Why Wouldn't You Want to Win?

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Stumbling on Wins is an important book.

If almost demands the question, "Why wouldn't someone want the team they have invested 1/4 billion dollars in...to win?"

The authors have done a fantastic job of teasing out just what it is that determines what causes professional sports teams to win or to lose.

For example: Everyone knows that coaching matters in professional sports, but how important is that coaches skill to the team? If you took that NBA coach and moved him to another franchise, does the next franchise perform better or worse? Does the incoming coach do better or worse? It turns out that there is a statistically sound model to determine just how much value a professional coach adds to a team. My read on their analysis is that most coaches are important (without one the team would be in disarray) but most professional coaches are pretty similar in their contribution to a team winning. So go ahead and spend tens of millions but it's not going to cause you to win any more games. Are there exceptions? Yes there is one truly notable, exceptional...exception. There is a clear "greatest coach ever," and after that the reported results show that most of the rest do their job...and no one is all that much better or worse than anyone else. Again, my read on their analysis. I'll let you get the book to find out which coach.

What's even more fascinating is the authors discussion of how valuable certain all time all star players were to a teams winning. It turns out that a lot of current Hall of Famers were not as important to their teams that were big winners as many players were to teams that were losers. When Kareem Abdul Jabbar played basketball he was amazing. But there was another player who was able to help HIS team produce more wins than KAJ and yet he is not in the Hall.

Moving to football the analysis is more difficult because there are only 16 games played in a season, not 82 or 162. Basketball, hockey and baseball all lend themselves to more valuable statistical analysis.

But analyzing the football stats has plenty to teach us about who the most important quarterbacks are...even who the most important kickers are. It turns out that field goals do matter...and it turns out when the kicker goes to get his paycheck his kickoffs should matter more than his field goal kicking ability when it comes to his paycheck...and it doesn't.

Just how good is Ben Roethlisberger? You'll find out in the book.

In baseball, Bill James discovered years ago that "batting average" isn't anywhere near as important as On Base Percentage or Slugging Percentage. You never see those numbers reported in the paper or on ESPN. Why? OBP and OSP are a great deal more important in valuing a player.

Taking a walk, is not exciting. But when Ricky Henderson walked 100 times it turns out that was a *lot* more impressive and important to his team than his other accomplishment of 100 stolen bases.

My first inclination is that to watch your team score runs because of bases on balls is nowhere near as exciting as watching stolen bases which is not as dramatic as the home run.

How often have the Chicago Cubs signed the big name only to find out that Home Runs just don't convert to wins and losses. (This wasn't covered in the book...it's my assessment of being a Cubs fan for too many years...)

The fact is that players are getting paid quite well in general but some players are far overpaid IF WINNING MATTERS. And a LOT of players are FAR UNDERPAID if winning matters. But is that what matters?

The data collected in the book is so clear cut that there is no justification in Hockey, for one goalie, say, to get paid much more than another goalie. The best goalie of the current era is heralded as just that. But there are others who are just as good and earning nowhere near the money. Why?

There's no question that players know that scoring more points in basketball comes from taking more shots. Taking more shots demands a more selfish approach to the game and those coaches who allow that to permeate will have teams that win fewer games. Players that are "exciting to watch" don't always make for the best players for a team to have if winning is what matters.

I found the analyses in the book to be insightful and it reignites my personal passion, as a fan who prefers to see his team win than to see the star player hit a home run.

An endless array of notes cite and acknowledge contributors not only in sports but those who have studied what matters. I was pleased to see they mention Brian Burke who does such an excellent job of analyzing sports in general but football in particular.

This book is a must have for the sports enthusiast...and for the guy who goes up to the window and plops his $100 down on the Patriots while in Las Vegas....

An Application of Sabermetrics to Basketball and Football, with some Hockey and Baseball Thrown In

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Why do sports teams spend so much money on players who do not live up to expectations? In a business in which success on the field is quantified to the Nth degree and measures of virtually everything are readily available, why do team officials make so many poor management decisions? The strangely named "Stumbling On Wins: Two Economists Expose the Pitfalls on the Road to Victory in Professional Sports" helps to unpack the manner in which statistics may be used effectively to predict the performance of players and therebase percentage plus slugging percentage for batting average, home runs, and RBIs helped to identify players with skills that were undervalued opening results. This is especially true for basketball. They find that the NBA overvalues scoring and undervalues a number of other skills such as shot blocking, rebounding, and passing that have a high correlation with wins. This makes it possible to pay less to players that contribute these core skills to a team and theremaking process in acquiring players. They make a special example of the New York Knicks who have consistently spent high amounts of money for virtually no success on the court. In the process they single out for abuse Isiah Thomas and his legendary flop as President of the Knicks.

The authors do the same with the NFL and look at such overvalued commodities as quarterbacks and question how to find statistics that help predict the quality of any player, especially the measurement of those skills that are less valued than passing. They find that the ability to scramble and carry the ball is undervalued, but it is an enormous skill for a quarterback that contributes to win totals. They also have a fascinating discussion of the merits of punting on fourth down, suggesting that statistically teams would be better off running a play in an attempt to get the first down. The trade-offs on this are complex, but it suggests that conventional wisdom is faulty when it comes to this particular aspect of the game.

There are complex appendices and endnotes to explain in detail the case that the authors make. Overall, this book is intended as a primer on how to structure a team with lesser expenditures for personnel and still have a more effective unit take the field. It is also an indictment of the management of major team sports and their commitment to status quo approaches to building winning teams. The result is that many of those traditional ideas are ineffective, or in some case they are even counterproductive to the goal of winning championships.

Stumbling on Value

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Reading the previous offering from these two authors, The Wages of Wins, had a profound impact on me. As a Knicks fans and a lifelong lover of basketball, I was perhaps uniquely primed for their message, but it was nevertheless a real revelation to see the empirical case made that scoring is overvalued in the NBA and that decision makers make systematic errors rather than incorporating all the information available to them. Watching Isiah Thomas operate after reading the book was as fascinating as it was painful and sparked me to take a serious and very rewarding interest in the use of advanced statistics in basketball and other sports as well.

Needless to say, I have been excited for a long time about the arrival of their second book. Stumbling on Wins definitely didn't disappoint. I picked it up and didn't put it down before finishing it. It is immensely readable and very entertaining, full of the kind of sports stories that make it very clear there is ample room for improvement at the top or your favorite franchise and plenty of insight into human behavior to be garnered from a study of sports. It really builds and improves on their first book by focusing on the core insight about irrationality in human decisionmaking and by drawing on many different sports to illustrate the point.

For both casual and serious sports fans, I think this will be a very enjoyable read which should deepen your understanding and enjoyment of sports for the long term. I guarantee you won't look at any of the decisions made by your local sports franchises in quite the same way again. Highly recommended.