Matt Yglesias

Ari Fleischer Tapped to Defend Inane College Football Status Quo

In case you had any doubts about the need to reform college football’s post-season, note that the BCS has hired Ari Fleischer to help make the case against change:

Ari Fleischer Communications, a sports public relations firm headed by the former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been hired by BCS officials to help remodel the tattered image of college football’s postseason system.

BCS executive director Bill Hancock, promoted to the newly recreated position early this week, announced the hiring of Fleischer’s company Saturday.

Hancock said in a statement the goal of the hiring was to help highlight the positive aspects of the BCS, which he called the best way to match college football’s top two teams, while preserving the bowl system.

People with a strong case to make don’t hire a guy who’s primarily known for being a huge liar.

Barack Obama came into office promising reform of the system but there’s been no action. The American people are getting tired of this dithering and demand action. Surely the Fleischer hiring should spur the White House’s competitive instincts.

Brandon Jennings

A few years back, the NBA cartel established a rule saying that 18 year-olds can’t play in the league. This, combined with the NCAA cartel’s rules, means that in practice if you want to become a professional basketball player you need to spend at least one preparatory year playing professional basketball without being paid for it. And make no mistake—big-time college hoops is a professional endeavor. Everyone except the players gets paid a lot for it. One obvious alternative strategy would be to simply go play professionally in some other league in Europe or China where they don’t have this rule.

Last year, Brandon Jennings became the first guy to blaze that trail, signing with Rome’s team in the Italian league. Now this year he’s in the NBA playing for the Bucks. And playing well! He’s scoring 25.3 points per game on efficient shooting and adding 5.5 assists and 4.3 rebounds.

I’d like to think this shows that not only are their advantages to getting paid to play basketball, but also that playing in Europe against other grown men is probably superior preparation for the NBA than is playing against teenagers in college.

The Secret to Phoenix’s Success

I had a few dialogues over the weekend with people about why on earth Phoenix is doing so well so far in the season. Looking at it a little bit more closely, “good luck” seems to be a big part of the answer. All the research shows that the best predictor of future performance is point differential, not win-loss record. If two teams meet ten times, and each time Team A wins by one point, the message you should take away is that Team A and Team B are closely matched and either could win the next matchup. It’s just bad luck that Team A is 0-10 in the matchup. And even though Phoenix’s 10-2 record is tied for best in the league, their +4.1 point differential is worse than what we’ve seen from Dallas, Denver, Portland, Boston, Milwaukee, Atlanta, or Orlando indicating that based on what we’ve seen so far we shouldn’t expect Phoenix to seriously contend for a championship.

By contrast, the surprisingly good Hawks look upon closer examination to be . . . surprisingly good pairing their 10-2 record with a second-best-in-the-league point differential. Common sense tells me that when Orlando and the Lakers have the opportunity to play more games with all their starters in place, Atlanta will slip. But so far they just seem to be a really good team.

Is Thierry Henry a Cheater?

As you may have heard, Europe is being roiled by the fact that France beat Ireland in a crucial World Cup qualifying match thanks to a goal assisted by a handball committed by Thierry Henry. Henry has admitted that he used his hand, so there’s no controversy about what happened, only about whether anything will be done about it.

What’s interesting to me is the apparently widespread impulse to call this “cheating” on Henry’s part rather than just poor officiating. I don’t know nearly enough about the norms of soccer to say whether or not that’s an appropriate judgment. But it strikes me that in American football if someone won the game based on part on, say, a bad out-of-bounds call we couldn’t say that the guy who should have been called out had been “cheating.” Similarly, a lot of us think that poor officiating delivered the 2006 Finals to Miami (especially game five) but if anyone was cheating it was the referees. Slipping poison into the other team’s water supply would be cheating, getting every marginal block/charge call to go your way is just good fortune.

Admittedly, though, none of those things are really parallel to using your hands in a soccer game. But I’m struggling to come up with an analogy that really works one way or the other.

Omri Casspi

The Jewish people are not necessarily known for our athleticism, nor are the Sacremento Kings known these days for winning basketball games, so I was a bit surprised when I looked it up and found that Omri Casspi, the 21 year-old forward who’s the first Israeli to make it to the NBA, is not only playing, he’s playing pretty well—8.5 points and 3.1 rebounds on 60.1 TS% and 21.3 minutes per game. Not All-Star numbers, obviously, but the kind of guy you’d gladly have on your team.

And actually Sacramento, which projected terribly during the offseason, is doing pretty well. A return to form by Kevin Martin and a big sophomore leap from Jason Thompson are the main causes but Casspi is part of the change that Sactown can believe in.

To Punt or Not to Punt

Some people feel that the problem with the statistical defense of Bill Bellichick’s playcalling is that the “go for it” option failed to take into account how good Payton Manning is. If you think about it for a while, I think you’ll see that this is backwards.

The point of punting is that you’re trading possession of the ball for field position. Whether that’s a good trade depends in part on how likely your offense is to secure a first down if you don’t kick the ball to your opponents, and in part on how good the opposing offense is. But the better their offense is, the worse kicking the ball over to them looks. The only reliable way to stop a really good offense is to be extremely reluctant to surrender the ball to them. Against a poor defense, field position is extremely valuable since they’re unlikely to score unless they get the ball close to your end zone. But what it means to be a great offense is that you’re a legitimate threat to score from any position—you really, really don’t want an offense like that to have the ball.

The problem is that conventional thinking in the NFL is that after three downs the default should be to give up possession of the ball unless it’s a desperation situation or something else special. But most of the time teams should be extremely reluctant to give the ball up. Fourth-and-shorts aren’t that hard to convert, and field position is a lot less valuable than possession of the ball. There’s just a convention of labeling any decision to run an offensive play as “risky” that’s completely independent of any actual assessment of the risks. Deliberately giving the ball to the Indianapolis Colts offense is taking a risk. They’re good!

Belichick Was Right

I bow to none in my hatred of Boston sports teams, Boston sports fans, and generally any phrase that involves both “Boston” and “sports.” That said, I’ve always admired Bill Belichick’s willingness to be more aggressive than the average coach in terms of going for it on fourth down. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that most coaches are too conservative about this, and the rest of the NFL ought to take a clue from the fact that it’s the most successful organization in recent NFL history that’s most eager to push the envelop on this.

Last night, however, provided a great example of why most coaches do the wrong thing. New England went for it in a situation when most teams would have punted. And it didn’t work out. If they’d punted, people would be criticizing their defense. But since they went for it, it’s the coach who’s getting criticized. In coaching, like in banking, the safe bet is to make the same mistake as everyone else. But just because a call doesn’t work out 100 percent of the time doesn’t make it the wrong thing. The numbers show pretty clearly that going for it is the smart play. See Nick Beaudrot, Brian Burke, or this post at Advanced NFL Stats.

Firing Byron Scott

It’s hard to see how firing Byron Scott is supposed to solve the New Orleans Hornets’ problems. Looking at them over the summer, they were getting ready to go to war with Chris Paul, the best point guard in the league and arguably the best overall player. He was backed up by Emeka Okafor, who’s very good and a totally plausible second-best guy on a good team. David West is fine. Posey was fine, too, but a bit past his prime. But Peja’s no good anymore. And yet he’s playing 25 minutes per game because who else is going to play? Devin Brown? Darius Songaila? When Okafor comes out, he’s backed up by Hilton Armstrong.

There’s just way too many terrible players on this team. Paul, Okafor, and a bunch of average guys could make the playoffs. But these are not average guys. Morris Peterson is shooting .341 from the field and .269 from three point land.

The Bright Future in Houston

We’re only six games into the season, but I think you’d have to judge the Houston Rockets’ 4-2 opening a victory for the stats-oriented approach to basketball. Not only is Houston’s GM a stats guy, but with Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady both injured we’re actually getting to put a somewhat outlandish hypothetical to the test. Guys like Dave Berri are always saying that guys who rebound well and score efficiently are valuable players even if relatively low shot volume keeps their total points modest. Critics tend to retort that low-volume, high-efficiency opportunities are being opened up by more prolific scorers and that if you had a whole team without a star shot-creator they’d suddenly be ineffective. Instead, put in a position where it makes sense for him to shoot a lot, Trevor Ariza is scoring twenty points per game, and guys like Carl Landry and Luis Scola are still getting their double digits.

The 2009-2010 Rockets aren’t going to be a great team, but I think there’s a good chance they’ll be a perfectly good team. And their good players are all pretty young. And they’ve got a chance to deal Tracy McGrady’s expiring deal if someone decides they need a midseason salary dump. And even if that doesn’t happen, then his contract will come off the books and soon Yao will be at the end of his deal. All in all it’s a reasonably bright future, especially when you consider that their GM has put up a very solid track record of good moves with modest resources over the past three years.

Rooting for the Mediocre

I’m reading Bill Simmons’ The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy. It’s a lot of fun, and something most NBA fans should enjoy, albeit full of analytical claims I disagree with. One of the most interesting of those claims is a kind of meta-claim he makes near the beginning of the book attributing to himself extra-normal insight from his youth spent as a Celtics fan. It was from watching the truly great teams like the Celtics and the truly great players like Larry Bird that you come to really understand the game since those are the guys who, themselves, understand the game best.

I think this is kind of backwards. You sentimentalize teams you root for, and if you root for a team that’s really good—the Celtics or the Lakers or the Yankees (or the Canadiens?)—you wind up sentimentalizing success. And since the point of a sports competition is to win the games, sentimentalizing success gets people extremely confused. Thus we wind up hearing an awful lot in the book about “character” and how you need good character guys to win. If you’re a Celtics fan, this probably makes a lot of emotional success. The Spurs succeeded in the 2000s because of their great character guys. They were good people. Which means that the Celtics won all those championships because they were such good people. But of course I don’t want to say that the Knicks teams I rooted for in the nineties lost because of “bad character.” So more prosaic ideas come to mind—for example, by the time the team peaked Patrick Ewing was already on the old side and even at peak Ewing, though very good, was never the top big man in the association.

I think common sense is that you understand a sport by watching the best teams play it without having a strong rooting interest. Just watching, relatively dispassionately, to see the best athletes in the world go at it. To wax poetic you need to be “the listener who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Otherwise you get too hung up on the idea that the ‘86 Celtics were better than the ‘96 Bulls (something that all and only people from Boston seem to think) and start twisting your whole worldview around to accommodate that conclusion.

Caron Butler Injured

With Caron Butler needing to leave Friday night’s game after an injury, Brendan Haywood told The Washington Post: “I hope he bounces back and is back quickly. Sometimes it’s frustrating, feels like we’re cursed.”

But are the Wizards cursed or do they have a sub-par medical/training staff? There seems to be very little attention paid to that kind of issue. But the conventional wisdom is that the Phoenix trainers are unusually good, so doesn’t it make sense that some would be unusually bad. Wizards players not only get hurt a lot (which happens to everyone) but seem to take a very long time to recover.

Early Results Making Me Look Ridiculous

I don’t think all that highly of my abilities as a sports prognosticator, but I really did think it would take more than two days of action for my NBA predictions to start looking foolish. But I said Cleveland would be the best team in the league and even though I think Boston will be very good thought Cleveland and Orlando would both be better. This theory took a hit when Boston beat Cleveland on opening night. But one game is one game. Then came last night. Boston thrashed a weak Charlotte Bobcats team while the James Gang went and . . . lost to Toronto. Basically nobody except Shaq on Cleveland shot a good percent. LeBron put up a triple-double and took enough free throws (although he shot these with a bad percentage, too) to make the overall scoring pretty efficient, but everyone else stank. And since when is Andrea Bargnani good?

Oh well. Frankly, I don’t much care for the Cavs so I’d be happy for them to turn out to be surprisingly bad. But I just don’t see how this personnel could fail.

Minimax Strategies in Professional Sports

Probably the clearest and most obvious difference between Freakonomics and the sequel is that in the original book, Dubner & Levitt were writing about Steven Levitt’s actual research. People like this research! He won important prizes for it. And not only is the research mathematically sophisticated and prize-worthy, it’s often about quirky, interesting subjects. The sequel, by contrast, has basically nothing to do with Levitt’s research. They just decided to deploy the brand to help sell copies of what’s really just a lot of third-rate political punditry. Interestingly, though, Levitt’s still doing the kind of work that made him famous in the first place.

For an example, check out this recent paper “Professionals Do Not Play Minimax: Evidence from Major League Baseball and the National Football League”:

In the perfect world of game theory, two players locked in a zero-sum contest always make rational choices. They opt for the “minimax” solution — the set of plays that minimizes their maximum possible loss – and their play selection does not follow a predictable pattern that might give their opponent an edge. But minimax predictions typically have not fared well in lab experiments. And real-world studies, while more supportive, have often used small samples.

Now a new study, Professionals Do Not Play Minimax: Evidence from Major League Baseball and the National Football League (NBER Working Paper No. 15347), looks at two of the biggest high-stakes examples of zero-sum contests: pitch selection in Major League Baseball and play-calling in the National Football League. Authors Kenneth Kovash and Steven Levitt find that: “Pitchers appear to throw too many fastballs; football teams pass less than they should.” They also find that the selection of pitches or plays is too predictable. The researchers conclude that “correcting these decisionmaking errors could be worth as many as two additional victories a year to a Major League Baseball franchise and more than a half win per season for a professional football team.”

Kovash and Levitt examine all Major League pitches – more than 3 million of them — during the regular seasons from 2002 to 2006 (excluding extra innings). They categorize them as fastballs, curveballs, sliders, or changeups. They measure the outcome of each pitch using the sum of the batter’s on-base percentage and slugging percentage (a measure they label OPS) and they determine that fastballs lead to a slightly higher OPS than other types of pitches.

That’s interesting! With the world mired in the most serious recession in decades, arguably not the most important subject for economists to be focused on. But still interesting. And it suggests additional research issues. Are pitchers and managers just making a mistake in throwing too many fastballs? Or is it maybe that for biomechanical reasons most pitchers can’t throw the optimal number of breaking balls without wrecking their arms?

Has “Moneyball” Failed, Or Succeeded?

I don’t really follow baseball in enough detail to know for sure if he’s wrong, but this Buzz Bissinger argument is wildly unconvincing:

Whatever happens in the National League and American League Championship series unfolding over the next week or so, one outcome has already been decided–the effective end of the theories of Moneyball as a viable way to build a playoff-caliber baseball team when you don’t have the money. That no doubt sounds like heresy to the millions who embraced Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, but all you need to do is keep in mind one number this postseason: 528,620,438. That’s the amount of money in payroll spent this season by the teams still in it–the New York Yankees, the Los Angeles Angels, the Philadelphia Phillies, and the Los Angeles Dodgers. Moneyball? You bet it’s Moneyball, true Moneyball, like it always has been in baseball and always will be.

Bissinger goes on to diss Billy Beane across various modalities. But my impression watching from afar is that recent developments in baseball largely vindicate Beane’s work. Obviously, having a bigger payroll to work with is helpful to a general manager. But for a while, detailed attention to statistical work allowed Beane to exploit massive market inefficiencies and put together high-quality, low-payroll teams. But then other people noticed. Michael Lewis wrote a bestselling book about it! So the insights spread, and there are fewer inefficiencies to take care of. If it had somehow been possible to copyright on base percentage and force everyone else to keep relying on batting average, that would have been nice for the early adopters. But it’s not, and the broad outlines of statistical analysis of baseball performance are now pretty widely understood.

The Portland Offense

John Hollinger explains how last year’s Trailblazers put together one of the best offenses in the league:

The Blazers succeeded with the unusual style that Nate McMillan imported from Seattle. His teams have a unique signature — they regularly rank among the league leaders in offensive efficiency and offensive rebound rate while simultaneously finishing among the league’s slowest-paced teams. Most people think of offensive juggernauts as wild run-and-gun outfits, but the Blazers succeeded with half-court execution and second shots much as McMillan’s outfits with the Sonics did.

Portland played the league’s second-slowest pace, averaging only 89.3 trips per side, and that both muted the players’ averages and obscured how devastating they were offensively. The Blazers were deadly efficient, averaging 110.3 points per 100 possessions — ranking second only to Phoenix in offensive efficiency. Despite a lack of brand-name players, they placed ahead of both the Lakers and Cleveland.

People tend not to believe that Portland had a great offense last year. This is in part because the slow pace led to low per game totals, but also because of the perception that they lack effective offensive players beyond Brandon Roy. This in turn stems in part from the quirk whereby people tend to think of put-backs and such as a kind of second-class scoring. The reality, however, is that grabbing offensive rebounds that lead to easy points is a way of putting points on the board that count toward the final tally. “Believe it or not,” Hollinger writes “they did it while barely shooting better than the league average.” But the minimized turnovers and maximized offensive rebounds and that got the job done.

Who Wants the Olympics?

New York Times article about the Obama administration’s involvement in Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid once again reminds me of how crazy all the Olympic-related lobbying seems. Is there any reason to think these events are actually beneficial? The main sense in which you can imagine a city being made better off by hosting an Olympics is that the hosting duties may cause it to invest in some useful infrastructure that pays off. But if that’s the case the infrastructure investments would have paid off even if there had been no Olympics. The name of the game is to identify useful infrastructure opportunities and build what’s worth building. If anything, pegging the investments to a one-off multination sporting event seems likely to cloud thinking about what is and isn’t truly needed.

This paper is skeptical of the Olympics. This paper sees a summer Olympics announcement giving a sharp short-term boost to stock prices. I take that as evidence that stock market participants are behaving irrationally, but if you think irrational capital market behavior is impossible then I guess that counts as evidence that hosting the games is beneficial.

Shocking Revelation

Does Barack Obama really not know that NFL players are subjected to a salary cap?

Forgot About Jameer

Jameer Nelson (cc photo by Keith Allison)

According to ESPN “At the moment, the big issue in evaluating the Magic seems to be what you think of Hedo Turkoglu and Vince Carter” and their experts put Orlando in distant third place in terms of who’s most likely to win the East.

This strikes me as much less relevant than the return of Jameer Nelson. In 42 games last year, Nelson averaged 31.2 points per game on a very efficient .612 TS% and had a 6.2 percent rebound rate. That’s really good. But he missed the second half of the season and most of the playoffs and then didn’t play well when he did get back in. But if you can add guy like pre-injury Nelson to your team, then you’re looking at a dramatic improvement. Can they? I have no idea. Nelson never played that well before, and maybe he’ll never reach those heights again. Then again, he was only 26 last season, maybe he’ll play better than he did and do it for 82 games. That’d be a great team. But if not, then not.

The Case for the Trailblazers

(cc photo by Keith Allison)

Eli Lake and I agree that the Portland Trailblazers are the only team that could beat the Lakers in the Western Conference in the coming NBA season. The main reason for this, as I see it, is that basically it’s extremely unlikely that anyone can beat the Lakers—they’re really good. For another team to be better, something weird would have to happen. And Portland is basically the best chance for that to happen.

Brandon Roy is 25 years old; LaMarcus Aldridge, Rudy Fernandez, and Travis Outlaw are 24, Greg Oden is 21, Nicolas Batum is 20. That’s six rotation players who are young enough that it’s plausible to imagine them taking a substantial step forward. And if four or five of them do take simultaneous substantial steps forward, then the team is going to be much better. And it’ll be a much better version of a team that was already very good. Notwithstanding their poor playoff performance, last year’s Blazers has the second best point differential in the West. Now is it likely that four or five of those six guys will all take simultaneous substantial steps forward while veteran guys like Joe Pryzbilla and Andre Miller stay level? No, it’s not especially likely. That’d be a stroke of good luck.

But it does seem to me to be within the realm of possibility. And it seems a lot more plausible to me than the idea that Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili are going to start playing better in their thirties.

Rubio to Barcelona

DKV Joventut’s teen sensation Ricky Rubio will be traded to FC Barcelona rather than joining the Minnesota Timberwolves as the fifth pick in the 2009 NBA Draft. This is mostly being spun as a bad thing for the ‘wolves and possibly even a tactical error by Minnesota. One factor in Rubio’s decision to stay in Spain is that the bill for buying out his contract with Joventut would have been prohibitively expensive. Thus Bill Simmons speculates that Rubio would have paid for the buyout to join a bigger market team where he could have earned more endorsement bucks and thus afforded the buyout: “Rubio needed big market endorsement $$$ to buy out other deal. LA-NY-Chi-Hou-etc. Minny couldn’t work. Kahn messed up. Shoulda flipped him.”

I think this whole line of thought is a mistake. Minnesota benefits from Rubio’s decisions. In general, basketball players are considerably better at 20 than at 18. Thus, in general you’d rather draft 20 year-old players rather than 18 year-old players. The problem, however, is that players with obvious promise enter the draft at 18 so unless you want to pass up on tons of talented guys, you often need to draft teenagers. Under the circumstances, for your teen draft pick to decide he wants to spend two years getting bigger and stronger while honing his skills in one of the world’s top leagues is a good thing. Maybe over the next two seasons Rubio will prove to be a bust, in which case no loss for Minnesota. Or maybe he’ll play well, in which case he’ll come to Minnesota in 2011, and the Timberwolves will get to have the 20, 21, and 22 year-old versions of Rubio on their roster for the rookie salary scale.

Football Stadiums Belong in the Suburbs

There is absolutely no good reason I can think of to try to tempt the Washington Redskins to move to some kind of new stadium located inside the District of Columbia. I love football, I love DC, and I love urbanism. But the NFL season only has 16 games. Eight of those games are on the road. That means you’re talking about a facility that’s going to be without an audience on over 95 percent of possible days. That means the facility can’t possibly be anchoring a neighborhood. On the overwhelming majority of occasions you’re talking about a giant empty space.

A baseball stadium or a basketball/hockey arena are used frequently enough to be perfectly viable elements of an urban neighborhood. Nevertheless, the tendency is for governments to subsidize their construction to a degree that goes far beyond what can be justified. But a football stadium just doesn’t work, it’s a hugely inefficient use of land, and thus ought to be exactly where FedEx Field currently is—a pretty peripheral area in the suburbs. Urban land should be used intensively, and the only way for a football stadium to be an intensive land use is to be one of those combo football/baseball stadiums that have fallen out of fashion and nobody wants to use.

The ideal thing for DC to do with the space currently occupied by RFK Stadium and RFK-affiliated parking lots is to put up lots of buildings where people can live and shop and some kind of park for them to enjoy. It’s land near a metro station and would make a nice fairly dense mixed use community that brought some extra amenities to the surrounding neighborhood.

Ricky Rubio’s Buyout

Ricky Rubio (wikimedia)

The Minnesota Timberwolves continue to have trouble bringing their draft pick Ricky Rubio over from Spain. Not, as it initially seemed, because Rubio doesn’t want to go to the Twin Cities. Rather the issue is that Rubio’s contract with DKV Joventut Badalona involves a $6.6 million buyout and the Timberwolves “can only contribute $500,000 toward the buyout under NBA rules, which handicaps their ability to convince an 18-year-old kid who made just $97,000 to make a huge financial commitment to chase his dream in the league.”

One thing that strikes me is that this seems like a scenario in which we could use some financial innovation. I would say that loaning Rubio $6.1 million to complete the buyout and let him come to the NBA is an investment that’s likely to pay off. He could raise the money by selling “Rubio bonds” that pay out a fixed percentage of his NBA earnings over the next ten years. If he turns into a star, you’ll win big. If he turns into a bust, you’ll lose a lot of your investment. I’d buy one. And actually buyouts aside this seems like a device that could be popular for a lot of young players. Promising rookies could sell bonds bring future income into the present and also to hinge against the possibility (*cough* Greg Oden *cough*) that injuries will prevent them from living up to their hype.

The other thing is that once you ignore the principle-agent problem facing Minnesota’s managers, it’s not clear to me that resolving this issue is really in the Timberwolves’ interest. Rubio “has two years remaining on his contract” and is 18 years old. 20 year-old basketball players are almost always better than 18 year-old basketball players. If Rubio doesn’t buy out his contract, Minnesota will still have his draft rights, will still be able to bring him to the United States, and will still be able to pay him a rookie scale contract. But they’ll be paying for what is, in effect, a better player while some Spanish team needs to finance his further development.

Leverage in the NBA

$14.2 million in 2009-10 plus an eight percent raise the next year.

John Hollinger explains:

Allow me to explain. The entire guiding principle of most cap-related decisions in the past two decades is that the cap will almost always go up and sure as heck won’t go down. It’s embedded in the contracts, too, most of which contain either 8 percent or 10.5 percent annual raises. Thus teams feel safe gambling on a $5 million player. If they’re wrong, the cap will effectively erase the mistake in a season or two by continually rising.

In the current environment, however, some teams are going to be completely whipsawed by a cap that goes down just as their salaries go up. Clubs that have several players with long-term deals could be well under the tax threshold in 2009-10, and then be well over it in 2010-11 with more or less the same players. This is a real threat for the Philadelphia 76ers and Indiana in particular, and it could grab several other teams depending on what transpires in the coming months.

Since the salary cap and the luxury tax threshold in the NBA are both pegged to revenue, and since teams have a limited capacity (but there is some capacity) to reduce the number of players they field, average salaries need to go down. But because contracts are usually guaranteed, and most players have large raises written into their contracts, the decline in salaries is going to need to be borne by a relatively small number of players. Which means, basically, that any team with the financial resources to be hiring next offseason is going to be able to take advantage of incredibly employer-friendly labor market conditions.

Relatedly, right now the Miami Heat have only Dwayne Wade under contract for 2010-11. In other words, Pat Riley is in pretty good shape.

The Evils of the Maximum Salary

LeBron James (wikimedia)

Dave Berri’s list of the most underpaid NBA players relies on his controversial “wins produced” theory so naturally most fans are going to disagree with it. At the same time, looking at his top two guys—Chris Paul and LeBron James—I don’t think anyone is going to disagree that these are excellent players. Nor will anyone disagree that Paul could easily secure more than his current 2008-2009 salary of $4,574,189 or that James could secure more than $14,410,581 on an open market.

And it seems to me that these kind of phenomena relating to the rookie scale and, in particular, the cap on how much you can pay an individual player are an under-discussed source of competitive imbalance in the NBA. In a world with unconstrained bidding on individual players, even if you paired with it a team salary cap, potential employers of top-flight talent would face a real choice. Of course you’d like to have James or Paul on your team, but do you really want to pay what they’re worth? The current rules essentially guarantee that those guys will be underpaid, meaning that signing them for “the max” is a no-brainer. But in an open market, you’d have to pay LeBron so much that it would seriously undermine your ability to sign other good players.

Under the circumstances the only way for a GM to build a great team would be to genuinely identify undervalued talent, not just luck into possession of a super-star who’s worth more than anyone is allowed to pay him.

Blazers Bid for Andre Miller

Looks like the Portland Trailblazers are going to put in a bid for the services of Andre Miller. It makes sense insofar as point guard seems to be their weakest position. But how much would Miller help the team?

Based on this it looks like he does help. But the upgrade from Steve Blake looks pretty marginal. And Miller’s not the kind of skilled long-range shooter who’d help space the floor for Brandon Roy. So this would be a useful pickup but probably not all that useful.