Basketball

Cool article in Sunday's NYT magazine about measuring the performance of basketball players.

It's a harder problem than measuring the performance of baseball players. With the exception of playing defense, baseball isn't really a team sport. It's more a series of one-on-one matchups that can be easily analyzed.

But the Rockets are clearly thinking pretty hard about applying analysis to this performance measurement problem. They've broken down, for example, what actions a player might take that help the player's resume but don't help the team win. And that's a good lesson for any manager --- sports fan or not --- trying to measure employee performance in settings where performance is hard to measure.

Here's the best line of the article:

It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says. “We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs. “It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re getting paid.”

"They all maximize what they think they're being paid for" --- that's a starting place for a course on organizational economics, just like the one I teach.