Category Archives: Sports – General

The NBA Bubble

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A_ToyotaCenter Looking for the next bubble to burst?

How about the National Basketball Association, where the local Houston Rockets play in what has been nicknamed ìThe Library on LaBranchî because of the lack of fan interest at their home games.

ESPNís Bill Simmons dissects and then sums up the leagueís dilemma well:

.  .  . The current system doesn’t fly. The salary cap and luxury threshold ebb and flow with yearly revenue — so if revenue drops, teams have less to spend — only there’s no ebb and flow with the salaries. When the revenue dips like it did these past two seasons, the owners are screwed.

They arrived at this specific point after salaries ballooned over the past 15 years — not for superstars, but for complementary players who don’t sell tickets, can’t carry a franchise, and, in a worst-case scenario, operate as a sunk cost. These players get overpaid for one reason: Most teams throw money around like drunken sailors at a strip joint. When David Stern says, "We’re losing $400 million this season," he really means, "We stupidly kept overpaying guys who weren’t worth it, and then the economy turned, and now we’re screwed."

This isn’t about improving the revenue split between players and owners. It’s about Andre Iguodala, Emeka Okafor, Elton Brand, Andrei Kirilenko, Tyson Chandler, Larry Hughes, Michael Redd, Corey Maggette and Luol Deng making eight figures a year but being unable to sell tickets, create local buzz or lead a team to anything better than 35 wins.

It’s about Jermaine O’Neal making more money this season than Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, James Harden, Serge Ibaka, Eric Maynor, Thabo Sefolosha and Jeff Green combined.

It’s about Rasheed Wallace — a guy who quit on his team last season, then showed up for this one with 34Cs and love handles — roping the Celtics into a $20 million, three-year deal that will cost Boston twice that money in luxury tax penalties.

With at least a dozen or so NBA teams facing serious financial problems, my sense is that the league is facing a radical restructuring whether the players like it or not. Of course, a substantial component of those teamsí financial problems is attributable to the transfer of capital that many teams made to players as a result of not needing to rat-hole capital for arenas that local governments naively financed instead.

Sort of makes one re-think this boondoggle, eh?

The Thrilla in Manila

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thrilla As we prepare for the media tedium this Super Bowl week, it is a good time to appreciate the SI Vault, Sports Illustratedís wonderful web archive of outstanding sports stories from the past.

For example, check out this article by Mark Kram chronicling 1975ís Thrilla in Manila, the epic heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and his arch-nemesis, Joe Frazier. The following is his conclusion:

In his suite the next morning [the victorious Ali] talked quietly.

"I heard some-thin’ once," he said. "When somebody asked a marathon runner what goes through his mind in the last mile or two, he said that you ask yourself, Why am I doin’ this? You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It changes you. It makes you go a little insane. I was thinkin’ that at the end. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ in here against this beast of a man? It’s so painful. I must be crazy.î

ìI always bring out the best in the men I fight, but Joe Frazier, I’ll tell the world right now, brings out the best in me. I’m gonna tell ya, that’s one helluva man, and God bless him."

Checking in on the Rockets at the halfway point

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Houston_Rockets_2 The football season still has two weeks to go and the NBA season is already at the halfway point?

The always interesting Dave Berri posted his wins produced/productivity stats for each NBA player through mid-season yesterday. As usual, the statistics reveal some interesting developments:

  • Unsurprisingly, LeBron James is the most productive NBA player so far this season. Surprisingly, Gerald Wallace of Charlotte is the second-most productive player.
  • So far this season, there are no super teams, but a bunch of really good ones. The top teams in the NBA in terms of Wins Produced and efficiency differential are the Lakers, Cavaliers, Celtics, Hawks, and Spurs, each of which posted a Wins Produced mark of more than 27.5, which means that each such team is halfway to 55 wins.  Denver, Orlando, Portland, and Utah are halfway to 50 wins.
  •  The Rockets are over-achieving a bit, having generated 23 wins out of a Wins Produced and efficiency differential score of 21. Blue-collar PF Luis Scola is the most productive Rocket at 5 Wins Produced, while flashy PG Aaron Brooks ñ who the Chronicle sports page christened the new Rockets star last week ñ is the least productive Rocket player in the regular rotation at 0.9 Wins Produced.
  • The most productive player at each position so far this season are as follows: SF James (13.8 Wins Produced); PF: Marcus Camby (11.8 Wins Produced), C: Dwight Howard (10.0 Wins Produced), PG: Chris Paul (9.8 Wins Produced), and SG: the 76erís Andre Iguodala (8.0 Wins Produced).

This seasonís edition of the Rockets is an entertaining mix of good complementary players who move the ball very well offensively and generally play hard-nosed defense.

But they donít shoot particularly well as a team and the lack of an inside presence defensively hurts the Rockets. Barring a major injury, the Rockets might make it to 45 wins, but my sense is that breaking even (i.e., 41 wins) would be a good performance by this club given its personnel limitations at this point in time.

With the Tracy McGrady contract expiring after this season, look for the Rockets GM Daryl Morey to make a deal for a go-to player either at some point during the remainder of this season or in the off-season. Thus, despite their gritty play so far this season, I would not be surprised if the Rocketsí nucleus looks substantially different going into next season.

Is it time for hoops yet?

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After all the mediocre bowl games over the past several days, it’s time to turn to the basketball season. A good way to start is with one of the best hoops scenes in the history of cinema, Jimmy’s winning shot from Hoosiers. Enjoy.

Why pay even more?

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1984 Ticket In addition to being quite frustrating from a purely football standpoint, attending Houston Texans games is incredibly expensive. And as ESPN.com’s Lestor Munson points out, if the NFL has its way in the American Needle case currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, then professional franchises will have virtual carte blanche to coordinate high prices with other clubs in their leagues.

A group of sports economists led by Roger Noll have filed the brief below with the Supreme Court explaining how the NFL position in favor of an exemption from anti-trust laws will likely result in a loss of consumer welfare. In short, the economists argue that economic research provides a firm basis for distinguishing between collaborative activities of league members that enhance economic efficiency and benefit consumers, on one hand, from collusive activities that are not essential for the efficient operation of a league and that simply benefit league members by reducing competition among teams.

The owners of professional sports leagues have already received a dramatic financial benefit from the billions of dollars of public financing for stadiums that local governments have thrown their way over the past generation. Providing an unnecessary anti-trust exemption that will provide anti-competitive incentives for league members while providing no economic benefit to the members’ customers will only make matters worse.

Food for thought as Houston leaders prepare to gift-wrap another dubious public subsidy for the owners of a professional sports franchise.

Sports Economists Amicus Brief in American Needle Case

A great interview

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Anything that happens in U.S. Open tennis over the Labor Day weekend is unlikely to match this hilarious post-match interview of Andy Roddick during the 2007 Australian Open after Roger Federer had defeated him in particularly dominating style.

Ali and Arnie

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Ali The Observer provides this entertaining compilation of quotes from Muhammad Ali, who just turned 67. My two favorites:

On his Parkinson’s disease: "It wasn’t the boxing, it was the autographs." (2003)

On his biggest battle: "My toughest fight was with my first wife." (1967)

Arnold Palmer And don’t miss this Tom Callahan/Golf Digest piece on Arnold Palmer, who turns 80 on September 10th. Palmer’s old friend, Dow Finsterwald, makes an interesting observation about Palmer that some current Tour pros should take to heart:

"But the thing Arnie and I truly had in common, the thing both of us enjoyed most of all, was playing golf. That may sound funny, but you’d be surprised how many good players, how many pros, weren’t able to enjoy it nearly as much as we did. To us it was an avocation as well as a vocation. I think of him as the greatest amateur-professional who ever lived. By that I mean he never stopped playing the game for the love of it, like an amateur. Sure, he liked making a nice living. But he loved to play. Still does."

Advantage Cartwright

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richardjustice032009 Texas Monthly’s Gary Cartwright caught my eye recently with this op-ed in which he bemoans the decline of sports writing in Texas.

I mean really. Can anyone who regularly reads the sports pages of Texas newspapers make a good faith argument against the notion that the current slate of Texas newspaper sportswriters cannot hold a candle to Dan Jenkins and his contemporaries?

Enter the Chronicle’s lead sports columnist, Richard Justice.

Justice — whose shoddy reporting, vapid analysis and bizarre blog comment attacks have been a frequent topic here for years — essentially proves Cartwright’s point about the demise of Texas sportswriting with this snarling and petty reply to Cartwright’s op-ed.

An old saying in India is that "sarcasm is the last weapon of the defeated wit."

Justice is living proof of the truth of that adage.

NBA Playoffs Win Probability

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nba chartThis is very cool.

Brian Burke, who authors the Advanced NFL Stats webpage, has developed a model for win probability for the NBA playoffs.  So, as you watch the Rockets/Blazers playoff game tonight, you can also watch a chart that calculates and constantly updates the probability of victory for each team while the game progresses.

Can you imagine the dynamic that these charts will contribute to the already electric playoff atmosphere at the Las Vegas casino sports books? ;^)