He's putting up numbers for the Celtics
For better or worse, the statistics jockeys have firmly entrenched themselves in the baseball firmament. Bill James, who once had trouble finding readers for his arcane, digithead newsletter, is now a Red Sox executive. Author Michael Lewis put sabremetrics, as the statistical analysis of baseball is called, on the map and on bestseller lists with his entertaining portrait of numbers-driven Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, in "Moneyball."
What about basketball? The sport provides a statistics-rich environment, but the National Basketball Association is now about where Major League Baseball was 15 years ago in terms of mining data for strategic advantage. Of the 30 NBA teams, fewer than 10 use data as a creative tool for winning, estimates University of North Carolina economics professor Dan Rosenbaum, who is also a roundball analyst. This year he consulted for the Cleveland Cavaliers. So, what happened in the playoffs? "I couldn't help much," Rosenbaum admits.
Or maybe he got out-analyzed by one of the hottest calculator jockeys in the sport, the Boston Celtics' 32 year-old whiz kid, Mike Zarren. A lifelong Celtics fan from Swampscott, Zarren is officially the C's assistant director for basketball analysis and associate counsel. Kevin Garnett calls him "Numbers," and Paul Pierce calls him "MIT." In an interview with The
So who is Mike Zarren, and what exactly does he do? To answer the first question, he must be a powerfully smart individual. When Zarren and his lifelong friend Aaron Weissblum were both at Beverly's Waring School, "I had to study math real hard to keep up with him," Weissblum says. Weissblum was Zarren's teacher. At the University of Chicago, Zarren racked up an incredible string of victories with the college's legendarily successful Quiz Bowl team, and he later edited a law and technology journal at Harvard Law School.
Zarren and Weissblum even created a board game together, called In10sity, and are working on another. Weissblum says Zarren paid his expenses at the University of Chicago as a "Magic hustler," selling winnings packs of "Magic: The Gathering" cards during the peak of the game's vogue in the mid 1990s. "That's completely made up," Zarren insists. He cops to having sold some packs during a gap year between high school and college, "but there's no way that paid for the University of Chicago."
I have found only one bump in Zarren's remarkable ride to his dream job. On March 14, 2000, the quiz show captain who had humbled Harvard and Berkeley lost the only game of "Jeopardy!" he ever played. It was the buzzer and the lights on the set, he now says. The winner, Robin Carroll, "was like Zen - she was at one with the lights."
How does Zarren help the C's? "We just don't talk about what I do," he explains. But back when the Celtics were just another doggy NBA team checking out of the first round of the playoffs, Zarren practiced his trade right out in the open. Up until 16 months ago, the Celtics website published several of his "Inside the Numbers" columns on such subjects as offensive efficiency, foul shooting, and the costs of a turnover. If you are on the internet, you can find them here.
Here is Zarren dissecting the rebounding numbers in a January 2006, 109-106 victory over the Charlotte Bobcats: On paper, the Celtics out-rebounded Charlotte 45 to 49, and 40 to 22 in the key defensive rebounding category. But Zarren's analysis focused on rebounding efficiency, which yielded a different conclusion. "So though each of the major Boston newspapers claimed that a big part of the Celtics' win was out-rebounding the Bobcats," Zarren wrote, "in fact the Celtics won this game despite being out-rebounded. In fact, this (along with turnovers) was one reason this game was close even though the Celtics shot 57% to the Bobcats' 40%."
Zarren confirms that, because of the team's recent success and the increased attention to his work, the "Inside the Numbers" columns won't be posted publicly any time soon. "It was easier to write that stuff when the team wasn't doing as well," he says.
Dean Oliver, a veteran numbers guy who grew up in the Philadelphia area and now works for the dataphilic Denver Nuggets, envies Zarren's current perch. "He is a true home guy who's working for the team that he cared about growing up as a kid," Oliver says. "A lot of us can't do that."
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com.
