Basketball Coaching and Economics
To build an effective new habit, you need five essential components: a reason, a trigger, a micro-habit, effective practice, and a plan.
— Stanier, Michael Bungay. The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever
Peter Boettke, a George Mason economist and avid basketball fan, offers an outlandish example: “I can change one rule in basketball and Michael Jordan will no longer be the best basketball player of all time. You could change the rules to require the game be played on stiletto heels. Then Cindy Crawford would be the best player.”
Peter Boettke from GMU Economics Department has interesting take on economics and basketball quiet frequently on his economics blog.
Coaches for years have been utilizing various statistics to help assess individual performance and improve team success. Coach L also uses various measures to help in putting his team together. Among my personal favorites, is the statistics concerning scores off the pass versus scores off the dribble to assess your teams offensive ball movement. See the thing that can kill your offense is lack of ball movement and in contemporary basketball what we call “first side threes”. Instead, you want the ball to move, perferably at least 3 sides of the floor (e.g., right, center, left) before a shot, and you would like to play the game inside-out, rather than outside-in. Getting your players to consistently play that way, however, is not as easy as it sounds.
Burried inside the article, however, is a great example of how Coach L utilizes incentives to try to get his players to play the way he wants them to. Last season (while Coach L was still at GMU), U of Miami was a team prone to turnovers. Coach L does not tolerate his teams being that careless with the ball. So when he started working with the team this year, one of the first things he did was to let them scrimmage but with a rack of 12 balls on the sideline. Whenever a turnover was committed, Coach L would remove a ball from the rack. When the rack was empty, the players had to run without a ball for the time remaining whether that was 5 minutes, or 2 hours. At first, the players continued to be careless with the ball and scrimmages turned into pure conditioning rather quickly. But it didn’t take long, and the players started to take care of the ball. Coach L calls this “incentive thinking”.
In basketball, great coaches such as Dean Smith of UNC, developed elaborate statistical measures to caputre these intangibles long along in developing systems to measure player efficiency. One of the most striking non-captured statistic is the pass that leads to the assist. Another is deflected passes. Yet another is boxing out that might not result in your rebound, but an easier rebound for your teammate. And finally there is of course the ability to set hard picks that free up teammates. Basketball is a team game played by individuals and as such it is full of both individual sacrifice for the good of the team, and individual brilliance. Obviously the conventional wisdom of triple doubles might lead us astray in assessing the value of any one player, but the various intangibles have always been looked at by the great coaches from Claire Bee to Bobby Knight, or Adolf Ruff to Mike Krzyzewski.
For Discussion: Share your thoughts on the links with economics and basketball coaching.
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