Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

Along the lines of yesterday’s post where I mashed up two different interests of mine (cognitive science and organizational theory), today’s post is about an intersection between basketball and management.

I don’t know a lot about basketball. I watch the game recreationally, but I’ve never played, and don’t have a feel for the sport. I do read a lot about it, though, in part because my favorite sports columnist, Bill Simmons, is obsessed with basketball, to the point where he recently published a 700 page tome called The Book of Basketball.

One of the more interesting debates in basketball these days is how to measure the productivity of a player. You would think it would be easy – take a player’s statistics like points, rebounds and assists, mash them together, and see who does the best. And that’s exactly what ESPN’s John Hollinger has done in his Player Efficiency Ratings to rate every NBA player with a single number.

However, basketball is a team sport. It has been shown repeatedly that five supremely skilled individual players may not mesh well as a team, so there’s a need for team players who fill in the little things that don’t get measured by the traditional stats. One such player is Shane Battier, who was described as the No-Stats All-Star by Michael Lewis in a New York Times story.

So how do you measure team contributions? Basketball geeks are now using something called “plus-minus”. In its simplest form, it’s straightforward – take the team differential in points when a player is on the court. In other words, if the team outscores its opponent by 5 points with the player on the court in a game, then the plus-minus for that player is +5. There are several refinements to adjust for teammates and strength-of-opponent and other factors, but that’s the basic idea.

The reason plus-minus is attractive is that the point of basketball is to have your team outscore the other team, and plus-minus measures the player’s impact on achieving that goal. As it turns out, Shane Battier tends to do well in plus-minus, even though his other stats are terrible (he rates as well below average in Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Ratings). Michael Lewis’s story describes some of the things that Battier does that don’t show up in the box score, particularly on defense, but it’s hard for most people to believe, since “numbers don’t lie”. The flip side to Battier is Kevin Durant, where his stats were eye-popping, but plus-minus said that he was actually hurting his team, in part because of his poor defense and inefficient shot selection.

Based on examples like these, it appears that traditional basketball statistics don’t necessarily measure a player’s contributions to whether the team wins; in other words, teams are measuring the wrong things. Well, not all teams. Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, has been affectionally dubbed Dork Elvis by Bill Simmons, because he’s figured out a Moneyball-esque approach to measure subtle ways in which players can affect games, and his team is winning with an unconventional set of players despite losing its two All-Stars to injury this season.

Now what’s amazing to me about this is that basketball is a pretty simple game. There are five players per team on the court at a time, and the goal is to score more than the other team. The professional teams spends millions of dollars to find and train the best players, and they’re only now starting to figure out how to measure the impact that a good team player can have on winning or losing.

If basketball teams haven’t figured it out, measuring the impact of a team player in the business world, where the goals are varied and conflicting, where teams are fluid and changing, and where performance evaluation is an afterthought, would seem to be impossible. And yet I’m wondering if some equivalent of plus-minus is possible, in part because I think of myself as a good team player, and would like to see those skills more widely recognized and appreciated.

It would have to start with defining the goals of a team, and having a way to measure the progress towards those goals, the way plus-minus measures team point differential as a metric for winning games. This is already complicated, as a team may have explicit goals (deliver the project successfully) that conflict with implicit goals (don’t contradict the manager). But efforts like the “results only work environment” are starting to move businesses in the direction of focusing on the end goals, rather than the process.

The other component, measuring performance, is also difficult, as any set of metrics will immediately be gamed. Perhaps a better metric of a team player’s effectiveness would be to ask each team member at the end of each project which team member they would most want on their next project. That could favor other characteristics like popularity, but if the team members were going to be judged as a team on the results of the next project, seeing who they want on their team could be a decent proxy to plus-minus.

Wrapping up, I think that plus-minus serves as a useful reminder for managers. If the best players in basketball aren’t necessarily the ones with dominant statistics, it’s possible that the best employees are not the ones with the highest performance evaluation scores. Plus-minus is a reminder to look beyond the numbers, and watch how the team actually works together, to see who is doing the little things that enable the team to function effectively, and to think of new ways of measuring productivity that might more closely map to the desired end-goals of the organization.

The tennis US Open is held each year at this time in Flushing Meadows, in Queens. Each of the past two years I thought about going, but couldn’t quite convince myself to take a day off work to really enjoy it, plus I always figured I could do it next year. Alas, with the movers showing up on Wednesday, I was really running out of time. Fortunately, this gave me the incentive to get most of my packing done over the weekend so I could go today.

Once I made it through the hour-long line to buy tickets (I didn’t order ahead because I didn’t decide to come until this morning), I had a great time. The early days of the US Open are fun in that matches are taking place on all of the outer courts, where you can crowd right up to the fence around the court. It reminds me of going to watch AVP beach volleyball in that way. In the picture to the right, you can see how close I was to Stanislas Wawrinka, the 10 seed, in one of his matches.

Being that close to the matches let me appreciate how unbelievably hard these guys were hitting in a visceral way that is not apparent on television. The eye-in-the-sky viewpoint of the television camera lets you see the entire court at once, which isn’t possible when you’re standing up against the court. I started off watching Korolev vs. Soderling, and I actually couldn’t turn my head fast enough to see the serve land in the service box if I watched the service motion. These guys were amping it up to well over 100 mph on the serve, so I had to focus on the service box, and catch the service motion in my peripheral vision to have any hope of seeing the serve’s position and the return.

As an aside, I was a competitive tennis player in my middle and high school days, playing on my high school’s varsity team my junior and senior year. I played against state-ranked players, and watched my share of competitive matches between such players. So watching these guys from the pro tour from that same vantage point off to the side of the court made it clear what a quantum leap difference there was between what I’d seen and what these guys were doing. I’d always clung to the fantasy that if I’d stuck with tennis (instead of changing sports to volleyball in college and ultimate frisbee after grad school) I could have been decent, but a fantasy is all that is. Even the sound of them hitting the ball with the racket is audibly different in a way that can’t be heard on TV. Man, they’re good.

One of the other fun bits is that there’s a big board listing the current scores of all the matches happening, so I could cherry pick the close matches. I ended up seeing five different tiebreakers, as I would find the matches where the opponents were evenly matched, and watch them slug it out to 6-6. Korolev/Soderling went to a tiebreaker in the set that I watched – tiebreakers are to 7, win by 2, and their tiebreaker went to 11-9 as they battled for each point. This was the third set, and Korolev had won the first two, so he managed to finish Soderling off in the tiebreaker, but for a straight-set victory, it was incredibly competitive.

I then went to go see Wawrinka, since he was ranked 10. I had to use my height to see the court, but his first set extended into a tiebreaker as well, as his opponent, Simone Bolelli, was playing extremely well. Wawrinka pulled out the tiebreaker, Bolelli lost his composure (partially because he kept hitting to Wawrinka’s fantastic backhand and getting beat with ridiculous down-the-line passing shots rather than hitting to Wawrinka’s weaker forehand), and once Wawrinka was up a break in the second set, it was clear he had the match in hand (and I found out later he went on to win in straight sets).

So it was on to the treat of the day – Rafael Nadal, the number one player in the world, winner of the French Open, Wimbledon, and the Olympic gold medal, was playing in Arthur Ashe stadium this afternoon against Bjorn Phau, some German qualifier dude. Since this was in the stadium, I was up in the nosebleed seats, literally on the top row, but the view was still okay from up there. I got there just as it was starting, and it turned out to be one heckuva match. I’ve never heard of Phau before (he’s apparently ranked 136 in the world), but he played the match of his life today. The first set there were no breaks, although Phau was pushed harder on his serve than Nadal was, including a couple deuces. That turned out to be the difference in the tiebreaker, as Phau went down by a couple mini-breaks and lost 7-4. The second set followed form except that Nadal broke Phau once to win the set 6-3.

More importantly than the score, though, was that Phau was playing out of his mind. I saw much better quality tennis in this match than I did on the outer courts, and not just from Nadal. Phau was hitting lines, moving Nadal back and forth, and up and back pulling off some ridiculous drop shots. He was playing aggressively – he attacked the net a bunch of times in the first couple sets and won all but a couple of those points. And the crowd got behind him for playing so hard and so well – we started cheering every time he won a big point, and I think that crowd momentum helped him raise his game. Nadal was also playing a bit passively (he later admitted he was tired from the travel to and from Beijing), so he was letting Phau dictate the game, and that made things much harder. And yet, every time Phau needed a point to put Nadal in trouble, Nadal would make an unbelievable shot to put himself ahead again. There were a couple passing shots that Nadal did on the dead run that were breathtaking.

I wandered off after the second set since it seemed like Phau had gotten Nadal mad and woken him up, and I figured the third set was a foregone conclusion. I wandered around the outer courts stopping in on other matches (including another tiebreaker between Llodra and Gabashvili), but then noticed that Phau was still in the Nadal match at 4-4 in the third. I rushed back, and arrived as Nadal was serving for the match, up a break at 5-4. Phau hadn’t broken Nadal’s serve all day, but with the crowd behind him, he managed to pull it off when he needed it most, including one ridiculous point where he had gotten to the net, Nadal squeaked a lob over him, he ran back to the baseline and spun around to return it, and then managed to get back in control of the point to win it. He held his serve just barely to take the lead at 6-5, and needed one more break to take the set, even going up love-15. But it was not to be, as Nadal came back to win his serve and force another tiebreaker. Phau came out strong in the tiebreaker, but then blew two consecutive volleys on points where he was in control, and went down 5-2 and couldn’t recover. Tremendous match, especially for the first round, and especially involving a top seed – most of the other top seeds rolled through their first round matches, so it was a treat to see this one. Walking out of the stadium, everybody was buzzing more about seeing Phau than about Nadal, as his play today was a revelation.

Part of the fun of spending the day watching tennis was thinking again about different aspects of tennis strategy. I’m no David Foster Wallace (who writes extensively about the mental game of tennis in Infinite Jest and in his essays), but it was fun to see so many different styles throughout the day. I watched Kei Nishikori beat a higher-ranked Juan Monaco by essentially moonballing him, keeping the ball in play while taking pace off the ball and letting Monaco hit himself into unforced errors. I saw other players try to slug it out by hitting harder than each other. Bolelli was extremely effective at wrong-footing Wawrinka, getting him going into a rhythm side-to-side, and then hitting it twice to the same side of the court as Wawrinka was running to the other side. Phau decided to go for it on his first serves – even from the nosebleed seats, I could hear the difference when he cannoned a flat serve at 130+ mph, instead of the softer sound from his 100mph spinning second serve. It ended up costing him as I think his first serve percentage was under 50% for the match, but when he got it in, he really put Nadal on the defensive. It’s all playing the angles and trying to force the opponent into a position where they have to make a spectacular shot to avoid hitting it right back to you. Fun stuff.

I’d been watching tennis for six hours at this point, and decided I was done for the day, but as long as I was out in Flushing, I figured I should walk by the Expo site with the towers made famous (to me, at least) by Men in Black. I then hopped the subway one more stop to the Flushing-Main St. stop to walk around the Flushing Chinatown. While walking around, I saw Flushing Noodle Shop which attracted my attention for two reasons: (a) I love noodle shops, and (b) it had dead ducks hanging in the window (Batman’s heuristic for determining authentic Chinese restaurants). Yummy stuff. Then back on the 7 to home, and now I should really get back to packing.

P.S. I’ve been enjoying my last week in New York. Friday night, I went out with friends to get drinks at Pegu Club, and then dinner at John’s Pizzeria. On Saturday, I took a trip to the Upper East Side to visit the Whitney Museum, and its Buckminster Fuller exhibit – man, he was a nutcase, but an inspired one. I loved his description of himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist”, his idea of putting a two-mile-tall tetrahedron city to host a million people in San Francisco Bay (according to his calculations, it should float), and even better, his idea of constructing half-mile sphere cities that would float because the sphere itself would only weigh three tons, while it enclosed air of approximately fifty tons, and using the greenhouse effect, could heat the air by as little as one degree to create buoyancy (hot air rises).

I ate a yummy pulled-duck sandwich at Starwich, and went on to do a quick run-through of the Met, mostly to see the JMW Turner exhibition, since I adore his work. It turned out I’d seen most of the pieces already, as they were primarily from the Turner Bequest and on display at the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery in London, but still great stuff. Also, I visited the Koons exhibition in the Roof Garden – I’d never been to the Roof Garden before but it’s lovely, as they have a martini bar overlooking the park. I also took a turn through Musical Instruments, and Arms and Armor – the latter is guaranteed to turn me into a teenage boy again every time I visit. Afterwards, I wandered back across Central Park and caught the tail end of a nice sunset, as pictured.

I’m going to try to make it to the Frick Collection tomorrow and maybe MOMA after the movers come, and that should just about wrap up my New York experience. It’s been fun.

I have a series of posts that are all linked in some way in my head, and are all in various states of incompletion. I’m going to dive right in and start posting and hope that it comes together as I go along. Or maybe I’ll just confuse people.

Last month, at the Yankees game, my non-baseball-fan coworker asked me why I was booing A-Rod so much. I had to stop and think about it – it was just one of those things I had internalized. A couple weeks later, ESPN.com ran an article asking the same question: Why do we hate this guy? My answer was partly that he had sold out for the money (for those of you who don’t follow sports, he broke into the major leagues with Seattle, and then left them when he got the Rangers to sign him to a 10 year, $250 million contract), and partly because he never performed in the clutch (which is unforgivable given his contract). He’s immensely talented, he piles up huge numbers, but when the game is on the line, he doesn’t strike fear into his opponents. He never rises to the occasion unlike his teammate, Derek Jeter, who always seems to be in the right place (the 2001 flip being a great example).

Examples abound throughout sports. Peyton Manning is like A-Rod, putting up the stats when it doesn’t matter and choking when it does. Tom Brady is like Jeter, unflappable in the clutch. In golf, Mickelson quails, Tiger Woods steps up (this past weekend, Tiger won his 12th major championship – after the third round, he was tied for the lead, and he broke away from the pack with a birdie on the first hole of the final round and ended up winning by five strokes). In the NBA, Karl Malone was the choker, Michael Jordan the legendary closer. Jordan was unbelievable in the clutch. Everyone in the stadium (heck, everyone in the world) knew who the ball was going to, he’d get it, and still manage to will his way to a score.

I think such feats are tremendously inspiring. There’s something about watching somebody who doesn’t just survive, but excels, when the pressure is at its highest. They have a sense of The Moment, when their legacy will be defined, which will inspire stories for years afterwards. I still have a newspaper picture of Jordan rising up for a jump shot in his last playoffs series against the Jazz, which I captioned with “I believe I can fly”, the tagline for one of his commercials at the time.

And such feats are not confined to the area of sports. In real life, there are those who go out and perform, who achieve, who step up, who seize The Moment and make it theirs. And then there are those who let life pass them by, who always let The Moment slip through their fingers. I’ve been fortunate to know a bunch of people in the former category. They are inspiring, as well as intimidating. They give me hope that such feats are possible, even as they make me feel inadequate for not having achieved them myself.

I’ve been thinking about what separates those who seize The Moment from those who don’t. One of the differences is that those who do want the responsibility of those moments. Jordan rarely let anybody else take the final shot. But when he took it and missed, he didn’t blame anybody but himself. He wanted the glory, and he accepted the responsibility that came with it.

Peyton Manning is the opposite – he wants the glory of the victory, but he doesn’t want the responsibility. Whenever the Colts lose, it’s never his fault in his mind; he blames his linemen for not providing good protection, his receivers for dropping the ball, or his coaches for the game plan. For instance, I’ll quote from an ESPN.com article after last year’s playoff loss:

“I’m looking for a safe word here, I don’t want to be a bad teammate,” Manning said when asked about Indianapolis’ blown blocking assignments.

Way to stand up for your teammates there, Peyton.

A-Rod is the same way – he doesn’t want the responsibility for the team’s losses, and thus always seems tentative in the clutch. And I think there is something karmic here. Nobody wants to be on a team with a guy who’s only focused on himself (I’m saying guy here because, honestly, guys are more likely to be individually focused). We like teammates who look out for us, who cover for us, who make us better. We’ll put up with teammates who are individually brilliant because they do their job well, but we always know in the back of our mind that they’d desert us if it came down to us or them. Successful teams are those where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. When individuals consider themselves to be more important than the team, the team suffers. And because they don’t trust their teammates, they suffer karmically and never achieve as much as they could otherwise.

Jordan actually provides a great example of this in the evolution of his career. At the beginning of his career, he was the individual superstar, scoring lots of points and piling up the accolades; in the playoffs in his second season, he scored 63 points against the Celtics prompting Larry Bird to comment afterwards that “I think it’s just God disguised as Michael Jordan.” Of course, people remember the quote and forget that the Bulls lost that game. It wasn’t until years later that Jordan realized that despite his amazing talent, he could not win without his teammates. Once he figured that out, he went on to become the greatest basketball player of all time. And, in fact, the codicil to his career, where he unretired and played two more years with the Washington Wizards, only serves to reinforce the point; by that point, it was more about him than his team, and it showed in the results.

Why am I rambling on about sports and teams and taking responsibility and seizing The Moment? I think there are parallels to management and life somewhere in here. I’ll start to get into that tomorrow.

I went skiing yesterday. It was awesome. Fresh snow, knee-deep powder in places, and no lift lines despite it being Saturday of a holiday weekend.

The part which never fails to astonish me is that I can still ski. I hadn’t been skiing in probably close to three years. And skiing is not like any other activity that I do – it’s not like I get practice with strapping long boards to my feet while walking down the street or sitting in a cubicle. And yet I got off the lift at the top of the mountain, started down the steep run (yes, I cleverly chose a black diamond run for my first run of the day/year), and had an awful hundred yards or so, where I was out of control and sliding all over the slope. Then the muscle memory kicked in. By halfway down the run, I was back in control, making smooth and short turns, facing my torso down the fall line and concentrating on keeping my weight forward. And I only got better from there.

It’s bizarre when I think about it. Where is this information stored? It’s got to be in my brain someplace, some pattern-building that was done when I learned to ski. But that knowledge sits there completely dormant, unused until the right set of contextual cues arise. Then, boom, the knowledge is loaded up and it’s right there and available to be accessed.

It makes me wonder whether I could leverage the equivalent of muscle memory in other aspects of life. I think this is probably the principle behind the Memory Palace, but I’ve never really experimented with it. I think they’re similar because it’s like the equivalent of mental tagging, like del.icio.us, using mental contextual cues to elicit the appropriate memories, where muscle memory depends on physical environmental cues.

The other observation of the day was that when I get the technique right, things are so easy. There were a few points during the day when I got the rhythm down, everything working together as I went down the hill. And it was almost effortless – it just felt right. And this immediate feedback is another neat thing about sports – when you do it right, you know. When I played volleyball, the balls which I hit the hardest were the ones that it felt effortless to hit – when my technique was good, everything in the body aligned and all of my wound-up energy exploded into the ball. When I was a little bit off-center or my timing was off, I could hit the ball, but there was a greater impact on my body (there were times when I felt like I almost tore my shoulder off).

Nothing deep, I know. But it’s kind of humbling to realize how well our bodies work sometimes, that we can learn some move, put it away for years, and break it out again when we want it.

P.S. As an aside, I’m a bit less worried about the cold of New York now. It was 20 degrees at the bottom of the mountain, less than 10 at the top, and I was unzipping my jacket during the day because I was too warm. Yay layers. Well, layers and hard work.

I played ultimate yesterday in my typical league. Even though our team eventually lost 15-13, I think I scored something like 8 or 9 of our points. Some of them I sky-ed over my defender, jumping up and snatching the disc at the highest point of my leap. A few I got because of great throws by my teammates, putting it to the open part of the field as I ran to the disc.

And I made one catch where time slowed down, inspired, no doubt, by my incessant consumption of sports on TV, where the slow-motion replay is a key device. My teammate had the disc about 10 yards out of the end zone. I made a poor cut, so I didn’t have much separation from my defender, maybe a couple feet, but my teammate decided to try to force the disc in there anyway with a hammer throw. It gets away from him, and it’s well behind me. My defender jumps and tips it further away from me. I’ve stopped, and jumped backwards at this point. And as I jump, time slows down. I see the disc start to float down, I see my hand reach out slowly to snatch the disc up away from the ground as I’m drifting horizontally towards it, I realize I shouldn’t land with the disc first because I might drop it, so I twist in mid-air to land on my back with the disc thrust triumphantly upwards, and time speeds up again.

It was a somewhat surreal experience – everything just stopped, and there was nothing in the world but me, floating through the air, and the disc spinning ahead of me. I can only remember two other occasions on which I’ve had it happen, so I think that makes this catch one of my top three most spectacular catches ever. The first time I remember it happening was in a Palo Alto hat tournament where the throw was terrible, several feet out of my reach in the end zone, but I dove and reached out full length to sneak my hand under the disc inches above the grass to grab it for the score. The other time was another one where it was way out of reach, and I just went to full extension layout with my left hand, grabbing it and tumbling several times.

So that was pretty satisfying. Even though we lost. Grr. Next week.

After reading this Pro Football Weekly article on possible trade scenarios for Randy Moss of the Minnesota Vikings, I wrote back to the author with one of my own. And, well, since I have a blog, I’ll share it here. On the off chance it actually happens, it’d be cool to say that I called it.

My hoped-for destination for Randy Moss is the Atlanta Falcons. It works for Randy Moss, because he works best in a playground offense – “I’ll go deep, and you throw it up high for me”. Michael Vick, the quarterback for the Falcons, also works best in a playground offense – “I’ll run around back here until somebody gets open, and then I’ll launch it 70 yards through the air”. (for those of you who don’t watch football, Vick is the most absurdly gifted athlete in the league right now – he’s faster than anybody on the field, and can throw the ball further than pretty much any other quarterback).

The Falcons desperately need a deep threat receiver. I came up with this scenario last week, but today’s game against the Eagles just proved it. The Eagles were able to put 9 defenders in the box (normally it’s 7), because the Falcons receivers just aren’t threats – they can’t get open. Now picture adding Randy Moss, the single most dangerous deep threat in the NFL. All of a sudden, you have to drop the safety back to protect against Vick flinging it 60 yards through the air to a streaking Moss in stride. Peerless Price, the current lead receiver, goes back to the #2 role that he’s more comfortable in (his best year as a pro was playing opposite Eric Moulds in Buffalo), because he can often beat the #2 cornerback on a defense. The running game opens up, because the defense can’t stack the box with defenders any more (this is even more significant because the Falcons already had the #1 rushing offense in the NFL this season partially due to Vick). The defense has to respect the pass _and_ the rush. And that opens up all sorts of playcalling possibilities. Play action becomes a brutal option, where Vick fakes to Dunn going into the line, the linebackers and safeties take two steps in to stop the run, then realize Vick still has the ball, and that Randy Moss has gotten behind them. Vick stops, launches it, and it’s a touchdown. It would be simply devastating.

I don’t think the Falcons have enough to interest the Vikings in a trade, but if I were them, I’d consider giving up a first round pick and some of their defensive line depth (maybe Chad Lavalais, a second year defensive tackle who’d be affordable for the Vikings).

I highly doubt it would happen, because, well, it’d be too much fun. A source did reveal today that the Vikings were leaning 60/40 towards trading Moss, according to ESPN.com, so we may get some fun trade scenarios this offseason. He’ll probably end up with Baltimore, because they’re even more desperate for a receiver than Atlanta. But Kyle Boller isn’t nearly as exciting as Vick (although he does have the arm strength – Boller turned into a high first round draft pick when he demonstrated to scouts that he could throw a football through the goalposts from the fifty yard lines from his knees). So I’m going to hold out hope for my scenario.