Comment by el_dot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by el_dot | Hacker News Reader

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Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story.

"a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader narrative." I think your comment is spot on, case in point:

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.

What Michael Lewis failed to mention is that in Memphis, Battier played with Gasol, the same Gasol who made the Lakers an instant contender and eventual champion. And in Houston he played with 2 perennial all-stars in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. This year Houston did not have either Yao or Tracy and they sucked, Battier is still there...

>Nay, basketball is not much different. Get the best players + good coaches and you'll win the most games. End of story.

Almost every sport is like that. Sabermetrics was an attempt to find an optimal set of players using statistics. That will never work in the NBA (you could certainly argue that it hasn't worked in the MLB, either).

Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that. As such, major Sabermetrics stats like OPS and WHIP don't translate to basketball. You get something like Hollinger's PER rating, which is meaningful but not really telling.

Scoring is largely out of context. A good player may score 20 points a game on a bad team and only 10 on a great team. Matchups change throughout the game and what your team does has a huge effect on what you do.

In baseball, it's much more realistic to look at the statistics of a handful of players and figure out how you should organize your team. In basketball, crafting game plan strategies and rosters is still more of an art than a science.

"Baseball is ultimately broken down into a series of 1-on-1 match-ups. A pitcher vs. a hitter, with a defense behind them. It's a team sport but the largest functions of the game are 1-on-1. No other major professional sport is like that."

Cricket is a lot like that, actually. Its dynamics are different, though: whereas in baseball in a given matchup between a pitcher and a batter, the pitcher usually "wins", in cricket, between a bowler and a batsman, the batsman will usually "win" (or, at least, not "lose"). It's this difference that explains why cricket matches that aren't limited in overs or time last so much longer.

> Cricket is a lot like that, actually.

Including the often very dicey performance metrics. My favourite example is batting average(total runs/total dismissals), which is skewed in favour of lower-order batsmen, who are more likely to record not-out scores.

I'm more interested in their median score (or better yet, median partnership).

Agreed, except on the partnership bit, which I don't understand. Keeping track of partnerships always seemed like trivia to me. Can you explain a bit further?

Batsmen contribute to partnerships with, e.g. good running between wickets. Things like that aren't reflected in batting averages, or their effect is downplayed.

True. It still sounds uncomfortably like trivia, but maybe that's because nobody's figured out how to measure it properly yet.

It sounds a lot like evaluating fielding, in both cricket and baseball, because in addition to keeping track of whether a player drops the ball (both figuratively and literally) or not, there are many would-haves and should-haves to take into account.

But you're right: good running between the wickets, and also shot selection with a view toward getting the better batsman more of the strike, is a real skill which should be measured, even if it is difficult and nobody really knows how yet. :)

I was coming from an entirely American POV, so my apologies for ignoring cricket!

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