Tag Archives: NBA

ESPN can fix tanking without the NBA’s help.

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ESPN has grabbed the tanking horse by the reigns and has been riding it for weeks now. We hopped on for a while. Our take was very capitalist. Tanking is a bad managerial decision. If owners and GMs want to manage teams poorly, they will fail and why should we care? Arturo cut right to the heart of the matter:

ESPN is a media company that televises games. Tanking is inherently bad for ESPN.

The NBA has a television contract with several outlets, including ESPN. At the start of the season the entire schedule of televised games is decided. Of course down the stretch there are games that don’t matter. Was anyone tuning in to watch Charlotte games after I don’t know … 20 games? The NBA shares revenue from national television and certain teams get slotted in TV spots long before we know if they’ll be tanking.

In the NBA there are too many problems with management. A big part is you can buy your way in, and there is no real accountability. The Maloofs are terrible owners and terrible people and they’re still in control. Trying to fix the bad management in the NBA doesn’t seem possible and trying to fix tanking in the NBA is trying exactly that.

However, television companies could take another route. They could refuse to put up with tanking. What if after a certain mark in the season (how about the All-Star break, we use it for everything) TV stations are allowed replace “bad games” and the team they replace doesn’t get paid? Then they can replace the game with another game that people want to watch. There might have to be rules on rotating which games can be used as replacement games to prevent teams like the Lakers from getting all of the replacement games. Then you take the money that would have gone to the team that gets replaced and give it to the teams that replace it (and maybe to their opponent if they were not a bad team.) So if teams doing poorly still want television revenue they need to make sure they’re playing well enough so that broadcasters still want to show them. That would of course mean no sitting stars.

No one likes watching tanking teams. We’re not going to stop it for a very simple reason. Tanking is a stupid idea (for the most part and please don’t act like most teams tanking are doing it effectively or the “right way”) Using logical rules and methods to stop teams from being bad won’t work because those teams are bad precisely because they are illogical! What we can do is refuse to watch tanking teams and refuse to pay them. If they want to sacrifice their season to try for a better pick, fine! Then they get to sacrifice their television revenue and no one has to watch them fail.

-Dre

The 2011-2012 NBA Wins Produced Cheat Sheet

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I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there.

Richard Feynman, Letter to Armando Garcia J, December 11, 1985

The New Kings

At the end of last season, I was arrogant. I was at the top of my game. I felt I had an answer or a model for every possible scenario the NBA could throw at me.

Then everything changed.

First, we didn’t know if we would have a season.Then we didn’t know where Chris Paul and Dwight Howard would end up. We still don’t know who’s going to be playing where exactly. Never mind the fact that the schedule for the season is so strange that Vegas refused to post over/unders for wins for the season.

But I wasn’t worried, All I had to do was adapt all my existing models slightly to account for the variation right?

Yeah, about that…

One of the projects that we had been working on is on improving the Wins Produced model . The Lockout gave us a great opportunity to do so and we did. This is a very good thing.

Except that it means that the world changed. Up is not quite down but it’s not exactly up anymore. The value and contribution of each player has changed and it’s going to take a while to adjust to the new reality.

It’s easy for anyone to be confused.

Luckily, I’m here to help you with that and I’ve been in the lab working on the problem. To start, I decided to come up with a nice little cheat sheet for the New Wins Produced model. It features every veteran currently on an active roster and it’s sorted by team and by the players Wins Produced for the 2010-2011 season. It has basic information for each player, totals for the last five years, each players average year and the numbers for the 2010-11 season.

Hopefully, that will help everyone involved.

-Arturo

Major League sports are not as big as sports fans like to think

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Sports are supposed to be a great help to the economy. That’s the story we’re told when cities add taxes to build stadiums and arenas. The problem, though, is that when we look over the numbers, we don’t see many people that sports actually help.

The Ideal Scenario isn’t that Ideal

The problem with Sports as a business is that most days your stadium or arena will be empty (at least with respect to the sport that motivated the construction of the building). Let’s take a look at a city that has managed to do it right. The Staples Centers in Los Angeles is an arena that most cities should strive for. But here’s what the numbers say.

  • The Staples Center host three major sports teams (The Lakers and Clippers for basketball and the Kings for the NHL)
  • If the Kings, Clippers and Lakers all played the maximum number of playoff games there would be a major sporting event in the Staples Center 166 days out of the year.
  • If the Kings, Clippers and Lakers all sold out every game they would have filled approximately 3.5 million seats
  • The Los Angeles area has over 12 million people. That means only around 25% of the population could go to a sports game a year, and that’s only if no one attended multiple games.
In an arena with three major teams (the ideal scenario) an arena doesn’t help much. After all, even in the ideal scenario above, the building can only seat a tiny portion of the population.   And this building is still not hosting a sporting event the majority of the time.  Furthermore, even if somehow the Staples Center could find events for the rest of the year, it would still only increase the number of tickets sold to about 7 million annually.

Numbers for Major Sports in the NBA

Here are some rough estimates for league wide attendance during regular seasons*
  • If every MLB game sold out approximately 121,500,000 seats would be filled
  • If every NBA game sold out approximately 25,000,000 seats would be filled.
  • If every NHL game sold out approximately 25,000,000 seats would be filled.
  • If every NFL game sold out approximately 35,000,000 seats would be filled.
  • Total for all four leagues is about 200,000,000
Here are some rough estimates for league wide attendance in the ideal case for playoffs for each league (7 game series in NHL and NBA and 5 game and 7 game series in MLB)
  • If every MLB playoffs went the distance and sold out approximately 2,000,000 seats would be filled.
  • If every NBA playoffs went the distance and sold out approximately 2,1000,000 seats would be filled
  • If every NHL playoffs went the distance and sold out approximately 2,100,000 seats would be filled.
  • If every NFL playoffs sold out approximately 770,000 seats would be filled.
  • Total for all four leagues is about 7,000,000
Here are some fun comparions
So when it comes down to it every major league sport in the United States would be about two thirds as effective as Netflix if each had maximum popularity. The playoffs all put together amount to one busy day of shopping for Wal-mart in the US. It’s easy to get impressed by large numbers when speaking about the NBA but when put in context they are just not that big.

Summing Up

The numbers I showed above say that sports just can’t seat as many fans as we’d like to think. One other issue with all of the fans listed above is this: they will spend their money else where if sports go away! The research has shown that sports don’t help local economies. Part of the reason is the limited nature of this.  The size of the venues are quite small relative to the local population.

Next, even if local fans can’t see NBA games it doesn’t mean they stop doing anything for entertainment. Maybe they don’t go to the Hooters next to the American Airline arena. That doesn’t mean they don’t go to a different restaurant after doing something else such as going to a movie. The end story is that the NBA doesn’t help as many local fans as we’d like to think and it turns out those local fans are perfectly capable of having fun without the NBA

-Dre
*For NBA and NHL arena capacity I estimated 20,000 per arena. For MLB stadium capacity I estimated 50,000 per stadium. For NFL stadium capacity I estimated 70,000 per stadium.

Reading about Reading

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Michael ‘wiLQ’ Wilczynski from Weakside Awareness recently asked me to share who I had on my RSS feed. I use Google Reader to keep up on all of my NBA reading. I figured I’d share the links to the blogs I follow and ask if there were suggestions to more I should follow. I’ll put the whole link too so it’s easy to copy and paste into your RSS reader if you’d like.

Update: Here is my reader file should you wish to just upload it easily. Thanks to Chris for the tips. In Google Reader click on the gear (Reader Settings->Import/Export) Dre’s Google Reader Feed. (I also have my non-basketball follows in here too)

Listed Alphabetically

If there are other blogs you think I need to follow let me know. Don’t feel snubbed if I don’t follow yours, sometimes I see an awesome blog and forget to add it.

-Dre

How Much is Your Team Worth?

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Yesterday I did a quick breakdown of how much every player with 500+ minutes in the NBA would be worth on the open market if they were paid based on their 2010-2011 production. Frequent commenter Fricktho had a great idea. What if we broke it down by team? So here’s the value of each team at the end of 2011.

Table 1: Value of NBA Rosters at the End of the 2010-2011 Season

Team Roster Value (millions of $)
Miami Heat $116.2
Chicago Bulls $108.4
Los Angeles Lakers $105.0
Orlando Magic $104.1
Dallas Mavericks $102.7
Boston Celtics $102.5
Oklahoma City Thunder $100.8
Memphis Grizzlies $97.6
San Antonio Spurs $92.2
Portland Trail Blazers $87.9
Philadelphia 76ers $82.1
New York Knicks $80.3
Phoenix Suns $80.2
New Orleans Hornets $80.0
Milwaukee Bucks $79.7
Indiana Pacers $79.7
Atlanta Hawks $75.5
Denver Nuggets $75.4
Houston Rockets $71.1
Minnesota Timberwolves $67.0
Golden State Warriors $66.2
Utah Jazz $62.7
Los Angeles Clippers $61.2
New Jersey Nets $61.1
Detroit Pistons $59.8
Toronto Raptors $56.8
Cleveland Cavaliers $51.6
Sacramento Kings $48.1
Washington Wizards $39.0
Charlotte Bobcats $38.0

notes on methodology:

  • Players are counted towards the team they were on as of June 30th, 2011, according to Basketball-Reference’s transaction log.
  • A player’s value is counted towards the team they were last on, even if they are a now a free agent or a restricted free agent.
  • However, Sonny Weems, Joey Dorsey, Kenyon Martin, Wilson Chandler, and J.R. Smith are not counted as they have signed exclusive deals overseas.
  • Players values for the whole season were counted towards the team that had them at the end of the season. For instance Marcin Gortat was worth $15.7 million, and this full value is counted towards Phoenix.

Fun Notes

  • The Miami Heat were worth twice the salary cap last season, and three times as much as the lowest valued-team, the Bobcats.
  • Toronto, Cleveland, Sacramento, Washington and Charlotte were the only teams with rosters valued below the salary cap.
  • The average ($77.8) and median ($79.7) teams are above last year’s luxury tax limit ($70.3).
  • Michael Jordan has done a terrible job of running the Bobcats.
- Dre