Dorkapalooza 2010!

This past Saturday was my first time attending the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, on the second leg of my spring break trip. With over 1000 folks packed into the Boston Conference Center to hear about the evolving role of statistics and technology used in sports, the event dubbed “Dorkapalooza” by ESPN pop sports writer Bill Simmons pretty easily lived up to the hype.

The Panels

I went to 5 panels- below are my notes detailing the key insights from each discussion. [I got tired of typing so my comments get increasingly sparse. This was a long post so please point out any typos.]

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1. Next Generation Sports Management

This panel sought to address the evolving role of sports ownership in general, with economic problems, globalization, and new technology all poised to effect big changes in the nature of salary cap rules, revenue sharing, and sports entertainment.

  • There’s been a growing recognition of sports as a good investment; this has been reflected in the increased activity of overseas owners acquiring stakes in American teams (the Cavs and Nets immediately come to mind).
  • In that vein, sports are a sustainable business; compared to other industries, sports teams are not displaced by new technology. (Some MLB and NFL teams have been around for 100s of years, compared with the lifecycle of your average Fortune 500 subject to competitive pressures, changing consumer behavior, and periodic economic upheaval)
  • On the perennial question of the tradeoff between wins & profitability (which is an issue assuming that spending is correlated with wins, a fact that’s been proven in baseball and still holds true in other sports like basketball and football):
  • Sports is a “quasi-public good”. If you’re a profitable team that happens to be perennially unsuccessful (the Clippers were the running joke in this conference— exactly the type of unenlightened, uninformed leadership that this generation of execs is trying to combat), you run the risk of alienating your fan base. A popular refrain throughout the day was the correlation between wins and profitability— a winning team generates interest and a passionate fan base, which is ultimately the only sustainable way to be profitable.

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2. International Expansion

With the rapid globalization and spread of appreciation of American sports globally, the next frontier for American sports leagues is overseas expansion. Exploring this topic were some big names— Sunil Galati, head of the US Soccer Federation (leading the MLS and the US bid for the 2018 FIFA World Cup); Mark Waller, CMO of the NFL; Maurizio Gherardini, senior VP of the Toronto Raptors; and David Baxter, president of the adidas Sports Licensed division. The vast experience of these speakers resulted in a discussion as anthropological as it was technical/managerial.

  • A big challenge in taking sports like (American) football global is in translating the cultural experience. For a game as complex as the NFL, even the simplest play-by-play commentary is difficult to follow for fans not well-versed in the sport.
  • For the MLS, it’ll be tough to turn demand for the SPORT of soccer into demand for the MLS product, especially when the MLS clearly isn’t the top-caliber soccer league in the world. The expansion strategy will have to shift to reflect this reality.
  • Gherardini made some good points about how the dynamics of sports in US and Europe are completely different. Europe employs an “open” system, where essentially anyone with enough money can start a new team and move up and down leagues depending on their success, while the US is a closed system more controlled by league-wide mandates. Also different is how sports are treated by fans—according to Gherardini, in Europe, “once the game’s started, it’s like Church. You can’t move!”. This explains why always-open concession stands aren’t a widespread phenomenon in European sports venues, simply because no one wants to leave their seats during the match.
  • On the risk of top players going overseas? Not very likely, due to the competition and level of play here. But, Europe will definitely evolve as a destination for player development, as some players (like the case of Jennings) can advance rapidly by being in a different environment.
  • Seeding sports in a new country is a long-term process of brand-building that requires patience. The NBA has done the best job to date with its international strategy.
  • The BRIC economies will be the next big destination for sports expansion.
  • Keeping with the notion of sports expansion as long-term, Gulati views soccer in the US on a 50-year time horizon. Soccer popularity is slowly growing in this country (Americans are the #1 ticket buyers for the 2010 World Cup!). He sees the next 6 months as potentially being the most crucial period in the history of US soccer— with the US-England match in June, and the results of the World Cup bid announced in December. Should be fun to watch.
  • We probably won’t see NBA teams based overseas anytime soon, because the dimension of potential business in Europe isn’t big enough to make that viable. The “TV countries” (the ones that watch the most) in Europe aren’t the same countries that care about basketball, which is a huge factor given that TV revenue streams are a big part of sports league revenue.

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3. What Geeks Don’t Get

This was basically the headline event of the day— Mark Cuban (owner of the Dallas Mavs), Darryl Morey (GM of the Houston Rockets), Jonathan Kraft (part of the Kraft Group, owner of the NE Patriots), Bill Polian (GM of the Indy Colts), and Bill Simmons (ESPN writer) were joined by writer Michael Lewis to discuss, in a nutshell, the state of the sports analytics industry. The panel was more entertaining than educational, and watching the three “basketball” guys (Morey, Cuban, Simmons) go back and forth was fun.

  • The overarching theme— communication is key, because no matter how useful the stats are, they need to have wide applicability and be easy to understand to actually matter.
  • Kraft was a detriment to the discussion, contributing almost no useful information other than detailing the vagaries of statistical analysis in football. Bill Polian had some good insights on how- 1) the sample size in football is so small and makes trend tracking difficult, 2) coaches have basically been using analytics in stats and video for over 30 years, and advanced statistics are hard to use in football.
  • The players don’t need to understand the details; it’s up to the GM and coach to implement the findings. Interesting is the evolving role of the GM as decision-maker and planner for the organization.
  • Mark Cuban had some cool thoughts about the importance of psychological analysis for basketball players. He outed Gerald Green as a moron.

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4. Basketball Analytics

Discussing the state of analytics in basketball was a panel featuring Cuban, John Hollinger (ESPN), Kevin Pritchard (Blazers GM), Mike Zarren (Celtics asst. GM), Dean Oliver (author of the Bible of basketball analytics, Basketball on Paper), and Marc Stein (ESPN writer).

- One of the biggest issues with basketball right now is the lack of standardized collection of advanced statistics (things like deflections, charges, etc., all variables that any team that uses statistical analysis spends significant capital and effort on individually collecting). A big shift in the next couple of years will be when the league finally starts systematizing the collection of this data and making it available to teams.

  • A cool statement from Dean Oliver on a tell-all metric: “+/- is just a fact. Adjusted +/- is an analysis.”
  • The biggest tell as to whether stats are being used by teams- looking at the lineups that coaches play. That’s probably the most effective way to use statistics, analyzing what players work best together against certain lineups.
  • Box scores are so limited now because they capture the outcome of only 20% of defensive plays (blocks, steals, etc.). They don’t talk about stops, deflections, missed shots, who made a mistake on the play, etc.- things that really matter.
  • Video tracking- the kind that’s offered by Synergy Sports- will be the “quantum leap” in basketball analytics.
  • Read more about this panel on Truehoop.

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5. Future of Sports Journalism

This was a fascinating discussion on how new media is affecting how we follow sports, so it was more a journalism conversation than a sports talk.

  • “Destination media” is increasingly valueless. The value lies in individuals as platforms for providing good, accurate content that can be trusted over time.
  • Breaking news and scoops are no longer important when information becomes commodified within minutes. It doesn’t matter to be first anymore; what matters is your ability to provide deeper analysis/inside commentary. Long-form journalism will be very valuable. “What’s durable is authority.”
  • “Audiences are driven by the ability to be smarter”; it’s crucial to make your content easily accessible and allow your readers to be their own news-gatherers.
  • Broadcasters and their audiences are simultaneously creating content, and it’s possible to instantaneously understand how people are reading and reacting to things you write.
  • People have a notion of “if the news is important, it’ll find me.”
  • ESPN is still trying to figure out its most effective real-time strategy and the right mix between curating/creating content, a topic particularly germane to me given my work on TickrTalk.

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The People

Probably the coolest part of the day was seeing all the big NBA and ESPN names in attendance. Because of the nature of the event, everyone was accessible and open for conversation- it was great to be able to pick the brains of people like Mark Cuban, Bill Simmons, Brent Barry, Marc Stein, David Thorpe, Henry Abbott, Mike Zarren, Howard Beck, and Jason Fry. This aspect of the event alone made going worthwhile.

The Big Picture

Blazers GM Kevin Pritchard described the use of analytics in basketball as still “in the second inning”. Just under half the teams in the NBA had representatives in attendance at the conference, and the attendees radiated the kind of palpable buzz one senses at the beginning of a large movement (aside: the last time I felt a similar mix of optimism and enthusiasm was at an Obama rally during the Pennsylvania primaries). People bemoan the sports industry’s woes in this economy, but the smart leadership on display at this event convince me that it’ll move in the right direction. Sports seems to be leading other industries in its efficient use of data and technology, and the future’s exciting.

"We must stop looking at education as a product – in which we turn out every student giving the same answer – to a process, in which every student looks for new answers. Life is a beta."
— TEDxNYed: This is bullshit « BuzzMachine (via kareem) (via rahmin)
"We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy,” Dr. Bramble says, “because that’s what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don’t have to?”
To be fair, our brain knew what it was talking about for 99 percent of our history; sitting around was a luxury, so when you had the chance to rest and recover, you grabbed it. Only recently have we come up with the technology to turn lazing around into a way of life; we’ve taken our sinewy, durable, hunter-gatherer bodies and plunked them into an artificial world of leisure."
— Just read, and enjoyed, Chris McDougall’s “Born to Run”. Here’s my review of it, on Goodreads

I just read this passage from 2666:

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby Dick… What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

I’m always excited to hear about a book or piece of art where the author or creator just nailed it in terms of expressing the magnitude— both glory and tragedy— of existence (that’s why I love Kerouac and DFW!); Bolaño hinted at this skill in Savage Detectives and I can’t wait to pick his magnum opus up.

"Correctly evaluating a small handful of moves is far more important in human chess, and human decision-making in general, than the systematically deeper and deeper search for better moves—the number of moves “seen ahead”—that computers rely on.
[…]
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors."
— Garry Kasparov, The Chess Master and the Computer
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable."
— Helen Keller (via kareem)
Yup.

Yup.

"But the culture in which I and almost all whites were raised vainly imagines that hunger, sleeping, and excreting can be regimented. Amerindians have always mocked the palefaces for looking at clocks to know when they ought to be hungry. It is in the same clock-mad spirit that we are all supposed to “work” from nine to five on such preposterous projects as accounting for what we have done upon billions of square miles of paper derived from devastated forests, frittering away our time upon such dreary gambling games as playing the stock market or selling insurance in drab offices, turning out drillions of lines of chatter for people whose minds cannot be at peace unless perpetually agitated with information and misinformation, and manufacturing, selling, and advertising bizarre, noisome, and pestilential automotive contraptions for taking us all to and from these same projects at the same hours— thereby blocking the roads and jangling our nerves, presumably to give ourselves the message that we really exist and are really important."
— Alan Watts, in his autobiography In My Own Way. So far, it’s an excellent portrait of the inner life of what the NYT calls “perhaps the greatest Western interpreter of Eastern thought in the modern world”. While probably one of his most banal thoughts throughout the book, he resonates particularly well with me and my thoughts on impending post-collegiate life when he goes on to say, “Therefore, at the age of twenty-one, I made to myself the solemn vow that I would never be an employee or put up with a “regular job”“.

To state the obvious, David Foster Wallace was a very smart man. Apart from the man’s profound intellect, though, what really stands out is his sincerity. You can tangibly sense his feeling of despair/desolation at the state of modern America— the pervasiveness of irony, the eschewing of emotional depth because of our supposed superiority, overall, the basic aversion we have to truly confronting our human problems.

A long paragraph from Infinite Jest (which has been my most enjoyable reading experience in quite some time):

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip— and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete in this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about J.O. Incadenza’s the American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it’s natural that Himself’s dark little cartridge was mostly a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.
Paul Buchheit on: Being Awesome

A good decision-making framework:

Will I learn a lot from the experience? (failure can be very educational)
Will it make my life more interesting? (a predictable life is a boring life)
Is it good for the world? (even if I don’t benefit, maybe someone else will)

In his words, “Evaluating risk and opportunity (as a human)”. Basically, is what you’re doing meaningful enough that whether or not you *succeed* in the traditional sense, you’re happy you did it?

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Themed by: Hunson