Following up on this post from a couple of months ago on Dallas’ proposal to Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones to build a new stadium in Fair Park for the Cowboys, Professor Sauer posts this analysis of Jones’ counter-offer to Dallas officials — i.e., the cost of the stadium would be $650 million, with the Cowboys paying roughly a third and getting $425 million in public subsidies from Dallas County. The public financing would be paid in part by a 3% increase in the hotel occupancy tax, which would raise that tax to the nation’s highest of 18%. Jones argues that the stadium and surrounding commercial and residential complex (which would include hotels) would “drive business to the metroplex.”
With pragmatic clarity, Professor Sauer observes: “If I were a hotel owner and Jerry Jones was asking for a subsidy to compete with me, financed by a tax on my business, I’d be hopping mad.”
Stay tuned on this one. Although Professor Sauer’s skepticism is undoubtedly correct from an economic standpoint, my sense is that Jones will be able to play on Dallas public officials’ concern over falling behind Houston in the “stadium arms race” to get a deal done that involves a boat load of public financing.

Given my interest in sports, several friends have asked me why I have not blogged much on professional basketball. My stock answer is that, even though I have followed the NBA for about 45 years or so, I find it less interesting now than most other sports, particularly baseball, golf, professional football, intercollegiate athletics, and bowling (well, maybe not bowling).
The Houston Rockets are a good reflection of my reservations. The Rockets won two championships in the 1990’s by building a team of interesting complementary players to surround the wonderful talents of Hakeem Olajuwon, who is one of the top five NBA players of all-time. Now, the Rockets have promising young center Yao Ming surrounded by a boring mish-mash of players who do not play well as a team. The Rockets other star player — Steve Francis — exemplifies this problem, as he is a phenomenal athlete who is frankly a poor point guard. As a result, the Rockets have made the playoffs only once in the last five years (this season), and were dispatched in that series with relative ease by a Lakers team whose individual parts are better than its whole.
That’s a long introduction for this Geoffrey Norman Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed in which he addresses lagging interest in the NBA and the reasons for it. The entire op-ed is quite witty and well worth reading, and here is a sampling:

Many pro-basketball games are so poorly played and tediously long that the fingers seem drawn irresistibly to the remote. You find yourself seeking relief in “The Battle of Stalingrad” on the History Channel or the food channel’s primer on how to make jerk sauce. Even some stranger eating worms or getting fired by Donald Trump seems preferable to enduring 10 minutes of undisciplined motion, interrupted occasionally by a dunk, some chest-thumping, a shove, a technical foul, a missed free throw and a beer commercial.

. . . The problem is with the product, not the consumer.
The first game of the Spurs/Lakers quarter-final series was played on Sunday afternoon and, according to Nielsen, drew a 4.9 rating, which translates into 7.3 million viewers. That afternoon’s NASCAR race scored a 6.1 rating and 9.8 million viewers. The contrast is especially telling when you consider that this is probably the most desirable matchup in the NBA’s unending postseason, with each series lasting longer, it seems, than the Florida recount.

And Professor Bainbridge will appreciate Mr. Norman’s analysis of the Lakers:

The Lakers stars, of course, possess a celebrity that extends beyond the realm of sport. Shaq endorses everything that costs money, and Kobe did too until he got into trouble with the law. Just as people who didn’t know anything about the game would tune in to watch Michael Jordan, nonfans ought to be drawn to Shaq and Kobe, who has been called the heir to Jordan’s throne. Plainly, it isn’t working out that way.
Perfect for L.A., if not for basketball, these Lakers resemble a troubled film crew on location, with feuding stars, an ever more temperamental, gnomic director (coach Phil Jackson) and egos ceaselessly banging into each other so that the real point of the thing gets lost in the din. Great material for one of those fan magazines where celebrity is its own justification. Who cares if Kobe unilaterally decides to take over a game and plays as though making a pass to the open man might cost him a shoe endorsement? It doesn’t matter because…he’s Kobe.
The “Showtime” Laker teams of the late 1980s were built around Magic Johnson, who generally led the league in assists. They ran the fast break, and they moved without the ball. Their rivals, on the opposite coast, were built around another great all-around player, Larry Bird. The Celtics/Lakers rivalry was one of the greatest in the history of sport. A matchup of great stars — true — but also of great, and distinctive, teams. When they met in the finals, people changed dinner plans so they wouldn’t miss a game. The Celtics of the 1960s and the Knicks of the 1970s could inspire such loyal devotion, too, and for similar reasons.
With the Lakers now down 0-2 and on the ropes, it looks as though it may come down to the San Antonio Spurs and the Detroit Pistons in this year’s finals. This is a matchup that might be challenged in the ratings by “Animal Planet.” The Pistons and the Nets played a 78-56 contest the other night that was more grueling to watch than even “The Bachelor.”

Then, Mr. Norman closes with an astute observation about what is missing:

Those great Knick teams (of the late 1960’s and early 70’s) were much more than the sum of their parts, and that was the fascination. There was some kind of deep art at work. Fans sensed possibilities and valued, above all, a display of control in the midst of all that motion.
After all, if you just want movement, collisions and chaos between the beer commercials, you can watch NASCAR.

Stuart Benjamin over at the Volokh Conspiracy makes this interesting proposal that the top seeds in the NBA playoffs ought to be able to pick their own opponent in each round of the playoffs. Inasmuch as the first round of the NBA playoffs is only mildly more interesting than the utterly boring NBA regular season, my sense is that Stuart’s suggestion has merit and might spice things up a bit.

As noted in these earlier posts, the statistical analysis of baseball that Bill James invented over 20 years ago has changed the way baseball players are evaluated. Now, the success of Mr. James’ statistical analysis is being applied to improve the evaluation of basketball players.
This Washington Times article by Patrick Hruby reports on the work of Wayne Winston, an Indiana University professor, in applying sabermetric statistical analysis to National Basketball Association players. As with sabermetric evaluation of baseball players, Professor Winston’s evaluation of NBA players is often contrary to conventional (and usually wrong) viewpoints. About LeBron James, the 19 year old rookie who is the consensus choice for NBA Rookie of the Year, Professor Winston points out:

“Nobody should be talking about LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony,” he says. “They should be talking about Dwyane Wade. It’s a crime.”
“James rates as an average NBA player,” says Winston, a professor of decision sciences at Indiana University. “That’s good since very few rookies rate that high. But Wade’s a real impact player for Miami. He ranks 21st best in the league in terms of changing the chances of your team winning a game.”

Professor Winston’s evaluation program is called Winval, which rates and ranks the value of every NBA player. The system ignores traditional measures such as assists and rebounds to answer a more basic question: That is, does a team play better or worse when a particular player is on the floor? Winval’s ratings are weighted to take into account every player on the floor. For every time segment a player is in a game, the system tracks the other nine players on the floor, the length of the segment of play, and the score at the start and end of the segment.

“We don’t care if you never score a point,” Winston says. “If you make plays and help your team win, you don’t have to score.”

The result of all that math? Rankings that sometimes refute conventional NBA wisdom. High-scoring players like Vince Carter, Dirk Nowitzki and likely MVP winner Kevin Garnett are among Winval’s top 10. But so is San Antonio’s Bruce Bowen, an unsung defensive specialist who averages just 6.8 points a game.
On offense, Bowen makes the defending league champs less than a point a game better than an average NBA player. On defense, however, the Spurs are 10 points a game stingier with Bowen on the floor.
Sacramento’s Brad Miller and Denver’s Nene fare well for similar reasons, while the Nuggets’ Anthony, the Kings’ Mike Bibby and New York’s Stephon Marbury rate lower than you might expect.
“Marbury’s one of the top 10 players on offense,” Winston says. “Everybody thinks this guy is a great player. But when he’s on defense, he gives it all back.”

Winval even gives its users insight into the off-court lives of some of the players:

A few years back, Winston couldn’t figure out why Jason Kidd’s normally stellar rating had taken an abrupt nosedive. It later came out the All-Star guard had been involved in a domestic altercation with his wife.
“DeShawn Stevenson, on Utah last year, his rating was really bad for two weeks,” Winston says. “The next week, I found out he was suspended from the team. So we can spot these guys having problems. We don’t know if they’re marital, psychological, injuries. But if a guy starts playing [bad], we know it.

This is the type of research that might get me interested in the NBA again. However, the league continues to do well financially, so they could care less about my lack of interest.
Hat tip to the DA for the link to this interesting story.

On top of this prior interview and article, the American Enterprise Institute interviews the baseball sabermetrician Bill James. A few excerpts:

TAE: Is Barry Bonds the best player of our era?
JAMES: By far.
TAE: Was Babe Ruth the finest player in the history of the majors?
JAMES: Yes. Mays may have been as good, Honus Wagner may have been as good, Bonds may be as good. But Ruth had more impact.

And another:

TAE: More American kids now play soccer than baseball. And on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of June you can, as I found last summer, go looking for baseball on TV and find everything but, from NFL Europe to women’s golf. What, if anything, can be done to halt baseball’s slide in popularity?
JAMES: I advocate a Constitutional amendment against playing soccer.
Seriously, the problem is that baseball is not a television game, and the television era has not been particularly good to baseball. To be fair, professional baseball tolerates an unconscionable amount of standing around and posturing, and this makes it less exciting than it ought to be and therefore less attractive to young people. I think there’s a growing recognition of this, but the problem is that even when one recognizes the problem it’s very hard to fix. People in baseball are working on it, however.

And on the issue of “team chemistry”:

TAE: Should a team’s racial composition ever be a factor when building a club, in terms of “chemistry”? The Florida Marlins reportedly signed Latin players quite consciously because they have a large Latin fan base.
JAMES: It’s hard enough to make judgments about baseball players when you make them on the basis of: How fast does he run? How well does he throw? What’s he like in the clubhouse? If you start building in irrelevant factors it makes the process not difficult but impossible.

Stated simply, Bill James is a national treasure.

Billy Gillispie, coach at the University of Texas-El Paso, will be introduced as the new Texas A&M basketball coach this afternoon. Gillispie, 44, is a native Texan who coached at four high schools and a junior college in Texas before becoming a college assistant coach at Baylor, Tulsa and Illinois. He took over the head coaching job at UTEP shortly before the start of the 2002-03 season, and the Miners went 6-24. This season, UTEP was 24-8 and advanced to the NCAA Tournament, which was the biggest turnaround in the nation. The Miners lost their first-round game to Maryland last week in a close game.
Gillispie takes over at A&M from Melvin Watkins, who resigned under pressure after a 7-21 season. In six years under Watkins, the Aggies were 60-112. The Aggies have not been to the NCAA Basketball Tournament since 1987.
Given A&M’s alumni support and its proximity to the Houston metropolitan area, it is puzzling that the Ags have not been able to establish a decent basketball program. My sense is that Gillispie is a good hire for the reason that he has deep Texas recruiting roots and the Ags desperately need to establish sound Texas recruiting pipelines. However, Gillispie has his work cut out — A&M basketball has become a coaching graveyard, and that reputation is very hard to change.

The NY Times reports that only four of the Sweet Sixteen teams remaining in the NCAA Basketball Tournament ? Duke, Kansas, Vanderbilt and Xavier ? have posted graduation rates of 50 percent or better for their players.
That’s what you get when you mask minor league basketball with the veneer of intercollegiate athletics.

The University of Houston will announce today that it hiring 58 year old, former University of Texas basketball coach Tom Penders as its new men’s basketball coach.
This is one of the most puzzling coaching hires that I have seen in years, particularly for UH, which is famous for giving such coaching icons as Bill Yeoman, Guy V. Lewis and current baseball coach Rayner Noble their first head coaching jobs at a relatively young age and then sticking with them through thick and thin.
Penders was fired by the University of Texas in 1998, and UT couldn’t have been happier getting rid of him despite the fact that Penders restored a winning tradition to UT’s men’s basketball program. UT released Penders when a scandal broke out over his coaching staffs’ public release of a player’s grades after the player decided to transfer to another school. Penders allegedly authorized the release of former UT player Luke Axtell’s grades and then blamed it on others. After the ensuing scandal soured Penders’ prospects at UT, Penders received a $900,000 going-away present and soon took the head coaching job at George Washington University, where he lasted two seasons before resigning amid revelations of players using his son’s telephone account to make over $1,000 in telephone calls. Penders has recently been a color man on college basketball telecasts.
To give you an idea what type of fellow UH is hiring in Penders, one only needs to recall how Penders left his longtime assistant, Eddie Oran, who now sells cars in Bastrop, Texas, twisting in the wind when Penders left UT:

“If I had done anything illegal or wrong, you think they’d give me $900,000?” said Penders. “It’s trumped up and bogus. I’m not going to say anything other than Eddie Oran has to live in Austin and sell cars.”

The Astros’ archrival in the NL Central — the Chicago Cubs — announced today that their star pitcher Mark Prior may need to start the season on the disabled list due to an Achilles tendon injury and could miss 1 or 2 starts. After starting his career with a 3.32 ERA/9 RSAA (i.e., “Runs Saved Against Average”) in 19 starts in 2002, Prior had an excellent 2.43 ERA/42 RSAA in 30 starts. He has 2.74 career ERA, compared to his league average of 4.23, and 51 RSAA in 49 games. In short, he is a stud and is the Cubs’ best pitcher.