
An NBA Superstar with No Stats (2009) - shadowsun7
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
======
randomwalker
Previous discussion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481392>

I voted it up anyway, that's how much I like this article. After reading this
comment thread <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=481557> on that page, I
decided to read Moneyball, and it was one of the most riveting books I've
read.

Thanks, HN.

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10ren
For those who like to highlight text as you read, you can shut down the
nytimes' messing with you, by adblocking all its js, from all its servers -
and reloading. This filter worked:

    
    
        http://*.nytimes.com/**/*.js

~~~
nzmsv
The file responsible for the annoying search feature is altClickToSearch.js.
Here's my filter:

    
    
      ||nytimes.com/js/*/altClickToSearch.js

~~~
10ren
I went to the trouble of finding the offending js a while back, but some
aspect of its URL must have changed (server? directory? depth? name?), because
the filter stopped working. So now I nuke everything; the loss of js hasn't
harmed the text yet.

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Qz
I don't even like sports but this article had me glued to my monitor at 4:48
am.

~~~
hugh3
Really? I don't like sport and I found I couldn't understand it at all.

For instance, you have to read to paragraph 4 to find out that "Houston" is
the same team as "The Rockets". I never quite figured out whether Battier and
Ming are on the same team.

And "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." -- I have no idea what that means or whether it's a lot.

~~~
ryanelkins
There is a difference between "not liking" sports and not knowing anything
about sports. Not that I fault you for it, obviously, this article assumes the
reader has some basic understanding of the NBA and the rules of basketball.

~~~
eru
> There is a difference between "not liking" sports and not knowing anything
> about sports.

Yes, and that's even an argument in favour of explaining more. E.g. I like
some sports, but I don't know anything about basketball. (It's just not a big
sport where I come from.)

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pmccool
The use of easy-to-obtain metrics with little or no predictive value has
interesting parallels in all sorts of places.

~~~
jamesbritt
"The use of easy-to-obtain metrics with little or no predictive value has
interesting parallels in all sorts of places."

I was just wondering if there were parallels for this in programming.

The obvious might be the various approaches and "methodologies" to programmer
or team productivity based on dubious or non-existent hard data.

But I'm more wondering if there are tools or techniques that don't get any
accolades (like, say, MVC or TDD or the framework of the week) but have a
peculiar synergistic effect that ends up providing significant (and possibly
counterintuitive) value.

What's the "Shane Battier" of software development practices?

And how would you know?

~~~
InclinedPlane
I'd say good design. Refactoring has known benefits, but good design is
similar to refactoring while skipping the middle step of having a cruddy
design to start with. Developers who tend to write better designed code may
not be appreciated for it. Consider that better design often requires
considerable forethought and may take longer to implement than a typical
"first thing that comes to mind" satisficing type design.

Also, the lack of future bugs and lack of future difficulty in expanding and
adapting good code may result in a lack of attention for that code (people may
not appreciate its subtlety and elegance and merely think it solves an easy
problem to start with).

The end result may be that the developer takes longer to resolve fewer bugs
and implement fewer bits of functionality than other developers while the
benefits of higher quality design and code might be largely invisible.

Discerning developers may be able to recognize and appreciate higher quality
coders, but in environments with short-sighted or overly bureaucratic
management I'm sure this sort of problem exists.

~~~
pmccool
Trouble is, "good design" is pretty hard to quantify. It's much much harder to
quantify than things like LOC, or whether this milestone or that was reached.

Another difference is that a basketball game has a definite, qualitative
outcome. That, at least, can be measured. With software development you don't
even have that luxury.

~~~
eru
Did you mean, "a definite, [quantitative] outcome"?

~~~
pmccool
Yes. Oops.

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csytan
I enjoyed the article last time, and enjoyed re-reading it again. Here's a
youtube video, if like me, you hadn't seen Battier play:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4aDM5d27_w>

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pkulak
I've been noticing the same kind of play from Nicolas Batum over the last
couple years: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Q4GVXGMlE>

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trun
Extremely long, but definitely worth the read.

~~~
mncaudill
It's hard to go wrong with anything written by Michael Lewis.

~~~
bonsaitree
Actually, it is. Mr. Lewis can spin a fine yarn, but as with much of his first
major work (Liar's Poker), a good deal of detail, and outright truth, is
sacrificed to back-up the original thesis and offer a more compelling reader
narrative.

With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-
metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team,
or even individual, performance in baseball.

Basketball is an entirely different kind of animal. The data miner in me looks
forward to seeing if this sort of analysis will offer genuinely useful
predictive performance models this sport.

~~~
jdminhbg
"With hindsight, and much more data, long-term trending analysis of the Sabre-
metrics examples given in Moneyball have not correlated with increased team,
or even individual, performance in baseball."

Hmmm... what? The general principles Beane operated from have pretty much been
adopted league-wide at this point. Of course, MLB is a zero-sum game, so once
everyone adopts something, it's no longer an advantage. The Tampa Bay Rays are
operating off the same statistical measurement philosophy (although they
understandably don't share which) to make a small-market club operate
efficiently, and they're pretty successful with it.

~~~
pwhelan
A corollary there is that you cannot leverage in baseball like you can in
financial markets to play at ever thinner margins and thus the theory becomes
largely useless unless you can augment it with better information.

Also, people forget that "increased... performance" in baseball often means an
increase in profit, not an increase in victories.

~~~
bonsaitree
True. In financial markets, even small inefficiencies and impedance mis-
matches can be exploited due to liquidity, fine-granularity, high transaction
volumes, and uniform standards of measurement. The same principles don't down-
scale to the individual athlete or small-group (team) dynamics.

Put another way, financial market strategies (in theory) can be constructed on
matching/measuring against a continuous variance in capital efficiencies.
Human performance is simultaneously less consistent, discrete, and difficult
to measure.

Put another way, think of matching the torque/horsepower vs. rpm curves for a
typical family sedan's engine versus a high-compression race engine. The
former can get good performance with an automatic transmission, the later
requires a stick shift and an experienced hand on the till.

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mirkules
The article touches on predicting stats, and I'm wondering what kinds of
predictive algorithms would be used in a situation like this?

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leftnode
As a side note, why do you have to login to email this article to a friend? My
friend and I are huge Rockets fans, and I know he'd love to read this, but
forcing me to sign in to email it to him is ridiculous.

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albertsun
You could just copy the URL...

~~~
leftnode
Yeah, I know, that's what I did, but annoying nonetheless.

