Here are two questions posed at Quora: Why Are Other NBA Players Criticizing Jeremy Lin’s Contract? Has This Ever Happened Before? And the top answer – an answer that was re-posted at the Huffington Post – comes from none other than our very own Andres Alvarez (editor of The Wages …
Dave looks at what drives free agent motivation in the NBA and why Utah may actually have an edge.
If you listened to All Things Considered on NPR today, you heard a brief comment from me on Jeremy Lin (every basketball fan’s favorite topic). My interview with Joel Rose actually took much longer than the two quotes you heard. What we talked about, though, doesn’t take that long to …
Dave reviews reviews of John Lehrer’s book “Imagine”
The Detroit Tigers – the team I follow — were expected (by just about everyone) to win the Central Division in the American League this year. But even after winning today, the Tigers are five games under 0.500. And even if the Chicago White Sox lose tonight, the Tigers will …
The term “treadmill of mediocrity” has crept into the vocabulary of some NBA fans recently. The term – introduced by former Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard – doesn’t seem to have much empirical support (as noted in this forum HERE and HERE and HERE). There is another treadmill, though, that teams …
As we have noted over the past couple of weeks, today (May12th 2012) Barnes&Noble will be offering Stumbling on Wins as the Deal of the Day at an absolute steal for $1.99! The book addresses many questions, including… Was Isiah Thomas a victim of his player budget? Do hockey goalies matter? Why …
A little over a year ago, NBA “experts” were telling us that the Knicks are now much better – and the Nuggets are now in trouble — because Carmelo Anthony was playing in New York. The Knicks clearly concurred when they gave Melo a maximum player salary. Now we are …
My latest for Freakonomics (yes, I wrote two posts this week), focuses on competitive balance in college basketball. One argument the NCAA offers when people ask why the labor that generates multi-billion dollar television contracts are not actually paid is that paying the student-athletes would disrupt competitive balance. As I …
Readers of Henry Abbott’s TrueHoop blog might have seen the following today: Writing about the deal to keep the Kings in Sacramento, at great expense to the city, Dave Berri notes on the Freakonomics blog that 85 percent of economists agree that state and local governments should not subsidize professional …