NBA statistics done right:

I've been boning up lately on the weird world of basketball statistics, a field less mature than baseball statistics. I don't feel all that confident in my understanding of NBA numbers yet, but I do want to mention that Matt Yglesias' new Slate piece explaining why Dirk Nowitzki of the NBA Finalist Dallas Mavericks has gotten better since his best friend, the great point guard Steve Nash, left the team, strikes me as a lot more plausible use of data than Malcolm Gladwell's recent book review about basketball statistics in The New Yorker. Yglesias writes:

If Dallas isn't winning because it plays better defense, then what's the team's secret? The Mavericks are winning because they've unshackled Dirk Nowitzki. The conventional wisdom says that great players in general, and Nash in particular, make their teammates better. But in the case of the Mavericks, Nash made Nowitzki—the team's best player and his best friend—distinctly worse.

Playing with Nash turned Nowitzki into a half-star, half-carnival freak. Nash's penetrate-and-dish moves allowed the 7-foot tall, David Hasselhoff-loving German to take advantage of his uncanny accuracy from the 3-point line. It turns out, though, that having him spot up for 3-pointers isn't the best use of Nowitzki's abilities. Nash's great asset is his unselfishness and ability to find the open man. What makes Nowitzki special is that he doesn't need to be open in order to score. Nobody can guard him...

A strong case can be made that Nowitzki, not the MVP Nash, has now emerged as the best player in the NBA.

Nowitzki has gotten better by parting ways with the league's most unselfish player. And Dallas as a whole is proving that you can generate an effective offense by "playing the wrong way." The Mavericks run lots of isolation plays and don't usually bother passing to the open man. Nash's Suns ended 19.7 percent of their possessions with assists, the highest rate in the league. Nowitzki's Mavericks assisted teammates just 14.8 percent of the time. Only the horrifyingly bad Knicks had a lower rate. Meanwhile, the superselfish Mavs had the league's second-most efficient offense in the regular season.

I would guess that Yglesias was inspired by the criticism of Malcolm Gladwell's contention, based on his three economists' rather unsophisticated analyses, that Kevin Garnett has been far and away the best player in the NBA for years.

Garnett is a great basketball player, but in his current situation on the awful Minnesota Timberwolves, he's too unselfish for his team's good. He does all the subtle little things well, but he doesn't do enough of the obvious big thing: put the ball in the basket. He averaged only 21.8 points per game in 2006 on a team where everybody else stinks. He needed to score about 30 ppg just to lift his team to mediocrity.

Something that has been hard for me, and many others, to learn is that in sports, the most effective athletes are often the selfish or show-offy ones, not the good citizens who always do the conservative things that the coaches tell them to do. Back in 1920, the fans loved Babe Ruth for hitting more homeruns than all the others teams in the league, but the baseball experts held him in contempt for swinging for the fences instead of choking up on the bat and trying for singles. Well, we now know for sure that dumb ol' Babe was right and all the smart money guys like Ty Cobb and John McGraw were wrong about this fundamental question of baseball strategy.

Or remember when the young Magic Johnson organized a palace coup on the Lakers and got his coach, Paul Westhead (who had won the NBA championship with Magic not long before), fired and replaced with Pat Riley? Magic felt stifled by Westhead's conservative offensive style and wanted a coach who would let him play the freewheeling "Showtime" game that the fans loved. Well, Magic went on to win four more championships.

After Magic, it became stylish to view scoring as a crude, inferior skill than just about anybody could do. The real art of basketball was in passing to the open man, like Magic did. When Michael Jordan came along, the fans were instantly enraptured but the mavens sniffed. This guy was always shooting the ball, which seemed so 1970s: sure, he'll sell a lot of shoes with his fancy scoring average, but you can't win championships leading the league in scoring. Six championships later, none of them won with a genuine point guard on the Bulls, we know that the fans were right and the experts wrong.

In golf, the old, prestigious Ben Hogan strategy of driving for accuracy, not distance, then hitting superb long irons onto the green is obsolete. Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh, Phil Mickelson, and Ernie Els now follow a less elegant approach of "flogging" the hell out of the ball off the tee, going and finding it, then wedging it out of the rough and onto the green from short range. It works.

As a conservative, this pattern in sports rather irks me. Cautious traditionalism deserves to win, right? Well, it doesn't always work out that way...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer