A few years ago, Wharton economist and Freakonomics contributor Justin Wolfers, along with co-author Joseph Price, published a paper alleging implicit bias among NBA referees. The paper kicked up a strong controversy, prompting fierce denials from the NBA. With this month’s publication of the paper in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Henry Abbott revisits both the paper’s conclusions and the NBA’s response.
For the 20-year period ending in 2007, the Los Angeles Lakers’ NBA championship record did a surprisingly good job of reflecting the stock market.
Tim Donaghy’s 2007 arrest for betting on N.B.A. games, including games that he refereed, shocked basketball fans. Despite his astounding betting success rate (70 to 80 percent), Donaghy claimed that he never fixed N.B.A. games but rather used insider information, a claim that the N.B.A., the F.B.I., and the U.S. Attorney’s office were unable to disprove.
In a recent blog post, we linked to a New York Times article by John Branch showing that the percentage of made basketball free throws has remained steady for 50 years. A reader named Ashley Smart (aptonym?) replied with an amplification/caveat that is well worth sharing: I, like many of your other Freakonomics readers, was intrigued by John Branch’s article . . .
Over the past half-century, ballet dancers who perform Sleeping Beauty at London’s Royal Opera House have been raising their legs higher and higher. (More here.) So why, over the same time period, have professional basketball players not improved their free-throw shooting?
John Dunn/The New York Times Courtney Paris Oklahoma’s loss in the N.C.A.A. tournament raises interesting questions of both economics and law. The Sooners’s star player, Courtney Paris, promised before the tournament to pay back her scholarship if the Sooners didn’t win the championship. As an economist, I can’t wait to find out whether Paris will follow through (and if so, . . .
Here are two interesting follow-ups to Tuesday’s post, in which I described how basketball teams who are behind at half-time fare a bit better than might be expected. First, my friend Lionel Page points me to a related study of his, which analyzes tennis. Lionel uses a similar approach to arrive at a different conclusion, but I think his results . . .
| When entering your office pool this season, check out the collective wisdom on winners and losers, then bet against it. Slate‘s Chris Wilson explains. [%comments]
Here’s my favorite new fact about N.C.A.A. basketball: teams that are behind by one point at halftime are actually more likely to win than teams that are one point ahead. This striking finding comes courtesy of a terrific new paper by my Wharton colleagues, Jonah Berger and Devin Pope. Their findings are summarized in this graph, which collects info from . . .
Take a look at this story reported at espn.com about the Portland Trail Blazers and Darius Miles. The Trail Blazers declared Miles medically unfit to play and released him. If he had played two more games with the team, his $18 million salary over the next two years would count against the Trail Blazers for the salary cap and they . . .
Who will buy the movie rights for this charming article about a 73-year-old college basketball player, and when, and for how much, and what will the eventual movie be titled? A piece of Freakonomics schwag goes to the person whose guess is most entertaining or, failing that, most accurate. Photo: Shawn Poynter for The New York Times
The Celtics’ demolition of the Lakers reminds me that the sport announcers would do well to put more emphasis on “rebound rates.” Like putt probabilities, the rebound rate basically tells you the probability that a team will get the next rebound. Can you answer a fairly simple question: In the NBA if a team misses a shot, what is the . . .
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen draws an intriguing parallel between accusations made by disgraced NBA ex-referee Tim Donaghy, and models of collusion. While David Stern has denied explicit collusion between the league and the refs to influence game outcomes, Tyler argues that there may instead be implicit collusion: refs may simply perceive that the league wants them to produce . . .
I’m guessing Doc Rivers doesn’t read this blog, especially when we ponder why he isn’t using a bench player as good as Leon Powe, but I’m also guessing that Rivers is pretty happy he changed things up last night. Here’s Powe’s line for the evening: Playing time: 14:39 FG made: 6-7 FT made: 9-13 Reb: 2 Fouls: 4 Points: 21 . . .
When Levitt and I were up in Boston a couple months ago to write about the Celtics’ reliance on statistical analysis to make strategic and personnel decisions, one goal was to figure out strengths and weaknesses the Celtics knew about their own players and other teams’ players that weren’t obvious. Danny Ainge and Mike Zarren were understandably not very forthcoming . . .
In our Times column published last Sunday, we wrote about how Mike Zarren of the Boston Celtics organization uses statistical analysis to help with personnel and strategic decisions. Here’s one paragraph toward the end: Zarren is also responsible for the Celtics’ basketball-related technology and uses a service that delivers video footage tagged with statistical information. With just a few mouse . . .
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 . . .