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Welcome, welcome to Wharton Moneyball. Welcome to a full hour of sports analytics
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here on the Wharton Podcast Network. This is Cade Massey hosting this week, along
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with what should be the whole crew at some point. We've got three quarters of the crew in
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here at the moment. Shane Jensen from his usual perch in Philadelphia. Otty Weiner on the road as Otty is
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often on the road. In this case, he's being a road warrior, showing up after having traveled 36 straight hours.
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Otty Weiner, we're expecting nothing but clear, focused, intellectual horsepower after 36 hours of travel as
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usual. We are gonna- I will do my best, Cade. Eric Bradlow is gonna roll in. Speaking of traveling, Eric also traveling, but we
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think we're gonna get him for part of the show. We'll take him whenever he arrives.
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We're gonna run our usual format today. We'll do an interview in the first half
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of the show. We'll roll into an open topics, open lines, in the second half of the show.
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We have back on the show, a frequent guest, Ben Alomar. Ben formerly of ESPN. He's also about as good as it gets
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when it comes to the world of basketball analytics. Ben even has his own book. If you wanna jump into sports analytics rights
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and teaches on sports analytics, his book is Sports Analytics, A Guide for Managers, Coaches and
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Other Decision Makers. But I would recommend it even to fans who wanna get up to speed on sports
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analytics. Ben is based here with me in Austin, Texas. He plays around at the University of Texas
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as well as with other jobs that we'll leave silent for the time being. Ben, welcome aboard.
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Great, thanks for having me back. Really appreciate it. Glad to have you, glad to have you.
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We are freshly into the third of four rounds of NBA playoffs. We started the Western last night.
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I think we're starting the Eastern tonight, maybe. Is that right? We've got San Antonio and Oklahoma City had
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a doozy of a game one last night. Cleveland, New York gonna go off soon. Kind of a bruiser of an East Coast
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final. But we gotta hear a little bit of your thoughts on the NBA in general, but
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especially coming out of these two high powered teams and especially Oklahoma City last night.
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And Wimby continues to emerge into what people thought he might be, I suppose. He was absolutely incredible last night.
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I mean, both ends of the court. I think according to ESPN's net points metric,
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he had one of the top 1% defensive games ever in their data set. That sounds good, that sounds good.
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Yeah, that's pretty good. And his three point shot from near the half court to keep them alive in the
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first overtime, just absolutely incredible. His impact on the last end of the game and the two overtime periods, truly amazing
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performance by him. Ben, can you tell us a little bit about that defensive metric?
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Do you know enough about it to talk about it? Like that's obviously a tough thing to, it's
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different than people scoring efficiency or whatever. What can you tell us about that defensive
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metric? Yeah, so this is Dean Oliver's, future Hall of Famer Dean Oliver's metric every time, every
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time. And basically what it does is it takes a look at the amount of credit, when
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something happens, how do we split that credit between all the players involved in it?
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So when we know that Wemby was, when he's guarding somebody and we know the outcome
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of that possession, let's try and split that up between Wemby, the shooter, the defense, the
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rest of the defense, all that kind of stuff. And sort of add all that impact up to get for a total net points created
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number for the entire game or season, what have you. So does it consider things like proximity or
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is it just on, does it some notion of who's guarding who? It is based on sort of the identified
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matchup that is happening at that time. So they have, Dean's got the player tracking
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data to identify who they think is guarding which player. An imperfect metric measurement for sure, but it
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is absolutely part of how it works. Does it capture, Rick, one more follow up, and then we're going to jump to you.
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Does it capture just, I suppose it captures attempts to score that are not successful, but
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also the absence of attempts to score? Because one of the things that happens around
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Wemby is people are scared to shoot. Well, and yeah, absolutely. And that sort of kept them alive in
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the end of regulation. I think it was where, you know, Shea is driving. They have exactly what they would want.
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Shea's driving into the paint and Wemby is there. So he decides to kick it out and
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they missed the shot. Like, yeah. So I think that piece is not part of this metric.
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Something actually has to affirmatively happen to measure in this context. But absolutely.
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So it's underestimating. It was the top 1% ever, and it underestimates the impact.
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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, plausibly that is not a trivial, I mean, we're not sliding Dean or the
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analytics at all. We know that this is one of the challenges with analytics is that we don't capture
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well what doesn't happen, and yet that can be a big part of the game. That's a big part of the big man's
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defensive game. Particularly for Wemby, because you can see like with the Timberwolves we're doing in the second
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round, just couldn't, wouldn't take any shots anywhere near him. And that's, yeah, we missed that.
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Okay, Adi. Yeah, so what you're describing is a metric that measures the defensive contribution on a game
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basis by kind of looking at the individual matchups. The standard way we measure defense would be
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some sort of adjusted, regression adjusted plus minus, which probably works pretty well on the season
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level because all that stuff that Cade's talking about that isn't measured gets captured by that
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in aggregate. So I guess my, if there's a question at all here, it would be, are they
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complimentary? Or are they ultimately, if you had one, would you rather have the tracking based matchup
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version or the regularized, what we call wrap them? Some people put Bs in front of it,
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easy and regression adjusted plus minus or something of nature. Yeah, I think it's a question, a little
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bit of what you're trying to use the metric for. I think they can work in different contexts
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really well, for example, like to measure impact in a game. Yeah, I absolutely want the matchup level.
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And I think that looking at sort of an adjusted plus minus defensive metric, again, once
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you have enough sample size and so you feel confident it's a good estimate, then that
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tells you something. And then the sort of matchup base helps explain some of the why.
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And then you can see if there's, what else of the why that is forming the defense, the adjusted plus minus metric, what are
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we not capturing in that matchup based metric? And I think that's, seeing those differences really
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is always really interesting and trying to dive into those. But I just think that, I mean, Wemby's
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Rapham numbers are sick. I mean, it's not like, it's very transparent what he does to the defense.
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So what's your sense of what, how much data is required before these good plus minus?
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This is basically a plus minus. You're talking about a very fancy plus minus,
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but hockey was the first with plus minus as far as I know back in the day. It was like the stat in hockey, but
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the guys in hockey told me, those are so noisy. You need like years of data before plus
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minus means something. Presumably with the Bayesian and the regularize and all that, you can get to something stable
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quicker, but how much, I've always been kind of cautious about plus minus because of how
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much data is required. How much until you're confident, Adi? So I'll just comment.
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I mean, there's a lot more scoring in basketball. So you have way, way, way, way, way.
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It's like not comparable. Magnitude of 10 basically scoring level. Yeah, so the real issue is diversity.
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So it only works if you have a variance, right? So if Wemby always played with one other
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player who was equally good or better, not really, but then you just couldn't, you would
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have what we call an identity viability problem. So the adjusted plus minus is there to
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disentangle the confounders. And that's only possible if you have variance. And if variance only happens when in weird
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situations where the game's over or whatever it is, garbage time or whatever, then you're not
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really getting a full accurate picture and you're just essentially biased. But I think with basketball, with a little
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variance, players coming in and out, and I don't think you'd be wrong if you'd attribute
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most of the main effect of suppressing defense to Wemby, but you have to have some
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control group. You have to have him not playing so you can see what happens. And that's part of it.
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But I think it probably converges pretty, I wouldn't say quickly, but I think by the
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end of the season, it probably works. So I'll fire off an email and try to get a better answer from people who
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actually do this for a living. Also, I think contribute a little bit more. I think the subset, I mean, maybe Ben,
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you've got thoughts on this. I think the player substitution mechanism in basketball
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is a little bit more random. Like in hockey, they go, like they come in in lines, where there's a sign, they're
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basically, you can have a whole game where two players are basically hitting the ice and
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off the ice at the same time. Whereas with fouling and with like everything else,
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I mean, obviously you're not gonna have two centers on at the same time. There's certain correlations in there, but I don't
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know. Do you kind of think of it as a relatively randomized process or a high, you
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know, at least there's, I feel like the process contributes to a lot of the variation
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that Adi is talking about. Yeah, you definitely have more variance in the NBA. And I think you're particularly with, when you
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focus on players like Wemby, you know, particularly this season, like he missed games due to
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injury or, you know, otherwise, I think you can have some trouble when you talk, Adi
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mentioned sort of garbage time with, you know, the Spurs and the Thunder this year, like
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Wemby didn't play a lot in late, you know, a ton of minutes because he didn't
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need to. And so there's a little bit of, you know, a question about how impactful that those
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things are. You know, Shea's the same way on Pro KC, just didn't have to play a ton
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in the fourth quarters a lot. So, you know, there's load management questions.
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So you get a lot of variance, but the question is, you know, sort of those late game time is how valuable is that
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in terms of really measuring true impact. I just want to observe that bigger picture
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about OKC and Ben, your history of OKC goes back and you've got some real roots
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in OKC if I have it correct. But, you know, last year, rewind a year to Presti and the Thunder winning their first
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championship and having that young roster and all those additional picks. And everyone's like, oh my God, how many
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championships are the Thunder gonna win? And they still are pretty high expectation for
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championships. But I don't think anybody would have anticipated that only one year later, they may not
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make the championship round. I mean, it's amazing how little we saw that, how few people saw that happening because
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it just, they seemed inevitable for a while after what happened last year, given what they
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had on their roster and their draft capital. Yeah, I think, you know, San Antonio is
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I think surprised a lot of folks because I think a couple of things, Wemby sort of accelerated, you know, and took this jump
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forward that I don't think everybody was expecting. I mean, unanimous defensive player of the year,
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you know, everybody thought he was gonna be great and nobody's surprised he's the best player
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of the year. But the level which he's able to control really both ends of the court now and
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where teams are like really sometimes just giving up trying to get into the paint if
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he's there is another level. And their young, other young guys have just been, Harper during the playoffs has just been
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tremendous. Cass just, again, continues to develop and become a really, really good player.
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So that young core accelerated faster than I think a lot of folks were expecting.
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And so they've been, you know, truly had a great season. You know, it'll be interesting to see how
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this, I mean, this is the series everybody's been looking for since about mid-season.
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Like, yeah, this is gonna be it. This is essentially the teams. I don't think people believe nobody's gonna win
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other than these two teams. So, yeah, it's a good, really great start to a great series.
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Are you breaking the Knicks heart this early? I mean, come on. Is that what you're- I mean, like,
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look, if they get there, they got a chance. You know, everybody's got a chance.
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You know. So let's, one, welcome Eric into the show. Eric just landed on the West Coast and
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made his way into the show. So glad to have you, Eric. Ben, let's do jump to the East.
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Ben, I assume he was talking about the OKC and San Antonio series? Absolutely. He is, and we're gonna change gears now
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and talk about the East, because he's been very interesting to us in Philadelphia, especially.
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One, the Sixers got past the Celtics, and not only that, but in a game seven, which doesn't seem to happen very often.
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But then they dropped the second round, and with it, we lose our favorite executive in
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basketball with Darryl Morris. So let's hear a first basketball talk. You've got some thoughts on what we saw
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over the first couple of rounds in the East, and then I am curious to hear your thoughts on Darryl before we wrap up.
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Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think the Celtics series with the Sixers was interesting, because going in,
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sort of, rewinding to earlier in the season, the Celtics were surprising everybody.
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Jaylen Brown was playing well, though plus minus maybe not quite as strong as the box
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score metrics. But the team was succeeding and playing really well, and they were gonna add Tatum back,
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and Tatum came back and was great right away. And so they became the prohibitive favorite to
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win the East, even though they weren't gonna be the number one seed. And then, again, they find that against the
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Sixers, they had this great game one, then they start to often lose game two. That's the Celtics' recent history.
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And they never really got control of the series again after that. And then the game seven, they just had
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a bad shooting night, and sometimes it's hard to overcome that. So it was a tough one for the
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Celtics to sit down. Again, they were missing Tatum in game seven, so they were not full strength.
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And the Sixers were just, overall, just not quite good enough. I think the Knicks really, they changed their
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offense to really put Cat in a position to run the offense and be a distributor and really control the offense and allow Brunson
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to go off and shoot whatever he wanted. They couldn't really, they couldn't match.
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And Anubi was just fantastic in that series as well. Eric wants to jump in, our local Eastern
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Conference basketball aficionado. So Ben, what I think about, and I'm gonna make a statement you just say right
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or wrong. Towards winning a championship, I think the Sixers are in the worst position of any team
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in the NBA. And let me say why. They can't get past the second round. They have $150 million in contracts to imbued
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George and Maxie. And so what do you do from here? Have you heard of the- Winning a
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championship, I didn't say they were the worst team. I said, if the goal is to win
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a championship, how do they get there in less than the next five years? I mean, they have pieces to absolutely build
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a championship roster. Like, they absolutely can do it. They're in a much better position than a
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lot of these teams. I mean, there's the Kings. Like, I mean, these teams exist that are
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just not good. And the Sixers, they're a good team. They just won a playoff series.
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They have two young, really strong, good guards. And B, you have to decide, can you
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get something of value if you move him? Or do you move him and just say, all right, we don't believe we can build
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around him and having him come in and out isn't productive. Can you move on from him?
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Do you get any value from, I don't know. All George, same way. Like, I don't really know what you can
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get of value, but you have good, strong pieces that are proven to be effective in
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the playoffs that are on the team. And it's hard to say we're in a worse position to go try and win a
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championship when you've got that already on your team. There are teams that really don't have any
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of that, which much worse positions. So from that angle, let's talk about Maury.
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So Maury ran the Rockets for a while and now he's run the Sixers for a while.
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And as so often happens around the world of sports, people will say, I'll take Moneyball
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seriously when they win a championship. Now, Presti's won a championship. And Harry Roseman's pretty close to Moneyball.
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They've won a championship. Hadn't happened in hockey yet, technically, but here
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comes Tulski in the Eastern Conference Finals. So we'll see. But Darryl has that.
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He suffers from not having that championship. What is your assessment of Harris and ownership
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letting him go? And what's your assessment of what he accomplished and didn't accomplish in Philadelphia?
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Yeah, I mean, look, Darryl is really one of the best executives in the NBA. I mean, when you think about the teams,
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a lot of folks associate analytics with Sam Hickey in the process and you gotta lose
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to get the draft picks. And so that's the way it's gonna be. And that's, tanking has been effective for certain
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teams to get that, and that's fine. But Darryl has taken a different approach.
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Darryl's approach is, I wanna win every year. I wanna put a competitive team on the
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floor every single season. And nowhere was that more evident was when he was in Houston and the Rock, the
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Warriors were clearly the dominant team. And they're like, everybody assumed that we're gonna
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be going back to the finals and we're winning another championship, all this.
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And Steph was at the height of his powers and all that. And Darryl said, no, I'm going to put
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together a team to challenge them. We may not, and so he had Harden, he had Chris Paul and you went after
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it. And if Chris Paul doesn't pull a hamstring in that series, he probably beats them and
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they go on to be in the finals, which they would probably have won, given the strengths of the team.
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So I think that it's unfortunate, it's bad, unlucky things do happen. I mean, you go, you can point to
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moments in time and all the time that could have happened, almost got there. And it's recognition that there's so much luck
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in the outcome of sports, particularly when it comes to winning a championship. You can't win a championship without luck.
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I think Habershaw goes through this great exercise every year, puts an asterisk on the championship
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and the NBA championship and goes through why there should be an asterisk on the championship.
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I love it. You go through every single championship and how they got lucky to win.
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And just happened, Darrell just hasn't gotten that lucky. He's put teams together, certainly been good enough.
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And he puts teams together to earnestly try and compete every single year, which is, I
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think from a fan's perspective, something that you would love, particularly if you've been suffering through
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some of these other tankathons in Utah or Washington. To have that as a goal to say,
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I'm not going to tank, even if I think it might help long-term, I'm going
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to put together a team and win now. It reminds me of something that Darrell said
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after Hinckley lost his position with the Sixers. He said something to the effect of, it
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was like Sam took the fans and the ownership on a long walk into the forest, promising them this great picnic down the road,
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but he didn't. He didn't leave them enough little treats along the way. And what you're saying is Darrell believed in,
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yes, we're aiming for the long-term, but we're going to keep it competitive and entertaining
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and enjoyable along the way. But I think it also shows, Cade, which you've talked about a lot, is the massive
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uncertainty in the draft. You can have a bunch of top picks and Embiid worked out.
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Obviously, Ben Simmons did not work out as well. Markel Fultz did not work out as well.
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And you can say, well, if I had known, I would have stayed with Tatum and the Sacramento pick.
00:22:10
Yeah, well, okay, if I had known. I think it highlights the fact that there is still uncertainty in the NBA, even in
00:22:16
the NBA draft. Can I, I want to jump in and ask a question about it that really highlights
00:22:23
exactly this issue. So this year's draft, I think there's pretty clear what the obvious, considered a very deep
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draft, at least at the top, but there's a statistical versus visual comparison that is making
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the rounds. Boozer is, Cameron Boozer, has got the best stats. It just, and it's like, when you talk
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about Rapham numbers, like on and off the court, adjusted plus minus, it's just sick.
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Yet he's not considered to be the number one or even number two pick this year
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because of eye test, I think. I mean, or something like that. I mean, maybe you can explain to me,
00:23:02
are we really having head-to-head here between the numbers people and the eye people
00:23:06
who are going to end up making the decisions, as we all know? Yeah, I mean, I think that they're often
00:23:14
those pairings that go way far back. You know, you have Durant, Oden, and there you had, you know, a lot of folks,
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you know, obviously the Trailblazers went with Oden, number one overall pick, and left Durant for
00:23:31
Seattle. The numbers were really clear that Durant was the guy and people wanted to try and
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sort of massage away Oden's lack of productivity for a variety of reasons. In terms of, you know, this current class,
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like what, and I haven't really dug into it yet in terms of projections and everything,
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but in terms of, you know, playing really well at the college level is not the same thing as being great at the NBA
00:23:58
level. Like, you know, we've seen plenty of guys who are good at college level and cannot
00:24:03
make it, you know, at the next level. So instead of, you know, trying to look at the actual skill levels of different players
00:24:12
and then projecting those out and how they, you know, can be put together and impact
00:24:18
actual NBA performance in the future, like that's what we really need to do in terms
00:24:23
of understanding whether this really is a numbers versus an eye test kind of situation.
00:24:28
Again, I haven't done that exercise yet, so I can't comment for sure that that's where
00:24:32
we're at, but I mean, there are more and more, just from the, you know, there's
00:24:37
a growing sense of folks that are actually pushing Boozer even farther down now than even
00:24:43
the third pick. So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Super interesting, because you're saying it's not just,
00:24:50
maybe Adi, you said numbers versus eye test, and I think Ben's saying, look, it's not
00:24:56
necessarily production. Maybe the better way of thinking about what you said first, Adi, is production.
00:25:01
And in college football, we talk about production stats or whatever. Eye test is historically kind of a pejorative
00:25:07
way of like old school scouting. And what I'm hearing from Ben is, real quickly, what I think I'm hearing from Ben
00:25:13
is identifying the feature that's gonna generalize to the NBA, the skill, the trait, or whatever.
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It's almost a feature building process, and it's not necessarily, stats in college won't necessarily translate,
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but we think we know the traits, and so can, but those aren't observed directly.
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It's like we have to infer them. So do I have that, am I thinking about that right, Ben?
00:25:37
Yeah, I mean, that's what Ben's saying. Go ahead, Ben. Sorry, one of the really great examples I
00:25:45
like to point to you about is Hashim Tabid years ago, who was just a dominant defensive force at UConn, and everybody loved him.
00:25:55
Everybody wanted him, we wanted him in OKC, quite honestly. We tried, like the numbers loved him, the
00:26:00
scouts loved him, it was great. And it just didn't translate to the NBA level because there was a, there's something that
00:26:08
we, that I have tried to measure at times in terms of sort of basketball intelligence,
00:26:15
basketball IQ that was missing that doesn't, that you really need at the next level to
00:26:24
survive. You can't just do it on the fact that you're dominant physically, whether athletically or size
00:26:29
-wise. Like that doesn't, if that's how you, if that's what you're relying on to be productive
00:26:35
in college, which you can be, then you're not gonna survive in the NBA. Adi and Eric both wanna jump in.
00:26:42
Yeah, so I just wanted to say, I mean, you're talking about latent variables that have
00:26:46
a better story, actually have a story, to be quite honest, but are yet very hard
00:26:51
to pin down and measure and we don't even know how they will predict versus something
00:26:55
which has no story whatsoever. It's just a bunch of, it's like adjusted plus minus stats that you have track record
00:27:03
on how they do and you can make forecasts and that basically you're dealing with a
00:27:10
particular, this, I think Boozer in particular, I think he really is the standout.
00:27:15
I mean, not just in one area or one, he just sticks out. He's only played one year in college, but
00:27:22
he just was unbelievable. He comes from a legacy. His father was a professional basketball player.
00:27:27
I think in some level, maybe his father hurts him because he was not a superstar.
00:27:31
He was only merely very good. Let me tell a quick story. I've never told this story before and I've
00:27:38
never thought about it before, but it's like this is so appropriate. I was at Duke in the early 2000s.
00:27:43
It was my first faculty position. There was a grad student there named Ken Catanella who'd been, I'm sure, cross paths with
00:27:49
at some point. Ken was an NBA. He had played college basketball, small college basketball,
00:27:53
played in Europe some professionally. And when he got to Duke as an NBA, he talked his way onto Coach K's
00:28:00
staff in some kind of assistant capacity. He was, as far as I know, I believe this to be true, the first full
00:28:06
-time analyst that Coach K ever had at Duke. And while he was there, we started playing
00:28:11
with numbers. So this is like, I think he might've been class of 04. So this is 2002, 2003, something like that.
00:28:18
So we pulled together and this is very early. And I'm not a basketball guy. We're like, well, let's do some plus minus.
00:28:23
And we were really raw basic plus minus. So this was not the B regressed, regularized
00:28:29
oddy. But I can tell you that Boozer was on that team. Boozer's dad, Carlos Boozer was on that team.
00:28:36
And he was not considered the top player on that team. And Sheldon Whitehead, am I making that name
00:28:41
up? There was another big guy they had, Sheldon something. I think Sheldon Whitehead is the senator from
00:28:47
Rhode Island. Like I said, like I said, I am not a basketball guy. So Sheldon, I forget Sheldon's last name.
00:28:56
He was considered the bigger force at the time. And they had some other, they had some
00:29:00
smaller players as well. Anyway, we run some basic plus minus numbers and we're like, well, are these right?
00:29:05
Because Boozer kind of jumps out. And it's like, what are we doing here that's right or wrong?
00:29:10
Because we didn't expect Boozer to be the one that was head and shoulders above.
00:29:15
And two things about that. One, we were not expecting Boozer to be the one that was head and shoulders above.
00:29:18
And two, Boozer's the one who went on to have the better professional career than his
00:29:21
fellow big man that he was playing college ball with. Sheldon Williams, by the way.
00:29:24
Sheldon Williams, there you go. Sheldon Williams, thank you, Eric, very much. Yeah, just to follow up with that, Boozer
00:29:28
was drafted in the second round and had a high first round career. Yeah, no, he had a perfectly good, an
00:29:36
NBA career, which says something. And the other thing about that, I love about that story is that it's models at
00:29:42
its best. Models at their best see around the corner. They see the future a little bit better.
00:29:47
They tell you something you didn't necessarily know. And we definitely had that experience with that
00:29:50
early rough stuff. Catanella, Catanella went on to a long time NBA career. He was an executive NBA for many years.
00:29:58
NBA, NBA teams, super interesting, super good guy. Okay, fellas, we're gonna need to wrap up
00:30:04
and let Ben go. Ben, always a pleasure having you. Very enlightening. Give us something.
00:30:11
We've played one game in this Western Conference Finals. We play at least three more, maybe six
00:30:16
more. What do you think is one thing we're gonna be saying at the end of the
00:30:20
Western Conference Finals that we're not saying right now? It's easy to overreact to one game, right?
00:30:25
So what do you think might occur between now and the end of this saying that we're not anticipating properly?
00:30:30
I think first I'm gonna lose a lot more sleep because I think the games are gonna, I think we're gonna go seven.
00:30:35
I think we're gonna go long and I think it's gonna be great for that. But I think that we're, I think the
00:30:42
question is, Wemby had this historic defensive performance and offensive, his overall, I mean, it was
00:30:51
Wilt-like numbers, crazy. Can he keep that up? That's the question. Can he perform at that level?
00:30:58
Because they absolutely needed him to win that game because they were about to lose that
00:31:03
game and then he makes two plays at the end of regulation, keeps him alive and then dominates in both overtime periods.
00:31:09
So that's a lot of minutes he hasn't played, he doesn't normally play that many minutes.
00:31:16
Let's see if he can keep that up. If he can, then they could actually dethrone
00:31:21
the Thunder. But that seems like what it's gonna take for them to do that. Ben's here, I'll make a statement just in
00:31:27
five seconds. I think we'll be talking about that SGA is not that great a two-time MVP.
00:31:36
I think he's gonna have a lot of trouble against the athletes. I do, I think he had a bad
00:31:42
night last night and I think Dylan Harper and D'Aaron Fox when he comes back
00:31:47
and Vassell, I don't think, I think SGA's gonna have some trouble in this series.
00:31:54
I get to make a prediction, that's my prediction, that's what I'm talking about.
00:31:58
That's fair, they got the guys to run at him for sure. My question's gonna be in what ways OKC
00:32:05
adapts because this is the thing about high -end basketball in these seven-game series is
00:32:10
that one team will adapt to the other and so they are very smart. This is what they're doing and there'll be
00:32:15
some at least attempt to adapt to what they experienced in game one. That the qualification is, look, they played them
00:32:20
in the regular season. It's not like this was brand new information. OK, team, why don't we let Ben go?
00:32:27
Again, Ben Alomar, longtime friend of the show, former ESPN and basketball analyst, basketball author, Ben
00:32:34
Alomar. Thanks for joining us, Ben. Come back and join us after the break. Welcome back.
00:32:40
Welcome back to Wharton Moneyball. Welcome back to a full hour of sports analytics here on the Wharton Podcast Network.
00:32:48
We are rolling into the second half of the show. Shane Jensen is here, Adi Weiner's here.
00:32:53
This is Kate Massey. Eric Bradlow flew in for a bit. We'll see if we get him back for
00:32:58
part of the second half of the show. We are recording on Tuesday afternoon as we
00:33:02
typically do. Show will go up early Wednesday. Just off the line with Ben Alomar.
00:33:08
Ben's based down in here in Austin with me. He's a former ESPN guy. Fun little perspective on the NBA.
00:33:15
I need that. I need that expert perspective on the NBA. We're gonna go open lines in this half,
00:33:20
and we are gonna get Eric Bradlow back, which is awesome. We'll do a little catch your eye, what
00:33:26
caught your eye. But before we do that, a quick shout out, big thank you to Stephanie Lanasa and
00:33:31
her family. Stephanie's a Wharton 2000 grad. They made a generous gift to Wasabi after
00:33:38
listening to the podcast. It's kind. We appreciate it. Helps us do the work, not just the
00:33:43
show, but the work we do with students around school. Also wanna note that the Lanasas have a
00:33:48
son, Ajax, one of their children, Ajax. He is committed to play golf at UCLA. Not this next year.
00:33:55
He's got one more year of high school, but beginning in 2027, be golfing at UCLA.
00:33:59
You know, this is the time of year where the NCAA tournament's about to start.
00:34:04
Great shout out, Kate. I think maybe a lot of our listeners don't know that everything that we do at
00:34:08
Wharton AI and Analytics, but also obviously Wasabi, is fully funded through philanthropy, corporate partners, and
00:34:15
foundations. And without that type of support, the show doesn't exist. All the things that you and Adi and
00:34:21
everyone is running at Wharton don't exist. So very much appreciated. Stephanie Lanasa and Ajax, their son.
00:34:30
Look forward to talking about college golf in the future. All right, guys, why don't we open it
00:34:33
up? Lots of things going on. Let's do a couple of rounds of what caught your eye.
00:34:38
I'm curious where you will take us. Why don't we start with our friend in
00:34:41
Israel on 36 hours travel, no sleep, before he nods off mid half hour. Adi, what do you got?
00:34:48
I'm happy to do so. I'm actually gonna bring up, I'm gonna mix two things.
00:34:52
So I wanna talk about hotness, because it's caught my eye. The hotness is the Philadelphia Phillies, who had
00:35:00
lost 10 games in a row, got a new manager, and now look like a different team. So that just, that's one data point.
00:35:06
The second data point is the Yankees, who look incredible for the first 45, 40 games
00:35:11
of the season, now look just, I would say lost, and have lost, they've lost the
00:35:18
majority of the games they've played this last week. So that leads me to, what is this
00:35:22
thing called hotness? And the reason why it caught me on my eye in particular is that I was
00:35:28
revisiting an old result, the old paper of Gilewicz, Tversky, and Vallone, which is the classic
00:35:36
paper called the hot hand fallacy. And I wanted to kind of figure out, well, what do people think?
00:35:42
Where is the academic literature on hot hands? I don't know if you know, but myself
00:35:47
and your now former department chair, or soon to be former department chair, Dylan Small, we
00:35:51
have a paper on the hot hand. We have a paper that shows that the Gilewicz and Tversky and Vallone paper actually uses
00:35:59
a very low power statistic to detect the hot hand. So we created a much more powerful one.
00:36:06
And so we reanalyzed their data and a lot of other data sets and showed that there is a hot hand.
00:36:11
It's not a massive effect size, but now that paper's now 10 plus years old.
00:36:18
And that led to, yeah. So I'll just, I'll comment because my old professor from Stanford, Joe Romano, and one of
00:36:26
his students, they revisited that data as well. And they actually did something which I had
00:36:32
noticed with one of my students when he was an undergraduate and we never published it,
00:36:36
was that in that paper, there was hotness when analyzed correctly, but it could be attributed
00:36:40
almost entirely to one particular player who was absurdly hot. So absurdly hot that if you put him
00:36:49
in, you have a statistically significant hotness. If you take him out, you don't.
00:36:53
And so it's fascinating because there are so many takes on the hot hand and some
00:36:58
are underpowered as you point out. I'm gonna say something that you will appreciate
00:37:02
about this whole research stream because the work that you guys have done in sports and
00:37:07
methodology. So what we did, Adi, you'll, and Shane, Kate, you guys will all appreciate this.
00:37:12
We took this exact measure that we created for sports and just applied it to purchasing
00:37:16
behavior in marketing and video consumption in marketing. So do people start binge consuming content?
00:37:23
Do people have hyper state dependence where they start buying products at a hyper rate?
00:37:29
So we literally took exactly the metric that we created for sports and directly applied it
00:37:35
to marketing. And actually, it's now up to my second most cited paper. We didn't call it hotness, we called it
00:37:42
clumpiness because I didn't wanna have a positive or negative valence, but this is a paper,
00:37:47
well, you guys remember, your former PhD student in stat, Yao Zhang, worked with Dylan and
00:37:52
I on this work. And it was revisiting the Gilevich and Vallone, Tversky paper, and then it was revisiting customer
00:38:01
lifetime value work, which a lot of it assumes that people buy at a constant rate,
00:38:06
which is not true. And so there's actually a very active literature on it, Adi, it's kind of rebirthed.
00:38:12
So this also helps us understand Eric's love of momentum, I suppose, on this show.
00:38:17
So, and I just wanna note that, I mean, there were a couple of economists, statisticians
00:38:24
who were, I got a lot of attention for challenging the methodology of Tversky et al.
00:38:31
And is it Tversky or Gilevich, first author on that? Gilevich. I should know that and I don't.
00:38:36
Okay, so it's Tom Gilevich. So there's, we had that, one of those co-authors on the show.
00:38:41
I have to add the behavioral element here at the end before we let go. I like what Eric said, he found a
00:38:47
hot hand, but it's a very small effect. The behavioral claim would be, no matter what
00:38:53
our size is actually there, the belief is much larger than the actuality. That's the behavioral piece of it that I
00:39:00
would add on top of these things. So I guess what I'm kind of saying is that we see like what the Phillies
00:39:05
have done. It's very hard to explain that without some kind of hotness, right?
00:39:10
I mean, obviously you can explain it, but it's hard to. And if you go back to the marketing,
00:39:15
as all my children would say, they call me Abba. When Abba's in a spending mood, they know
00:39:20
it's time to get on that gravy train. I get in that zone. I've never been on that train.
00:39:25
I've never seen an Abbi spending motor. No, it's extremely rare. But when that thing ticks on, it's like,
00:39:33
what happens? It's like a new person. So Adi, just because you brought this topic
00:39:36
up, I'll be a business person just for a second, because we're also a business show
00:39:39
a little bit. So what we also address in the paper is, should you encourage people to binge consume
00:39:46
or develop a hot hand when it comes to spending? And so we actually studied that.
00:39:51
What we did was, we had an in -sample period where we ran an experiment. We would encourage people to hyper buy, and
00:39:58
then we measured their customer lifetime value over a subsequent six months out of sample period.
00:40:04
And so a separate paper we wrote was in, you know, our big quant marketing journal,
00:40:09
Marketing Science, which is, should you try to make your customers binge consume and clumpy?
00:40:15
And is it good for economic value in the long run? It turns out it is, by the way.
00:40:20
But that was purely an experiment run on top of this metric that we created, as opposed to the lower power ones.
00:40:27
And then we showed that there's actually business value to encourage people to go into the
00:40:32
ABBA, Weiner, hot state. I'm pretty sure that whoever runs DraftKings and FanDuels read your paper, Eric.
00:40:44
Because, yeah, it's an ad blitz, let's just say, happening for any of us watching live
00:40:49
sports out there right now. Right. Well, Shane, while you got it, why don't you carry on?
00:40:53
What caught your eye in the world of sports the last week? Well, I guess this kind of relates to
00:40:57
the kind of momentum hotness sort of theme. I mean, I'm really intrigued, obviously, for the
00:41:02
upcoming round for the NHL playoffs, and specifically here in the East with the hurricanes, you
00:41:09
know, going into an 11-day break, basically, as hot as a playoff team can be, 8-0, but then having 11 days off
00:41:18
while Montreal and Buffalo battled it out. And, obviously, rest and all that is a
00:41:23
great thing. And, you know, if I could be on either team, I'd probably rather prefer to be
00:41:30
in Carolina's situation. But it does add a bit, kind of like, you know, to the extent that there's
00:41:35
a temporal momentum, whatever you want to call it, to what was going on with the
00:41:43
hurricanes before this big break. Has that dissipated, or are they going to keep going?
00:41:47
I guess that's kind of the question on my mind. Let me ask you a follow-up question
00:41:50
to that, Shane. So what would you have to observe to say that maybe the break was too long?
00:41:57
Because let's just say, for example, the Hurricanes win four games to three.
00:42:01
Well, maybe that's what it would have been anyway. Like, how do you look at the counterfactual
00:42:06
in this case? I think if they get blown out in four, you might say, wow. I mean, I'm not saying statistical evidence, but
00:42:12
what would be a narrative that you would have to see to say that- I think I'd have to see some kind of
00:42:17
like, not just like, not even, them losing the series, I suppose, in a blowout would
00:42:25
be pretty, some evidence. But, like, you'd want to kind of look, I think, at the underlying sort of measurables
00:42:32
and sort of see, you know, pop possession, like all these kind of other things, and
00:42:37
see if they're really kind of lagging on, to the extent that those are sort of
00:42:41
like some kind of, I think that's where you'd really, I think, see the compelling evidence
00:42:46
for like some kind of like, you know, rust kind of story. That's an interesting question.
00:42:51
Like, what reflects rust in hockey? That's interesting. I would also add, they have to, for
00:42:56
that story to hold, they have to lose game one. That 100% have to lose game one.
00:43:02
No, you have to. And really, you probably ought to lose more than one if that story's going to hold.
00:43:06
But Mark, they had, you know, Mark Messier is an analyst on ESPN, and they had him on after the game last night.
00:43:12
And he talked about exactly this issue. He said, back in the 80s, they had some kind of playoff round against the Flyers.
00:43:21
And he said, they had, they, his team, I don't know if this was the Oilers or the Rangers.
00:43:24
When did you say? Oilers. That'd be the Oilers. Yeah, the Oilers. I mean, this was the finals.
00:43:30
He had a 10 game break before the finals against the Flyers. Yeah, I think, because if it was like
00:43:34
an 87-88, they actually, I think, for at least a four game, for the current hockey structure, they have the record.
00:43:41
They went 16-2, I think, in that playoff round. Of course, they had swept everybody.
00:43:45
They just waited. Basically, they'd gone through whoever was out in the West and were just waiting for the
00:43:49
Flyers in the final. So Messier said last night, he's like, look, you come back and you feel a little
00:43:54
cement-legged, but you get a 10 day break in the middle of the season, and that, all season long, you never get that
00:44:01
break. It's like an entirely new season. He was, you could tell in the way he was talking about it, he said flat
00:44:06
out, he said the Canadians are up against it. This is a big, and this was after,
00:44:10
of course, talking flatteringly about the two teams that had just played, because it was clear
00:44:14
to him. I think it's clear to Messier that it's like, this is a big disadvantage, which is
00:44:18
the way we talked about it last week as well. I mean, look, it's not even only just
00:44:22
about this series. They're already a big favorite in this series. That break is gonna help them in the
00:44:26
finals if they make the finals. I mean, they got better rest than the Avs did if the Avs make it through.
00:44:32
A quick lamentation for the Sabres. That was a great series. It was game seven, overtime, that's just the
00:44:39
best thing in hockey. And it was the second series clenching game that I watched where it feels like the
00:44:46
team that won got outplayed. And they had this overtime goal. This was the Flyers against the Pens, overtime
00:44:51
goal in game six. Freaking Canadians against the Sabres, overtime goal again. I mean, the Sabres had pounded them for
00:44:57
at least the last two periods of regulation. They got outplayed probably in overtime itself.
00:45:03
That hot gold tender, man. I think to the extent that we've got a hot gold tender to this playoff, it's
00:45:09
the one in Montreal. Well, shout out to Sam Ventura, our friend from Carnegie Mellon who runs R&D for
00:45:15
the Sabres. And by any lights, that's a great season. Second round, and they seem like they're back.
00:45:22
They have a young team. There's just kids out there for that team. I think I saw, I heard that Montreal
00:45:27
and Buffalo actually are the two youngest teams in the league. Pretty incredible that they were playing.
00:45:32
They look like it on the ice. It looks like I'm watching my nephews, baby nephews out there playing hockey.
00:45:37
All right, Eric, what do you got? So I was thinking about golf and I was thinking about Aaron Rye winning the PGA,
00:45:44
but I thought about it more broadly. Like, name me a sport where the 40 -something-ranked player in the world wins the
00:45:53
title. So in basketball, I know there's not 40 -something teams, but there's no chance next season,
00:46:02
for example, like the Sacramento Kings are winning. In tennis, the 40-something-ranked player is
00:46:08
not winning the French Open. The 40-something-ranked horse is not winning the Belmont.
00:46:14
So I started to think, this is why I love golf, because you go into these tournaments and it could be 50, 60, 70
00:46:24
guys that could win the tournament and that's the wonderful thing. And it gets part of the momentum.
00:46:29
I thought where Adi was gonna go with his momentum story earlier, when baseball too, in
00:46:35
golf, you've talked about this, Kate, you get locked in. And if you get locked in for one
00:46:42
weekend, you can win a major. And Danny Willett won the Masters. I mean, who the, Danny Willett?
00:46:48
Danny Willett won the Masters. And I'm just saying, you get these situations
00:46:53
where it can happen. And that's what I thought about, is again, what other sport could the 40-something-ranked
00:47:00
player not only win, but one by three strokes? I just, that was what caught my eye.
00:47:06
Eric, let me just follow up with that. Does it make Scheffler's performance over the last
00:47:10
couple of years even more impressive? Does it make it even more impressive when one guy does so well over a long
00:47:15
period of time? Because that shouldn't happen, right? That shouldn't happen in what you just described.
00:47:19
Well, two other things, and I know Adi wants to jump in, two other things. So Scheffler is an interesting situation because, and
00:47:27
this isn't a bad thing I'm about to say, his wins and loss record when he's
00:47:31
in contention is starting, he's young, he's 29, is starting to look more and more like
00:47:36
Nicklaus than it is Woods. And let me say why I'm saying that. People know Jack Nicklaus has the record for
00:47:42
18 majors, right? He won 18, that's the all-time record. Do you know how many seconds Nicklaus has?
00:47:48
Also all-time record. 19 or 20. And Tiger Woods has 15 wins, two, three? Like Tiger Woods is in contention.
00:48:01
Tiger Woods wins, you guys know this stat. He's like leading after three rounds.
00:48:05
He's like 54-2 in his career. Jack Nicklaus doesn't have that record. I'm starting to see it.
00:48:11
This is not a problem. I'd rather be Scottie Scheffler than any other golfer right now.
00:48:15
Even than Roy McIlroy. I'm not saying McIlroy doesn't have a better accomplished record right now.
00:48:21
Scottie Scheffler had a bad week as far as I'm concerned. What, he ended up 15th?
00:48:26
I mean, that's as bad as he can play. As bad as he can play. He missed six putts.
00:48:30
I saw him miss six putts, six feet or less. He makes those putts, he's in it.
00:48:35
So, and the worst he can play, he's top 15. That's the worst he can play.
00:48:42
Yeah, so my comment is that one of the things that the reason why this happens is in, if you divide a golf performance
00:48:50
into three components, so it's almost like the four factors for golf. You have the tee shot, you have the
00:48:54
approach shot, and you have your putting. And you sort of Z-score your performance
00:48:57
and your strokes gained it. Your strokes gained your Z-scores on each of those components.
00:49:02
And you ask, well, what we've talked about since the show a lot, the tee shots
00:49:06
and the approach shots, the players are really different. They are quantifiably very, very different.
00:49:12
Their skill levels are vast and they're important. And in putting, they're very, very compressed.
00:49:20
But if you tried to, if you had only one of those to predict who wins the tournament, which one would you want?
00:49:27
If you only could pick one, which one would you? It's putting. It's putting, it's putting.
00:49:32
And so that's, and that's the component that has the least amount of skill or skill
00:49:37
variation. I mean, I don't want to say it's not skill. I can't do it.
00:49:40
You guys can't do it. Skill of variation is the thing that determines the outcome so frequently.
00:49:47
And so you get this 40th person because of that peculiarity of golf. Interesting, all right.
00:49:54
Let me give you one and then we'll do another round and I'll pass on the
00:49:57
second round since I've been kibitzing on that. But I'm gonna come back to hockey.
00:50:00
I was thinking about this last night and this is something to put up against y 'all.
00:50:04
Y'all react to this. It feels to me like hockey is in some sense the most exciting sport.
00:50:10
And I was trying to operationalize it in my head last night. You know, there's not much scoring as Adi
00:50:17
referred earlier. And so the win probability change from a score is pretty high relative to other sports.
00:50:27
Certainly huge compared to basketball. It's probably, I'm curious, it's probably a little
00:50:31
bit higher than baseball but scoring is comparable to baseball. It's probably a little lower than soccer.
00:50:37
Soccer's even bigger. It's gotta be higher than NFL. So the win probability change when a goal
00:50:44
occurs is big. But here's the thing. That combined with the fact that the trajectory
00:50:52
from zero chance of a goal to a goal happens faster than it has to be any other sport.
00:51:01
Like maybe with a pitcher and a home run, that's the closest thing to it. But a guy can go from the far
00:51:08
end of the ice where there's no chance that a goal's about to happen to being
00:51:13
high goal expectancy. Well, at least, you know, at least goal region in just seconds.
00:51:18
And it goes back and forth like this all the time. You go from like utterly risk of a
00:51:23
goal happening which is gonna lead to this big change in win probability to no risk
00:51:27
and negative risk. The other team with the high risk of win probability. I think that vacillation, that vacillation is.
00:51:34
Yeah, when Montreal was up two nothing in the game last night, early on, what was
00:51:39
the win probability? I'm just interested. Like in the first period up to, was
00:51:42
it like 80%? I doubt it would have been 80, but especially. Yeah, 80 would be an upper bound on
00:51:48
what I would probably put that probability at. You know? Yeah, but. Sure, 70s, 75.
00:51:54
Yeah, between 60 and 80, certainly. Between 60 and 80. Yeah, and that's this extremeness.
00:51:58
And you know, and then once it's two to one, well, then all of a sudden, you know, it's, I don't know, 55, 60
00:52:05
% maybe. And then when it's two to two, you know, I'm a momentum guy, I'd say, well,
00:52:08
the Buffalo's more likely to win. But do y'all buy my operationalization of,
00:52:13
that's a, can we think about, can we compare sports that way? Yeah. And ask about something about the volatility of
00:52:21
win probability. It just seems more compressed. Higher frequency. Divided by time.
00:52:26
I think it's like a derivative. By time. Right. By time. The instantaneous change in win probability is probably
00:52:33
highest in hockey, or potentially highest. Something like that. Something like that.
00:52:37
I would think, Cade, that if I was, you know, starting a sports network, or thinking
00:52:43
about this, and I was thinking about fan experience, the metric you just created is probably
00:52:48
one that would be very interesting to look at, and probably generates a lot of excitement.
00:52:55
Well, the qualifier on it is that you probably don't get huge jumps because goals don't
00:53:00
happen with very high probability. So we're talking about, it's moving around like
00:53:05
this, but it's going on both sides of the, it's going on both sides of the
00:53:09
0.5 line with high frequency. Okay. Let's do another quick round. Let's go back around to Shane.
00:53:15
Or no, Adi started us off. Okay. If you haven't been watching whatever local sports
00:53:23
you have. I haven't, but I don't have any quick takes. I have a question for you.
00:53:28
Yeah, sure. Don Mattingly. Did we know he was going to be a success? Tell me about his managerial background.
00:53:35
I mean, I don't think about Don Mattingly since he's been a player, but I'm sure
00:53:38
I'm just out of it. No, he is an accomplished manager, and not only, obviously, an accomplished player, and an accomplished
00:53:45
manager. I think what, just connecting on this point is, and in managerial prowess in general in
00:53:52
baseball, it's something that I have a hard time understanding how much it's valued.
00:53:58
I mean, we've talked about this because it's, in some level, the set of strategic moves
00:54:03
that you get to make as a manager in baseball is so much smaller than the things that you get to do in other
00:54:09
sports, particularly sports like hockey and basketball. You have all these combinations that you get
00:54:15
to decide upon, and when people come out, and all that changing of players, and strategically,
00:54:21
you have the manager in soccer manages what kind of team that they want to build,
00:54:27
and the whole team is built around that, is built around that manager's understanding of the
00:54:32
strategic design. Baseball's like, really, what are you really doing? In the old days, you had more to
00:54:37
do because they also were, in some level, very involved in player acquisition and termination decisions,
00:54:43
but here, we just don't see it, yet somehow, just, you see this mattingly effect, and
00:54:49
I'm probably, if you had to ask me where I stand on it, I'm essentially saying,
00:54:54
very, very minor factor. This is due to other factors, of which, a big helping of which is luck and
00:55:02
regression to the mean. The Phillies were a good team, and that someone asked me what's the mattingly effect, and
00:55:07
my first response is, clearly, it's regression to the mean. When you make the change when you are
00:55:12
at the worst, that's when things were so horrible, and so unexpectedly horrible, that you made
00:55:18
the change then, and then, therefore, my prediction for the Phillies in their next two weeks
00:55:22
after the managerial change was going to be much higher, simply because of the cherry-picking,
00:55:29
the tragedy, the moment. It said you had the paired comparison, the Red Sox fired their manager in about the
00:55:36
same time and have gotten no better. No, they weren't as bad. They didn't, did they have a 10-game
00:55:44
win? Losing streak? I don't think so. Also, I feel like you were only talking
00:55:48
about the manager in terms of on-field strategic decision-making contribution, not the behind-the
00:55:54
-scenes, getting the player to play their best, and that one, I think managers can have
00:56:00
a big effect there. It's fascinating, though, because Rob Thompson, who was the one fired, came in and did that
00:56:07
exact thing to the same team, basically, like three-whatever years ago, and somehow, so I
00:56:14
kind of feel like the refresh often works, but it's weird to me. Doesn't that just suggest that you need an
00:56:20
occasional refresh, that manager-player relations kind of gets stale? Adi and I are waiting for Aaron Boone,
00:56:26
but Adi, just quickly. Yes, we are waiting for him. Just quickly, by the way, let's pretend, this
00:56:31
is probably an overestimate, but just pretending that the Phillies were a 600 team to start
00:56:35
the season, that's probably an overestimate, but just roughly. I just did the calculation.
00:56:40
They've gone 18 and four under Mattingly. There's a 1.13% chance that they
00:56:44
would do that as a 600 team, straight from a binomial tail probability, so it's rare,
00:56:51
and we have to give something to it, but it's not like you would never see a team go this, like, this is a
00:56:59
rare stretch, but it's not a rare, rare, rare stretch. Yeah, but the 10-game-in-a-row
00:57:05
stretch is incredible. To put them back-to-back, and you get something that's really worth noting.
00:57:10
To lose 10 in a row and then to go 18 and four, that's a little different. 0.6 to the 10th is really small.
00:57:18
Shane, last word on Mattingly and your Phillies? Well, I'll keep it with the Phillies.
00:57:23
I just kind of saw that actually, just for the, because we're fascinated with the ABS,
00:57:30
I saw that Bryce Harper actually lost a challenge in the statistically worst possible situation.
00:57:37
So the context was, bases empty, zero-zero count, two outs in the first inning, and
00:57:44
so it's like, and it just kind of fascinated me like, I like, I mean, it makes sense that that would be the worst
00:57:49
possible combination. I just, I feel like we're not tracking, you know, obviously the hitters or whatever are
00:57:56
making their decision based on whether they really thought it was in the zone or not.
00:58:00
I wonder if there is any kind of learning for context that can actually be there.
00:58:05
Well, I actually think, I actually studied this a little bit. I'm not sure you were on when I
00:58:08
gave my results about the tracking, about the ABS, the tapping. The, we are, the people, the analysts are
00:58:16
tracking basically what I call run expectancy flip. And what you're pointing out here is that
00:58:21
the run expectancy flip was so small here, even at stake, so little was at stake,
00:58:26
that the future loss because of the expected value given how early in the game is,
00:58:31
that's the piece that people are not tracking properly. I think what's happening is that hitters like
00:58:36
Harper are given essentially the green light. And that's the way they're dealing with it.
00:58:41
And hitters like, you know, Jazz Chisholm are being told, you don't ever challenge.
00:58:47
Because you see him, you watch him hit. He's like, he's like, oh, at this point,
00:58:51
you know, what the hell's going on in my head? I feel like Jazz is the opposite side
00:58:54
of the spectrum from Angel Hernandez or something like that. But shouldn't, shouldn't, shouldn't the- They have
00:58:59
the same amount of judgment. Shouldn't the clubs, at the very minimum, you could tell, you could imagine telling a batter
00:59:05
as they leave the undead circle, you have the green light or you have a red light?
00:59:10
Absolutely. It's like, it's just a game situation at the batter, at the at-bat level, it
00:59:16
should be real clear that a guy can do it or can't do it, right? Absolutely.
00:59:20
My suspicion is that someone like Harper is given the green light to do whatever he
00:59:24
wants. But he shouldn't be given the green light. Even Harper shouldn't have the green light at
00:59:26
that moment. But it's not surprising that Bryce Harper is the one that makes that decision.
00:59:30
Especially Bryce Harper playing like he's been playing. He's on top of the world, he runs
00:59:33
the world. Let me do whatever I want to do kind of thing. There needs to be a check on that.
00:59:37
Okay, that was Shane's second one. Eric Bradlow. Just quickly, I know we're heading up on
00:59:42
time here. All right, very sad moment for me today because you guys know how much I love
00:59:46
tennis. Al Geras has already said, he just announced today he's not playing the entire grass court
00:59:52
season. So he's out of Wimbledon, he's out of Queens Club. So he's not playing, obviously the French, he's
00:59:58
not playing Wimbledon. I'm gonna start, I'm doing this, I don't care what anyone says, I'm putting Aceros next
01:00:04
to Sinner's season now. He's now broken the record for the most Masters 1000 wins in a row.
01:00:11
Broke Djokovic's record 36 in a row. And he's won five straight Masters events.
01:00:17
He's now the only, the second player, shockingly, to win all the Masters 1000.
01:00:20
I never realized that Federer and Nadal, neither of them won them all. How many are there?
01:00:25
There's eight. And Sinner's won them all now at age 24. Eric, real quickly, give us the eight Master
01:00:34
1000s tournaments. Oh, I don't know them all. I mean, I could tell you there's a
01:00:38
couple in the clay court season. The Italian Open was just one of them. There's one in Spain that takes place.
01:00:46
Like Indian Wells is one of them. You know, basically, every surface has, like, call
01:00:52
it two of them. They have the Grand Slam, which you might as well call the 2000 tournament, that is
01:00:56
the number of points. And then there's like two of each other type. There's the Grand Slam, there's two hard court
01:01:00
ones, there's two grass ones, there's two clay ones. And they're geographically distributed as well.
01:01:06
Like, how many are in the States? I would say two or three of them. Oh, you know what?
01:01:12
Cincinnati, I think, is one of them, is one of the, Indian Wells. There might be three in the States, maybe
01:01:17
one in Australia, two or three in Europe, something like that. Look, Sinner would have to play.
01:01:28
It's not even his B game. He has, I mean, I don't, I mean, injury could do it, obviously.
01:01:35
Akra has got injured, but if Sinner's healthy, this is going to end up being one
01:01:40
of the greatest seasons in the history of tennis, by far. I mean, it is. He can't win the Grand Slam this year
01:01:48
because he didn't win the Australian, but he may win every other tournament that he plays.
01:01:54
So I'm just sad from a fan's perspective. And I don't want to have to put
01:01:58
an asterisk next to his name. But if he cleans up, if Akra doesn't play the rest of the season and Sinner
01:02:03
cleans up three Grand Slams, and now he's at seven and Akra is at seven, I'm
01:02:07
not feeling good about it. It's not that qualified. All right, you've been giving us a bit
01:02:14
of a heads up on that one for a couple of weeks now. So it's coming to home to roost at
01:02:18
this point. All right, guys, why don't we let it wrap there? We'll get Adi off to bed.
01:02:22
Thanks for making it in here. And to you, Eric, on your travel, sliding in here.
01:02:26
And many thanks to Shane Jensen, who has just left away. Big thanks to the debut production performance of
01:02:33
Jacob Grodnick and his team, the Grod Squad on the engineering platform for us this time
01:02:40
and presumably going forward for a while. So glad to have these guys in. Thanks to Deep Patel for making this whole
01:02:45
thing run. Thanks to you guys for listening. Oh, and thanks to Marissa Reyna, our producer.
01:02:50
Thanks to you guys for listening. Come back and join us next time. Between now and then, enjoy your sports.