Scorecasting (14 page)

Baseball is a bit tricky to analyze since “defense” includes pitching and is determined more by the guy on the mound than by the effort and dedication of the other eight players on the field. Still, there’s not much evidence that defense is indispensable for winning a championship. Among the last 100 World Series winners, the superior defensive team has won 44 times and the superior offensive team has won 54 times. Among all postseason games, the better defensive teams have won 50.8 percent of the time versus 51.8 percent for the better offensive teams. That’s remarkably even.

Okay, but does defense give an
underdog
more of a chance? Are upsets more likely to be sprung by defensive-minded teams? Sifting through the statistics, we found that the answer is no. We calculated that in the regular season, playoffs, and championships, underdog teams are no more likely to win if they are good defenders than if they are good scorers.

If defense is no more critical to winning than offense is, why does everyone from Little League coaches to broadcasters to Michael Jordan persist in extolling its importance? Well, no one needs to talk up the virtues of scoring. No one needs to create incentives for players to shoot more goals and make more jump shots or score runs and touchdowns. There’s a reason why fans exhort “De-fense, De-fense!” not “Of-fense, Of-fense!” Offense is fun. Offense is glamorous. Defense? It’s less glamorous, less glorified. Who gets the Nike shoe contracts and the other endorsements, the players who score or the defensive stoppers? And for all the grievances about today’s “
SportsCenter
culture” that romanticizes dunks and home runs but ignores rebounds and effective pass rushing, the fact is that it’s always been true. Which of the following sets of names is more recognizable? The top five touchdown leaders in NFL history:
Jerry Rice,
Emmitt Smith,
LaDainian Tomlinson,
Randy Moss, and
Terrell Owens? Or the top
five interception leaders:
Paul Krause,
Emlen Tunnell,
Rod Woodson,
Dick Lane, and
Ken Riley?

Players—especially younger players—need incentives to defend aggressively. The defense gets blamed if the team gives up a score or a basket but gets little praise if it does a good job—no matter how vital it might be to the narrative of the game. Think back to Michael Jordan. As long as he was on the floor, there was little concern that the Bulls would score points. Ultimately, Chicago’s success was going to hinge on whether the team committed to rebounding and contesting shots and denying passing lanes. Jordan needed to encourage his teammates to commit to what’s rightly called dirty work, the grit of tough defense. His frequent refrain of “defense wins championships” was a clever way of reinforcing the work—and work ethic—of his teammates. (And to Jordan’s great credit, he played offense and defense with comparable excellence.)

But there may be something else at play, as well. Think back to loss aversion, the notion that we hate to lose more than we love to gain. On offense, athletes seek a gain. They’re looking to score, to increase a lead or reduce a deficit, to change the numbers on the scoreboard. On defense, athletes are trying to prevent points, to preserve the score and keep it from changing. Perhaps if sports were structured differently, defense might be perceived differently. Imagine if every game started not at 0–0 but with a score of, say, 25–25, and teams could only have points
deducted
from that total. It stands to reason that the principles of loss aversion might kick in and inspire better defense the same way the prospect of a material
loss
of strokes inspires Tiger Woods to perform better on par putts than on birdie putts.

But the bottom line is this: Defense is no more important than offense. It’s not defense that wins championships. In virtually every sport, you need
either
a stellar offense
or
a stellar defense, and having both is even better. Instead of coming with the “defense wins championships” cliché, a brutally honest coach might more aptly, if less inspirationally, say: “Defense is less sexy and no more essential than offense. But I urge it, anyway.”

THE VALUE OF A BLOCKED SHOT
 

His father was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers and played for the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League. His son played baseball in college. But
John Huizinga had always gravitated to hoops. As a kid, he idolized Bill Russell and spent most of his teenage years playing pickup games in the gyms of San Diego. Sprouting to six feet, three inches tall, Huizinga played shooting guard for Pomona College in California. Later, he became a professor and eventually a dean at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Yet he never kicked his basketball jones, managing a fantasy league team, the Dead Celtics, and devoting untold hours to watching NBA games.

Knowing how much Huizinga liked basketball, a colleague invited him to watch a top Chinese prospect work out in Chicago before the 2002 NBA draft.

“
Yao Ming?” Huizinga asked.

“Yup,” said the colleague, a Chicago statistics professor.

Huizinga was confused. He knew all about Yao, a seven-foot, six-inch center from China, projected as the top pick in the draft. But because of a thorny political situation and tense negotiations
with the Chinese sports authorities, Huizinga knew that Yao’s movements were shrouded in secrecy.

“How can we get in?” Huizinga asked his colleague. “I’m sure it’s closed to the public.”

“Easy,” the professor explained. One of his MBA students,
Erik Zhang, was a family friend of Yao’s, tasked with running the workout. Zhang had wanted to reschedule his midterm so that he could help Yao impress the scouts. The professor told Zhang he could postpone the exam. As a gesture of thanks, Zhang agreed to sneak the professor and a friend into the workout.

After walking into a dingy gym in downtown Chicago, alongside Pat Riley, Huizinga watched as Yao displayed his dazzling skills before a small audience of NBA scouts, executives, and coaches. “It was a cool afternoon,” says Huizinga. “I thought that was that.” But then Zhang invited Huizinga along for dinner. Huizinga didn’t know Chinese, but he knew basketball, and he knew all about negotiating. Zhang also realized that the Chinese authorities might be more receptive to dealing with a college professor than with a slick, in-your-face NBA agent. By the end of the meal, the group had suggested that Huizinga be Yao’s representative.

So it was that John Huizinga, a University of Chicago professor by day, spent the better part of the last decade moonlighting as the agent for the Houston Rockets center, arguably the most popular basketball player on the planet. Huizinga traveled the world, negotiated more than $100 million in salary for his client, and haggled over the fine print on sneaker contracts. Says Huizinga: “It’s also meant that I’ve watched more NBA basketball than you might think humanly possible.”

In so doing, he began noticing something curious about blocked shots in basketball. Some of them, he believed, had much more value than others. A block of a breakaway layup? That’s pretty valuable, since the opposing team is almost surely going to score. If the blocked shot is recovered by a teammate, who then starts his own fast break—a “Russell,” to borrow the coinage of popular columnist
Bill Simmons—well, that’s even more valuable. After all, it not
only prevents the opponent from scoring but leads to two points on the other end. Contrast this with a block of an awkward, off-balance leaner as the shot clock expires, or of a three-point attempt—that is, a shot much less likely to be successful. Or consider a shot swatted with bravado into the stands, enabling the opposing team to keep possession. Those blocks aren’t nearly so valuable.

Huizinga calculated that if context were taken into account, fans and coaches might think differently about the NBA’s top shot blockers. He teamed with
Sandy Weil, a sports statistician, to examine the last seven seasons of NBA play-by-play data, focusing on the types of shots blocked (e.g., jumpers versus layups) as well as the outcomes from those blocks (e.g., tipping to a teammate versus swatting out of bounds). They estimated the block of an attempted layup or a “non jump shot” to be worth about 1.5 points to the team. Without the block, opponents score or draw fouls most of the time, resulting in 1.5 points on average. For jump shots, which go into the hoop with less frequency, the value of a block is only one point. And so on.

Huizinga and Weil also assigned a value to the outcome of each block. Blocking the shot back to the opponent was assigned one value. Blocking the ball out of bounds so that the opponent retained possession but had to inbound the ball was worth slightly more. Blocking the ball to a teammate was worth the most. Finally, they examined goaltending, the least valuable block for a team, as it not only guarantees two points to the opponent but occasionally results in a foul, leading to a three-point play.

Sure enough, Huizinga and Weil found that if you rank players on the
value
of their shot blocks, taking into account the types of blocks and the outcomes, it differs significantly from the NBA’s list of the top shot blockers, which is simply numerical. As one glaring example, in 2008–2009, Orlando’s abundantly talented, abundantly muscled center,
Dwight Howard, blocked 232 shots, which factored heavily in his winning the NBA’s defensive MVP award. Yet his accumulation of blocked shots was actually worth less, Huizinga and Weil calculated, than the 149 shots blocked by San Antonio’s Tim
Duncan. How? It turned out that Howard often blocked shots into the stands, whereas Duncan often tipped the ball to a teammate. More important, Howard also committed goaltending violations more often than Duncan did. (In fact, Duncan, despite being a prolific shot blocker, hasn’t goaltended in over three seasons.) Howard may have blocked 83 more shots than Duncan did, but they amounted to a value of only 0.53 points per block for the Magic. Duncan’s average block was worth 1.12 points for the Spurs.

When the top shot blockers were reranked by the
value
of their blocks rather than by the sheer number, Duncan’s status as a truly elite center was affirmed. Though he’s never led the NBA in blocked shots, four times over the last decade he’s posted the highest value-per-block totals. By comparison, Dwight Howard’s best showing on a value basis is fifteenth. Milwaukee center
Andrew Bogut, not known as a particularly fearsome shot blocker, delivers value. Mavericks big man
Erick Dampier does not. And Huizinga’s client, Yao Ming, falls squarely in the middle.

The following table shows the ten most valuable shot-blocking performances over the last eight NBA seasons and the ten least valuable performances on a value-per-block basis.
Tim Duncan owns four of the ten most valuable performances; Dwight Howard owns three of the least valuable.

Of course, the total value of one’s shot-blocking is the number of blocked shots times the value of the blocks. If all your blocks are Russells, the most valuable type of block, but you produce only a handful of them a year, your score will not be very high. Similarly, if you block a ton of shots but most of the blocks aren’t that valuable, that isn’t so useful to the team, either.

Although the study tried to account for as many factors as possible, it’s not perfect, as Huizinga and Weil readily admit. There’s no accounting, for instance, for the increased fouls a shot blocker can accumulate with overly aggressive play or the potential increases in offensive rebounds—when the team shooting recovers the ball—that occur when the shot blocker leaves his man to attempt a swat. The study also can’t account for any intimidation factor: how
many shots a player may deter with his mere presence, how many times he causes the shooter to change his trajectory and angle. Still, the research highlights that not all blocks are created equal. It’s the value of an act, not the act itself, that ultimately matters.