan took an inbounds pass, dribbled to the free throw line, hung in the air as a guy flew by, then sank the series-winning jumper. As Jordan leaped in the air, pumping his fist, the guy who sank to the floor as if he'd been teargassed was Ehlo.
It was not an isolated incident. Year after year, Ehlo tried to guard Jordan, and year after year he came away flummoxed (though not for lack of talent; Ehlo was athletic, long and persistent, one of the better cover guys in the league). One time late in his career, Ehlo remembers Jordan coming off a down screen in the triangle offense. Reading the play, Ehlo stepped out into the passing lane, only Jordan instinctively countered him and stepped back, where he caught the ball, changed direction and hit a jump shot.
"How did you do that?" Ehlo asked as they ran back down the court. "I totally had you covered on that one."
Jordan shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know, Craig, it just happened."
Of course, nobody ever figured out how to stop Michael Jordan when he was just happening. Many were the nights when Ehlo would spend 40 minutes shadowing M.J. only to surrender four dozen points and secure goat status in the eyes of the Cavs' fans. Still, Cavs trainer Gary Briggs knew better. Says Ehlo, "After the game, he would look me dead square in the eye and say, 'He may have scored 45 points, but you were dead in his s -- all night.'" Ehlo pauses. "And that was all I needed to hear."
Similarly, Kobe's victims take pains to keep perspective. Battier says he thinks of himself as a factory worker approaching his task -- he punches the clock and puts in the time, and "that way I don't get too high or too low." Brewer says his friends tried to buck him up but that it can be especially tough because "sometimes you're the villain either way": If Bryant scores a lot, you've failed, and if he doesn't score a lot, well, a lot of people come to the arena to see Bryant score, so now you've let them down.
But that's not Brewer's worry anymore, it's Battier's. If the Lakers prevail and advance, the job of containing Bryant will probably fall to Dahntay Jones, whose Denver Nuggets held a 3-0 series lead over the Dallas Mavericks through Sunday. Then it will be Jones who will have to run face-first into screens and take elbows to the head. And beyond that, in a month or so, perhaps it will be a certain MVP forward from Cleveland, one who also bears a striking resemblance to a force of nature. In which case we'd get to see something rare and precious: two unstoppable players trying to stop each other.
Of course, just maybe, if Battier does his dirty, stinky job well enough, he could save everyone else the trouble.
5.13.2009
What statistics does Daryl Morey study?
What are some of the statistics Daryl Morey studies?
"Efficient use of possessions is an undervalued, under-appreciated thing relative to just a guy who scores," he said. "Is he using those possessions efficiently? That's a key thing that's undervalued."
And?
"The unit that is what I'd call `ground truth' in the NBA is measured another way. There's a player on the floor with four other players, and he's facing an opposing group of five. While those 10 guys are on the floor, they're playing a mini-game for the time they're on the floor. Who won?
"What created them winning and losing? Maybe they created extra possessions through turnovers or rebounding."
Maybe it's one or two players being part of the varied lineups throughout an entire game that is more responsible for success than a box score would show. Maybe a player some people see as valuable really isn't.
"Efficient use of possessions is an undervalued, under-appreciated thing relative to just a guy who scores," he said. "Is he using those possessions efficiently? That's a key thing that's undervalued."
And?
"The unit that is what I'd call `ground truth' in the NBA is measured another way. There's a player on the floor with four other players, and he's facing an opposing group of five. While those 10 guys are on the floor, they're playing a mini-game for the time they're on the floor. Who won?
"What created them winning and losing? Maybe they created extra possessions through turnovers or rebounding."
Maybe it's one or two players being part of the varied lineups throughout an entire game that is more responsible for success than a box score would show. Maybe a player some people see as valuable really isn't.
SHANE BATTIER - BY THE NUMBERS
Beyond stats, there's stats
The Rockets are pouring a large amount of money into statistical analysis. Whether or not you think it's a wise investment probably depends upon your opinion of Shane Battier.
Battier enjoyed a wildly successful college career at Duke University, where he led the Blue Devils to one national championship and a pair of Final Four appearances. In 2001, Battier swept the major National Player of the Year awards on his way to becoming a Memphis Grizzly, when that team selected him with the sixth overall pick of the NBA draft.
Since then, Battier has averaged more than ten points a game only once, and that came in his rookie year. His career high per-game rebounding average also occurred during his first season in the league. To be sure, he is a versatile defender and a heady player, one who overcomes his lack of athleticism through discipline and hustle. You'd never label him a bust, but — in the traditional view — you'd never call him a special player either. A stat line of ten points, five boards and two assists doesn't exactly get the heart racing.
But the Rockets didn't care about those numbers. They were focused on something else entirely, something that most definitely made their blood pump a little faster. Here's a small glimpse at what they saw:
When Battier was on the court, his team
• Scored more
• Rebounded better
• Fouled less
• Allowed fewer points
• Shot better
• Decreased their opponent's shooting percentage
In other words, he was exactly the type of player the numbers said they had to have.
"He definitely stood out in all the methods we use," says Morey. "He's someone who creates a large margin over who he's guarding. In the NBA, it's not how many points you score, it's what you do with each time down the floor. And when Shane uses a possession, it's always a high number of points are scored. And when Shane's guarding someone, not many points are scored when the other team uses the possession on the other end of the floor. When he played versus not over his years in Memphis, the team was about eight points per game better, a very significant margin."
The Rockets are pouring a large amount of money into statistical analysis. Whether or not you think it's a wise investment probably depends upon your opinion of Shane Battier.
Battier enjoyed a wildly successful college career at Duke University, where he led the Blue Devils to one national championship and a pair of Final Four appearances. In 2001, Battier swept the major National Player of the Year awards on his way to becoming a Memphis Grizzly, when that team selected him with the sixth overall pick of the NBA draft.
Since then, Battier has averaged more than ten points a game only once, and that came in his rookie year. His career high per-game rebounding average also occurred during his first season in the league. To be sure, he is a versatile defender and a heady player, one who overcomes his lack of athleticism through discipline and hustle. You'd never label him a bust, but — in the traditional view — you'd never call him a special player either. A stat line of ten points, five boards and two assists doesn't exactly get the heart racing.
But the Rockets didn't care about those numbers. They were focused on something else entirely, something that most definitely made their blood pump a little faster. Here's a small glimpse at what they saw:
When Battier was on the court, his team
• Scored more
• Rebounded better
• Fouled less
• Allowed fewer points
• Shot better
• Decreased their opponent's shooting percentage
In other words, he was exactly the type of player the numbers said they had to have.
"He definitely stood out in all the methods we use," says Morey. "He's someone who creates a large margin over who he's guarding. In the NBA, it's not how many points you score, it's what you do with each time down the floor. And when Shane uses a possession, it's always a high number of points are scored. And when Shane's guarding someone, not many points are scored when the other team uses the possession on the other end of the floor. When he played versus not over his years in Memphis, the team was about eight points per game better, a very significant margin."
DARYL MOREY - HOUSTON ROCKETS GM
Thinking Outside the Box
It turns out a player's scoring average isn't the big key to a win
If you're still judging teams and players by what you see in a box score, chances are a large part of what you think you know is wrong. You might as well crack open a 19th-century textbook and proclaim that you've got this whole science thing figured out. If you really want to know basketball, put aside your prehistoric notions of a player's scoring average and check your ego at the door. Professor Daryl Morey is about to teach Basketball 101. Class is in session.
"The big thing is rigorously tying every decision back to wins," says Morey, "since winning is obviously most important."
Then it's all about breaking things down to the four components which create wins. They are as follows:
• Effective field goal percentage, which is far and away the most important factor in determining wins. "Basically, it's the percentage you've made on your shots if everything was a two-point shot," explains Morey. "The easiest way I describe it is: two for six from three-point land is equivalent to three for six from two, because in both instances, you get six points."
• Turnovers
• Rebounding
• Free throws
Those are the elements involved in winning basketball games. From there, Morey and his staff break things down even further, asking questions like, "How did the rebound happen? Was it good positioning? Was it because we have a scheme that doesn't take us back in transition? You're isolating down each level on all the types because it all ties back to wins and what things have predictive power going forward. Because even if you perfectly figure out who helped you win in the past, it doesn't mean that's going to help you predict who will in the future, and that's really the goal."
It turns out a player's scoring average isn't the big key to a win
If you're still judging teams and players by what you see in a box score, chances are a large part of what you think you know is wrong. You might as well crack open a 19th-century textbook and proclaim that you've got this whole science thing figured out. If you really want to know basketball, put aside your prehistoric notions of a player's scoring average and check your ego at the door. Professor Daryl Morey is about to teach Basketball 101. Class is in session.
"The big thing is rigorously tying every decision back to wins," says Morey, "since winning is obviously most important."
Then it's all about breaking things down to the four components which create wins. They are as follows:
• Effective field goal percentage, which is far and away the most important factor in determining wins. "Basically, it's the percentage you've made on your shots if everything was a two-point shot," explains Morey. "The easiest way I describe it is: two for six from three-point land is equivalent to three for six from two, because in both instances, you get six points."
• Turnovers
• Rebounding
• Free throws
Those are the elements involved in winning basketball games. From there, Morey and his staff break things down even further, asking questions like, "How did the rebound happen? Was it good positioning? Was it because we have a scheme that doesn't take us back in transition? You're isolating down each level on all the types because it all ties back to wins and what things have predictive power going forward. Because even if you perfectly figure out who helped you win in the past, it doesn't mean that's going to help you predict who will in the future, and that's really the goal."
DARYL MOREY - HOUSTON ROCKETS GM
Daryl Morey is a 36-year-old MIT graduate and often sees opportunity where others see alarm. Conventional wisdom says Artest is toxic. Morey has the numbers to show that the talented head case can reinforce an already vicious defense (Houston was second in efficiency in 2007-08) while boosting a middle-of-the-pack offense. And that makes him worth the risk.
Several teams, including the Nets, Nuggets and Cavaliers, consult a statistical analyst on personnel decisions, but the Rockets are the first to have built a division of numberjacks, and Morey is the league's first GM who is committed to the new science. His group's research is geared toward not only draft night and player acquisitions but also on-court combinations and coaching strategies.
Morey grew up reading Bill James' Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru. "In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow," Morey says. "We chose analytics."
MOREY GUARDS HIS SECRETS CLOSELY BUT OFFERS A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE: "IMAGINE WHAT YOU'D WANT TO KNOW IF YOU COULD. THAT'S WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON.
That choice stems from the understanding that a traditional box score reveals only a fraction of what happens in a given game and that the information therein is often misleading. "Your eye is drawn to dramatic events, to scoring and getting scored on," says David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah and the lead author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport. "So it looks like the scorers are the best players."
Real fans know that's not necessarily the case. Quantitative analysts can prove it. They treat a basketball game as a fluid event in which pace of play, lineup combinations and interactions among players all contribute to how points are scored and prevented. "On a typical scoring play, you can divvy up the credit much more precisely than we've done in the past," says Dan Rosenbaum, a part-time adviser to the Cavaliers who is also a senior economist in the White House Office of Management and Budget. "You need to account for the guy who set the pick, the guy who made the pass, the guy who set up in the corner to spread the floor, the guy who cleared space by moving down the lane—and that's just the offense."
Morey grabs some scrap paper from his office table and begins to diagram a halfcourt. He plots an x, representing point guard Rafer Alston, outside the top of the key, then draws an arrow to a spot deep in the lane. From the arrow's tip, he draws three or four sharp lines in a burst of directions. One is a shot, another a pass under the basket, another a kickout. "We want to measure something closer to a whole play, the true impact of an action like getting to the paint," he says. Stabbing the arrow tip with his pen, he asks, "What happens here?" The possibilities fly. How often does Alston shoot, and what is the result? What about passing? Drawing fouls? Turnovers? And how does the formula change if that x is Tracy McGrady?
"Imagine what you'd want to know if you could," Morey says, leaning back from the table. "That's what we're working on."
In 2005-06, the Rockets won just 34 games. This season, many expect them to contend for the championship. Morey's ascent hews to that abrupt trajectory. He spent three years running numbers as senior VP of operations and information under Danny Ainge in Boston before the Rockets hired him to be their assistant GM, in 2006. By May 2007, he had the corner office. "I was a complete unknown when I started here," he says with a laugh. "Now I'm just a relative unknown."
Yao was skeptical of the Artest trade, but he also knows Ron-Ron could be a difference-maker.
If at times Morey sounds as if he is protecting a secret, it's because he is. His group closely guards its complex methods in an attempt to maintain an advantage in what Roland Beech, founder of the website 82games.com, calls "a young field with a wide range of what people are trying to understand." But you can reverse-engineer some of what the Rockets' quantitative analysis reveals by studying their roster. Morey inherited T-Mac and Yao Ming; his priority has been to surround them with championship-level support. The current crew includes several guys whom their boss affectionately calls "basketball players": Shane Battier, Carl Landry, Chuck Hayes. Back when he was assistant GM, Morey helped to direct the draft day deal that sent Stromile Swift and the rights to Rudy Gay to the Grizzlies for Battier because Morey's numbers showed that when the fundamentally sound forward is on the court, his team is better at scoring, rebounding, shooting, limiting fouls and stopping opponents from scoring.
"Everyone wants Kevin Garnett—he's got the perfect height, body, mentality—but most times, you're going to have to do with less," Morey says. "Behind Yao and Tracy, we've been willing to give up an inch of height, let's say, for more skill, a person who plays harder and creates for others, who defends and rebounds well." Morey's "basketball players" don't pop off a stat sheet, but they give coach Rick Adelman interchangeable and versatile parts that are capable of creating offensive and defensive advantages. "Chuck can guard anyone from 1 to 5; Shane can play 2, 3 or 4; Luis Scola can play 3, 4 or 5; and Brent Barry can go 1, 2 or 3," Morey says. "We're limited only by our strategic insight."
Statistical analysis has instigated a culture war in baseball, with math whizzes positioning themselves against the status quo, hell-bent on puncturing long-held theories. But the hoops version of Moneyball is far more complementary. In fact, the analytics of the NBA often reinforce old-school concepts such as the "glue guy." The Battiers of the hoops world can be praised for more than their intangibles. In fact, their value can be concretely expressed.
As Morey himself stresses constantly, his metrics are a tool—rather than the tool—for evaluation, one of many he and his coaches use. He is no robot churning out streams of data, nor is he a slave to his numbers. "There is more than one way to win, more than one way to see things," he says. "Through analysis, we're trying to give ourselves one more way to answer questions. But we combine those answers with what our coaches, players and scouts tell us."
Now is as good a time as any in Houston to put those answers to work. The injury-plagued Yao has gone three straight years without playing 60 games. Despite McGrady's being only 29 years old, his back, knee, and shoulder ailments make him feel much older. Last season, the Rockets won 22 straight games from late January through mid-March and still couldn't get out of the first round. With Artest stepping in to round out a Celtics-esque big three, these are critical days for the great analytics experiment. And Morey knows it. "Don't think we've hung the moon," he cautions. "There's a lot of work to be done. We haven't won anything yet."
Of course, even the best-computed plans can go awry; sports is inherently unpredictable. Injuries, unforeseen improvement by opponents (see last season's Hornets), a game-changing trade (Pau Gasol) a blown call or pure luck can separate genius from duncehood. Still, a Houston championship is no reach, so if the team falls short again, someone—or something—will have to be held accountable.
Then again, should the Rockets succeed, it would be a watershed moment for analytics. In a copycat league, other teams would surely follow Morey's winning model. "The commitment Houston has made makes them a test case," says Ken Catanella, the Nets' coordinator of statistical analysis. "How well they do could say a lot about how this field develops."
Biting into a Caprese at a lunch joint across the street from the Toyota Center, Morey shrugs off the suggestion that he is a standard-bearer. But he does feels the gravity of the moment. "There's a palpable sense … ," he says, then waits a beat, trying not to get too far in front of his skis. "We feel like we're working on something unique and hopefully special. Time will tell if that's the case."
Time and the moods of Ron Artest. No numbers can project if the much-traveled star will keep his cool or stay on task or be content to play third banana. That data can be collected only fresh each day. Morey knows he's given up potential (Donté Greene and a 2009 first-rounder) and taken on a potential headache. He also knows it's the kind of chance he has to take. "A Wall Street fund manager needs to stay ahead of the S&P, and he has about a 50% chance of doing that," he says. "As an NBA franchise, you're trying to be the one team that wins. To do that you have to be more risk-seeking."
Morey is confident that he's made as educated a bet as is possible. He has a good feeling about how Artest will take to Adelman, his former coach in Sacramento, and about the way he'll mesh with McGrady, Yao and the other "basketball players." The GM absolutely thinks this is the right call at the right time.
In the end, part of this moment goes beyond numbers. It's also about a leap of faith. Morey is good with that, too. "We have to keep pushing the envelope," he says.
"There is an opportunity here."
Several teams, including the Nets, Nuggets and Cavaliers, consult a statistical analyst on personnel decisions, but the Rockets are the first to have built a division of numberjacks, and Morey is the league's first GM who is committed to the new science. His group's research is geared toward not only draft night and player acquisitions but also on-court combinations and coaching strategies.
Morey grew up reading Bill James' Baseball Abstract and later worked for the stats guru. "In a league in which 30 teams are competing for one prize, you have to differentiate yourself somehow," Morey says. "We chose analytics."
MOREY GUARDS HIS SECRETS CLOSELY BUT OFFERS A GLIMPSE OF THE FUTURE: "IMAGINE WHAT YOU'D WANT TO KNOW IF YOU COULD. THAT'S WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON.
That choice stems from the understanding that a traditional box score reveals only a fraction of what happens in a given game and that the information therein is often misleading. "Your eye is drawn to dramatic events, to scoring and getting scored on," says David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah and the lead author of The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport. "So it looks like the scorers are the best players."
Real fans know that's not necessarily the case. Quantitative analysts can prove it. They treat a basketball game as a fluid event in which pace of play, lineup combinations and interactions among players all contribute to how points are scored and prevented. "On a typical scoring play, you can divvy up the credit much more precisely than we've done in the past," says Dan Rosenbaum, a part-time adviser to the Cavaliers who is also a senior economist in the White House Office of Management and Budget. "You need to account for the guy who set the pick, the guy who made the pass, the guy who set up in the corner to spread the floor, the guy who cleared space by moving down the lane—and that's just the offense."
Morey grabs some scrap paper from his office table and begins to diagram a halfcourt. He plots an x, representing point guard Rafer Alston, outside the top of the key, then draws an arrow to a spot deep in the lane. From the arrow's tip, he draws three or four sharp lines in a burst of directions. One is a shot, another a pass under the basket, another a kickout. "We want to measure something closer to a whole play, the true impact of an action like getting to the paint," he says. Stabbing the arrow tip with his pen, he asks, "What happens here?" The possibilities fly. How often does Alston shoot, and what is the result? What about passing? Drawing fouls? Turnovers? And how does the formula change if that x is Tracy McGrady?
"Imagine what you'd want to know if you could," Morey says, leaning back from the table. "That's what we're working on."
In 2005-06, the Rockets won just 34 games. This season, many expect them to contend for the championship. Morey's ascent hews to that abrupt trajectory. He spent three years running numbers as senior VP of operations and information under Danny Ainge in Boston before the Rockets hired him to be their assistant GM, in 2006. By May 2007, he had the corner office. "I was a complete unknown when I started here," he says with a laugh. "Now I'm just a relative unknown."
Yao was skeptical of the Artest trade, but he also knows Ron-Ron could be a difference-maker.
If at times Morey sounds as if he is protecting a secret, it's because he is. His group closely guards its complex methods in an attempt to maintain an advantage in what Roland Beech, founder of the website 82games.com, calls "a young field with a wide range of what people are trying to understand." But you can reverse-engineer some of what the Rockets' quantitative analysis reveals by studying their roster. Morey inherited T-Mac and Yao Ming; his priority has been to surround them with championship-level support. The current crew includes several guys whom their boss affectionately calls "basketball players": Shane Battier, Carl Landry, Chuck Hayes. Back when he was assistant GM, Morey helped to direct the draft day deal that sent Stromile Swift and the rights to Rudy Gay to the Grizzlies for Battier because Morey's numbers showed that when the fundamentally sound forward is on the court, his team is better at scoring, rebounding, shooting, limiting fouls and stopping opponents from scoring.
"Everyone wants Kevin Garnett—he's got the perfect height, body, mentality—but most times, you're going to have to do with less," Morey says. "Behind Yao and Tracy, we've been willing to give up an inch of height, let's say, for more skill, a person who plays harder and creates for others, who defends and rebounds well." Morey's "basketball players" don't pop off a stat sheet, but they give coach Rick Adelman interchangeable and versatile parts that are capable of creating offensive and defensive advantages. "Chuck can guard anyone from 1 to 5; Shane can play 2, 3 or 4; Luis Scola can play 3, 4 or 5; and Brent Barry can go 1, 2 or 3," Morey says. "We're limited only by our strategic insight."
Statistical analysis has instigated a culture war in baseball, with math whizzes positioning themselves against the status quo, hell-bent on puncturing long-held theories. But the hoops version of Moneyball is far more complementary. In fact, the analytics of the NBA often reinforce old-school concepts such as the "glue guy." The Battiers of the hoops world can be praised for more than their intangibles. In fact, their value can be concretely expressed.
As Morey himself stresses constantly, his metrics are a tool—rather than the tool—for evaluation, one of many he and his coaches use. He is no robot churning out streams of data, nor is he a slave to his numbers. "There is more than one way to win, more than one way to see things," he says. "Through analysis, we're trying to give ourselves one more way to answer questions. But we combine those answers with what our coaches, players and scouts tell us."
Now is as good a time as any in Houston to put those answers to work. The injury-plagued Yao has gone three straight years without playing 60 games. Despite McGrady's being only 29 years old, his back, knee, and shoulder ailments make him feel much older. Last season, the Rockets won 22 straight games from late January through mid-March and still couldn't get out of the first round. With Artest stepping in to round out a Celtics-esque big three, these are critical days for the great analytics experiment. And Morey knows it. "Don't think we've hung the moon," he cautions. "There's a lot of work to be done. We haven't won anything yet."
Of course, even the best-computed plans can go awry; sports is inherently unpredictable. Injuries, unforeseen improvement by opponents (see last season's Hornets), a game-changing trade (Pau Gasol) a blown call or pure luck can separate genius from duncehood. Still, a Houston championship is no reach, so if the team falls short again, someone—or something—will have to be held accountable.
Then again, should the Rockets succeed, it would be a watershed moment for analytics. In a copycat league, other teams would surely follow Morey's winning model. "The commitment Houston has made makes them a test case," says Ken Catanella, the Nets' coordinator of statistical analysis. "How well they do could say a lot about how this field develops."
Biting into a Caprese at a lunch joint across the street from the Toyota Center, Morey shrugs off the suggestion that he is a standard-bearer. But he does feels the gravity of the moment. "There's a palpable sense … ," he says, then waits a beat, trying not to get too far in front of his skis. "We feel like we're working on something unique and hopefully special. Time will tell if that's the case."
Time and the moods of Ron Artest. No numbers can project if the much-traveled star will keep his cool or stay on task or be content to play third banana. That data can be collected only fresh each day. Morey knows he's given up potential (Donté Greene and a 2009 first-rounder) and taken on a potential headache. He also knows it's the kind of chance he has to take. "A Wall Street fund manager needs to stay ahead of the S&P, and he has about a 50% chance of doing that," he says. "As an NBA franchise, you're trying to be the one team that wins. To do that you have to be more risk-seeking."
Morey is confident that he's made as educated a bet as is possible. He has a good feeling about how Artest will take to Adelman, his former coach in Sacramento, and about the way he'll mesh with McGrady, Yao and the other "basketball players." The GM absolutely thinks this is the right call at the right time.
In the end, part of this moment goes beyond numbers. It's also about a leap of faith. Morey is good with that, too. "We have to keep pushing the envelope," he says.
"There is an opportunity here."
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