Did you know that between 100 and 120 professors teach a course on sports economics? If you read today’s USA Today, this is but one interesting fact you would have learned about our growing field. On the cover of USA Today’s Money section is an article by Sue Kirchhoff entitled, …
Yesterday I posted a lengthy comment on Allen Iverson. Okay, it was really lengthy. For those counting, it was close to 2,000 words, which is about twice the length of a typical newspaper column. Hopefully what I said was worth the effort people had to invest to read it all, …
So far The Wages of Wins has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and at SI.com (Sports Illustrated on-line). In general these reviews have been quite positive. Still, if you look really hard, you can come across a few comments on our book which are not …
Malcolm Gladwell’s review of our book focused primarily on what we had to say about Allen Iverson. Consequently the media has often mentioned Iverson when discussing our work. It is important to note that much of our book – in fact, the vast majority of our book – does not …
Over the last few posts I have focused on scorers and role players. The story of Philadelphia in 2001 continues this tale. Here are the questions I wish to address: First, if Iverson is not one of the game’s great players, how did Philadelphia reach the NBA Finals in 2001? …
This past weekend we posted the following on our homepage. Our intention with The Wages of Wins was to write a book that would be very accessible to a general audience. For the most part the reviews of our book indicate that we were successful. Unlike the typical book written …
In The Wages of Wins we make the observation that it might be best to evaluate scorers in the NBA relative to other scorers. Recently I updated the analysis seen in our book in this forum via an examination of the top scorers in 2005-06 – which one can see …
A few days ago I posted a comment entitled Growing up a Sports Economist where in essence I downplayed the importance of being respected by economists at top institutions. For a person not at a top school, whose research primarily applies economics to the world of sports, my happiness cannot …
Amazon.com has added additional features to how The Wages of Wins is displayed on their website. You can now see a blown-up picture of the front cover (not sure why you would want to, but you can). You can also see that our book is has been copyrighted (again, not …
One of the points we make in our book is that Ben Gordon is not exactly the second coming of MJ. Although Gordon is a shooting guard who can score, he is not above average in shooting efficiency and doesn’t do much else particularly well. Consequently, unlike MJ, he doesn’t …