Do we overrate March Madness?
STL cracks the books to review the literature. Plus, we remember a PG icon, stir the Jazz pot, and more.
OPENING TIP
Evening in the headquarters of Save The Lottery. Above the rumble of the printing press downstairs and the clack of typewriters, the Gonzaga game blares. Chet Holmgren, presumptive top-three pick in the NBA draft, is looking either unwilling or unable to put his choking team on his back, and an argument has broken out. Some think Holmgren will be the next Adam Morrison, while others argue he seems more like the next Darko Milicic.
But there is danger here. Every year around tournament time, we get the same pieces from every outlet. Who hurt or helped their draft stock as a result of their tournament performance? It made us wonder: are teams over-indexing on a tiny sample size, or is a prospect’s play in the crucible of March Madness a crucial data point?
There are some obvious reasons to suspect that being wowed by a breakout tournament is just one more way for dumb teams to trip over themselves. There are several potential cognitive biases in play. First: recency bias. We need look no farther than the college football rankings to see that supposedly objective people are unable to properly weigh losses that occur at different times. Second: availability bias. This is the principle that we tend to overemphasize data that is more readily available, like nationally televised broadcasts gambled on by everyone in America.
And there is definitely evidence to support the idea that the availability heuristic is in play. A study in the Journal of Productivity Analysis demonstrated that a player who appeared in the Final Four was typically drafted 11 spots higher than another player with identical stats. That’s a huge effect given a draft with 60 picks.
But that really only demonstrates that a “stock boost” effect is in play, not that it’s a mistake. So we got out our pencils and looked at players whose draft position rose or fell significantly following the NCAA tournament, as compared to their mock draft position just prior to it1.
We limited our sample to the past fifteen years and to the first round. And the results were quite interesting. Of the 160 players classified as late draft risers, 32% were hits, 37% were busts, and 31% were neutral relative to their draft position—returns that are roughly in line with how GMs have performed historically in the first round when considering all players that were drafted.
This would seem to suggest that our initial instinct—that it was easy to overvalue the guys tearing up the bracket due to cognitive biases—might very well be wrong. So we went digging for others who had found themselves at the bottom of this particular rabbit hole.
ESPN’s Kevin Pelton took a quick look, and found that given a specific draft position, players that reached a Final Four consistently outperformed those that didn’t. Hmmm.
Then came a surprise. Harvard’s Anne Preston and Casey Ichniowski published an analysis back in 2012 entitled DOES MARCH MADNESS LEAD TO IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE IN THE NBA DRAFT? HIGH-VALUE EMPLOYEE SELECTION DECISIONS AND DECISION-MAKING BIAS. We will quote directly from their conclusions:
Across a wide array of different samples and different model specifications, the data provide very clear answers to these two questions. First, unexpected MM (March Madness) performance affects draft decisions. Models consistently show that draft decisions are affected by unexpected team wins and unexpected player scoring.
And then the kicker:
Second, NBA personnel who are making these draft decisions are certainly not irrationally overweighting this MM information… If anything, the unexpected performance in the MM tournament deserves more weight than it gets in the draft decisions. How collegians perform under the glare of intense media attention and large arena crowds in a lose-and-go-home championship tournament provides important information about the true potential of these players as professional NBA players.
Our survey suggests that front offices, on average, have continued to appropriately consider March results during the decade that has passed since Preston and Ichniowski published their research.
Now we can break here and cut directly to a shot of Magic GM John Hammond staring at a picture of Jalen Suggs and sobbing quietly, as there are always going to be exceptions. But even anecdotally, the rational GM case (shudder) seems to bear itself out. A quick list entitled “the greatest NCAA tournament performances of all time” looked like this:
Larry Bird (1979)
Sindarious Thornwell (2017)
CJ McCollum (2012)
Andre Miller (1998)
Shabazz Napier (2014)
Gordon Hayward (2010)
Dwayne Wade (2003)
David Robinson (1983)
Steph Curry (2008)
Kemba Walker (2010)
You could do worse. We should be clear, before we are inundated with irate readers mailing us the charred remains of their Hasheem Thabeet rookie cards, that the NBA draft is still more art than science. Your team does not need to rush out and draft Doug Edert. But there seems to be some signal here, not just noise. So if Caleb Love fills it up for 50 tonight… maybe he should go in the lottery.
TWEETS OF THE WEEKS
It’s probably nothing.
To put that in context, it’s 151 passes. Trae Young has more assists to Capela than Mitchell has passes to Gobert.
STL REMEMBERS
Today we’ve been discussing preps to pro prospects. Guys who ball out on the biggest stage and get their name shouted on TV by Dickie V during the big dance. But that’s not the only way guys make it to the league.
Another way might be to get caught by Billy Donovan at Florida for smoking weed for the third time, get indefinitely suspended, and decide to declare for the draft. That’s how the guy STL is remembering today joined the NBA.
If he sounds like kind of a knucklehead, that’s fair. Nike once cancelled an ad campaign around him after he cursed out a bunch of fans. But he wasn’t just a knucklehead, he was also a basketball genius. Here is Hubie Brown describing him:
"This guy has one of the highest IQs that I've been around. He sees all 10 people, he catches every call by the opposition and relays it to the bench. He has excellent recommendations out of offenses and defenses that we're doing. He's totally in tune since the first day I came here.”
He is a player who Shaq recruited because of his smarts and passing ability, and helped that team win a championship, taking incredible care of the ball, and leading the league in assist to turnover ratio that year.
And if you don’t recognize who we are talking about, that’s because he will not be remembered for any of that. Because mostly we loved him for just clownin’ guys, constantly, and without remorse.
Today STL remembers Jason Williams, White Chocolate:
(ed. note: This video is amazing, and it is only acceptable not to watch it if you hate both basketball and fun)
AT THE BUZZER
Robert Pera, the Grizz owner, is suddenly really rich. Why it matters (ESPN+, $)
ICYMI: Victor Oladipo is back! (Streamable)
Should Paolo Banchero go #1? (The Ringer)
Chris Paul, hoisted by his own petard (Streamable)
Vecenie’s latest mock has a bunch of NCAA tourney risers (The Athletic, $)
A number of other factors could also explain either a late move in projected draft positioning including team workouts, interviews, late draft declarations, mock draft tracking error, etc. etc.