A (Very) Brief History Of Time ⏱️🏀
Are the Bots now outperforming the Bookies? STL Investigates. Plus, adventures in beekeeping and more.
OPENING TIP
Welcome back to Save the Lottery! It’s been a moment since our last installment. Heightened sociopolitical tensions in the Baltic theater, combined with supply chain problems with certain noble gases, have rendered it impossible to continue our regular cadence.
We’re back with a vengeance though, and ready to offer our first round predictions! That’s a little joke of course, but it does underscore something that we do not do a lot of at STL: predict basketball game outcomes. We tend to avoid doing so because 1) it is hard, and 2) spending a lot of time being wrong about something feels like a questionable use of our readers’ time. That does not prevent so, so many others from making predictions. And mostly being wrong as well.
So we mostly leave predictions to three groups.
First, there are the punters in Vegas. We can’t say for sure whether they are killing it predictions-wise, but we will point out that Resorts World, the newest casino on The Strip, has 40 restaurants and a 5.5 acre pool on the roof.
Second, there are the geeks. Nate Silver’s 538, which publishes both lines and championship odds literally daily, has long been our favorite example.
Third and finally, we have the experts themselves. What would we do without them? Here, for instance, were their picks for the Suns / Pelicans matchup from Round 1.
It’s hard to say what’s less edifying here: the fact that we got to see 16 different experts predict that the 1 seed would defeat the 8 seed, or the fact that not a single one actually got their prediction correct.
So let’s take a quick look at the quality of our various parties’ crystal balls and see who comes out on top.
Preseason:
Some major props to the geeks at 538 here. Even before the season, they were on to the Lakers, giving them just a 2% chance at a championship (and a 49% chance to make the playoffs). Even with general skepticism that the Westbrook trade would work out, that’s a bold call. Similarly, the spreadsheet at 538 managed not to get hyped up about just how famous the big three up in Brooklyn were, something that bettors were unable to avoid.
On the other hand, the problem with a computer model is how hard it is to explain certain things to it. For instance, you can have Greg Popovich spend hours trying to explain Kawhi Leonard’s level of enthusiasm for playing when anything but 100% healthy, but it’s just not gonna sink in. Thus 538 was way too high on the Clips, which Vegas managed to largely avoid.
The experts at ESPN had the Nets and Lakers at the 1st and 3rd position, respectively, so the Geeks definitely take the win here.
Round One:
By the start of the Playoffs, the Suns had finally caught the betting public’s attention. Somehow, the Nets held on to the second-best odds in Vegas, proof that your average punter just can’t quit the big stars, despite a round 1 matchup that everyone expected to be tough.
The model, meanwhile, became very, very enamored with the Celtics. Very enamored. The Celtics looked great against the Nets, no doubt, but installing them as massive favorites to win the title still seems a bridge too far? It was hard to watch that series and think anything other than “Man, the Nets look like they want to go home.”
This is an interesting one though, and if the Celts regain their footing and take out the Bucks, we might have to start seriously considering giving up our day jobs and handing things over to the AI.
The experts meanwhile picked chalk in the first round, and it was. Push.
Today:
What has everyone learned through the first round? Well, the public is all worked up about Golden State, installing them as second favorites. This, again, is a bit confusing, given that Golden State mostly handled a totally outmatched Denver team and looked moderately convincing. On the other hand, the Warriors have a lot of very famous players. And a lot of ink has been spilled on a Very Important Topic: what do we call the new Death Lineup?1 We’re starting to have our doubts about the wisdom of crowds.
Meanwhile, the spreadsheet is suddenly bullish on the Suns. It’s a bit difficult to get terribly excited about a team that really labored to put away the New Orleans Pelicans, but the model saw something else.
And finally the public is coming around on the Heat. It’s notable that despite the Heat winning the East with games to spare, neither Vegas nor the geeks really had any time for the Heat until now.
The ESPN experts once again picked the higher seed in every series.
So who is doing it best? The Model. We’ve seen that the folks in Vegas just can’t quit the big names. The experts in the preseason were similarly starry-eyed, but reacted much more quickly than the public to actual conditions on the ground. However, when it comes time to make predictions, the experts have tended to suffer from some risk aversion, and are reluctant to stray too far from the win-loss record of the teams involved, which is interesting.
The model, on the other hand, has no compunctions about calling it like it sees it. And while it will make dumb mistakes, like assuming that Joel Embiid will EVER get through the NBA playoffs without breaking down, it’s been impressive so far.
What can we learn from the model? A few things. First, it cares about defense, which is notoriously hard to evaluate (witness Marcus Smart winning DPOY this year). Yes, yes, we all know defense is important, but it’s hard to evaluate on screen, and it’s difficult to track in a box score. Therefore, it is less cognitively available when we start predicting things (see the availability heuristic we referenced last issue).
The second reason the model might have the upper hand is that it changes its mind quickly. Who are the top guys in the NBA? Ask anyone and you’ll probably get a lot of Jokic, KD, Embiid, and Giannis. But the model doesn’t waste time asking guys to establish their reputation. It thinks that Jason Tatum is the second best player in the NBA. It already likes Desmond Bane’s game more than Harden, Bam, or Karl Anthony Towns.
Bane was spectacular in round one, and if you squint hard enough you can envision him as an All Star talent in a year or two. But the model doesn’t waste time with “he needs to earn his stripes” or “let’s see him do it under pressure.” It decides NOW. While in some cases this may equate to overreacting to a single season, there are likely many others (e.g. the imposter pretending to be James Harden in a fat suit) where the model picks up a true talent change faster than experts or the public.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
Poor Rudy. See below….
STL INVESTIGATES: INSECTS
We get a lot of flak from our apiarist readers for failing to acknowledge them or serve them properly amongst our content offerings. And it’s high time we rectified that. So this week we have decided, at long last, to present:
Save The Lottery’s Top Four Bee-Related NBA Moments
Last Thursday, the Utah Jazz assured everyone that contrary to reports, the swelling around Rudy Gobert’s nose and eyes was not going to interfere with his vision or shooting motion.
Apparently Gobert is an amateur beekeeper, and after swapping the queen in one of his hives several days ago, was beset by angry bees and stung on the nose. Besides being potentially the greatest injury notation in playoff history (Gobert: Probable [Bees]) this incident allowed us to learn several interesting things about bee stings. Said Gobert: “It’s actually good to get stung by a bee. There’s actually some good benefits. There’s actually some treatments where people get stung on purpose.”
This turns out to be completely true. STL immediately began looking into what some of the health benefits might be, and can report that being stung by a bee apparently grants some resistance to… further bee stings.Okay so to be totally honest, our research on the other bee related moments in NBA history was somewhat derailed by the fact that in addition to “National Basketball Association,” NBA is also an acronym for (seriously) “Nebraska (also Norway) Beekeepers Association.” This turned out to be problematic, because search terms such as “NBA + Bees”, or “NBA + Beekeeping” or “NBA + Bees Attack Frenchman In The Face Before Game 6” produced a huge number of results that were not strictly relevant to our search.
We hope you have enjoyed Save The Lottery’s Top Four Bee-related NBA Moments. See you next week!
AT THE BUZZER
Big men may not get paid in the NBA, but they can still cash in (Athletic $)
An oral history of White Men Can’t Jump (ESPN)
You need to check all the NBA playoff drip, don’t you? (ESPN)
It’s probably time to start really talking about Britney Griner (Insider)
A lineup that Steve Kerr appears less and less willing to use each time Ja Morant shreds the Warriors guards. Alas, poor Death 2.0 Lineup, we knew ye well.