This afternoon – somewhere around 4pm EST – my phone rang in my office. On the other end was Tom Van Riper of Forbes.com. Tom was working on a story on over-paid athletes and he wanted to ask me a few questions. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes, and in that time we touched upon why teams might overpay for aging stars and the inconsistency of NHL goalies (the latter topic is covered in Stumbling on Wins).
After the call was over I went back to work (I still have to put some finishing touches on some studies that will be presented at the Western Economic Association meetings at the end of this month).
And then a few hours later, Tom posted the following at Forbes.com.
As you can see, the words I spoke at 4pm EST were posted at the Forbes.com website at 6:30pm. Not sure I can remember a phone interview with this sort of turn-around.
By the way, Tom noted in our conversation that the last story he wrote that mentioned Stumbling on Wins – Is LeBron Really the Best – received more than a million hits. Of course, it helped that this story was picked up by Yahoo.com. Hopefully something similar happens this time.
- DJ
P.S. One more by the way… I went to post this earlier in the evening and Word Press was down. At that point, I didn’t think the Internet was that amazing.
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Eddie Curry is definitely overpaid. However given that the last season he played significant minutes he has negative 3 wins and was taking time from David Lee it could be argued that for a guaranteed contract the best use of his minutes is on the bench.
I also remember in 8th grade doing an assignment using all sorts of resources to look up info(Atlas, Encyclopedia, etc.). If I’d said that in less than fifteen years that a bunch of people would keep information sites updated and I could just type what I wanted and it would show up instantly, I think the teacher would have assumed I was insane.
There is another way, however, the Internet is like anything else, once you learn some basic concepts and consistent action can achieve some good results and fast.