Freakonomics in The Times Magazine: Hoop Data Dreams

Levitt and I have a column in this Sunday’s Times Magazine about the attempt to bring to the sport of basketball the intense statistical analysis that Bill James has made popular throughout baseball.

The column centers on the Boston Celtics, who have just completed the best-ever turnaround in N.B.A. history, winning 66 games this year after winning just 24 last year. The Celtics are one of a handful of N.B.A. teams that have recently become very data-centric (including the Rockets, whose general manager, Daryl Morey, came to Houston from the Celtics), and the Celtics’ stat man is a very colorful young guy named Mike Zarren. Here’s a bit about Zarren from the column:

[He] seems to know every data point about every N.B.A. player, past and present. Garnett calls him Numbers, the Celtics Dancers call him Stats and Paul Pierce, the team’s longtime standout, calls him M.I.T. even though Zarren never went there. He did, however, lead a University of Chicago quiz-bowl team to four national tournament victories and later graduated from Harvard Law. (Disclosure: Steven Levitt taught Zarren while the latter was an economics undergrad at Chicago.) …

Zarren also happens to be the team’s associate counsel, although this would be hard to believe if you came across him at a game, way up in the cheap seats, wearing his green satin Celtics jacket and shouting himself hoarse: ”He pushed! He pushed! … You got ’em, K.G.!” To describe his Celtics fandom as rabid would be a gross understatement. This is his third season on the Celtics’ payroll — he worked two years without pay as a law student and while clerking for a judge — but his family has had season tickets since 1974. He began regularly attending games at age 5, and since moving back to Boston after college, he has missed only five home games. ”Three of those,” he says, ”were due to illness.”

Zarren and Danny Ainge, the Celtics’ general manager, were way too smart to tell us much about their own and opposing players’ tendencies, strengths, and weaknesses. They are, after all, trying to win a championship, and even the lowly Hawks are proving pretty pesky in the first round of playoffs. Nevertheless, I hope you all find the piece as interesting to read as we found it interesting to write.

It was particularly worthwhile talking to Ainge, who was a great three-sport athlete and whose basketball intelligence is very keen. He said one thing during our interview that didn’t make it into the piece because it’s really off-topic, but it’s related to the talent/practice question we’ve written about before (most recently in regards to A-Rod).

When we asked Ainge about the relationship between talent, practice, and athletic excellence, here’s what he had to say:

My experience tells me that people like to do what they’re really good at. And so, in my life and the players I’ve been around, it’s unbelievable how I look out there on the court and I watch Eddie House and Ray Allen shooting jump shots in practice. I’ll look in there and I’ll see Kendrick Perkins and Big Baby lifting weights. It should be the other way around, but it’s been that way all the time.

The guys that are great at getting stronger and have great bodies are in there lifting weights and the shooters are shooting because that’s what they like to do. So that’s what my experience tells me. I was really good as an athlete as a child, so I gravitated toward it because from age five, I was really good, and I knew I was good. And I had older brothers that knew I was good and I got a lot of attention for being good and so that’s what I did.

Note: This will be our last Times Magazine column for a while. We are taking a break until we finish writing SuperFreakonomics. We started out writing one column a month, then switched to every other month. But even that is too much of a load, at least for us, when you’re trying to write a book.

This blog, however, isn’t going anywhere.