Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Yglesias on basketball

Part of the charm of the pundit Matthew Yglesias comes from the way he enthusiastically deploys his philosophical training -- he has a recent b.a. from Harvard in the field, and clearly loved his studies. (He uses "ex ante," a lot, for starters.) But I think he's dropped the ball in a recent Slate piece on basketball defense. It seems analytically weak.

He's trying to demolish the widely held view that, since the NBA, to increase scoring, has banned certain types of defensive moves -- namely "hand checking" on the perimeter -- strong defensive teams have been stripped of a key advantage. He describes the conventional wisdom this way: defense doesn't matter as much.

But Yglesias writes:

I concede that the new rules have made it harder to play defense. I fail to see, though, how that makes defense less important. Two factors determine who wins a basketball game: how many points your team scores and how many points the other team scores.[!] Since you have the ball roughly half the time and the other team has the ball roughly half the time, it stands to reason that offense and defense should have exactly the same importance. You could even argue that, in an era when it's easier to score than to defend, a guy who can stop the other team from scoring is more valuable than someone who can put the ball in the basket.

I can't argue this empirically, having drifted away from the NBA, but as a matter of logic, my English-major brain balks at this. Posit that under the old system there was a wide range of defensive talent, and that the best defensive players did a lot of hand-checking. (That's reasonable: You put one of your best defenders on the guy who handles the ball a lot. And one-on-one is when hand-checking occurs.) With the elimination of hand-checking, it is possible that the best defensive players have been hamstrung, and that they've drifted toward the median of defensive ability.

If the defensive differences among players and teams shrank, it would make sense to say that defense, relatively speaking, has become less important. You wouldn't pay a defensive star a huge sum, because he wouldn't be that much better than Joe Blow Defender. Meanwhile, a scorer like Allen Iverson remains as valuable as ever.

The last thing Yglesias says in that excerpt seems correct: It's possible that a wide range of defensive performance would persist. (Skills other than hand-checking and pestering guards would then become important. A new kind of defensive star might emerge.) But his claim is bigger than that: It's that, by definition, no rule change can reduce the importance of defense in basketball. That can't be right.

Anyone who has studied game theory care to comment on whether Yglesias's argument works?

Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:22 PM

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