🤖The bots and the bookies 🎰
Is 538 poised to make another epic prediction fail, or do gamblers have it all wrong? Plus, STL's annotated guide to the bubble, evidence Rob Pelinka is a genius, Jimmy Butler Facts, and more.
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OPENING TIP
The NBA Finals are here, and we are pumped.
The storylines are everywhere. LeBron vs. his old team. Pat Riley vs. his old team. Heat Culture! The Lakers opened the season at 4-1 to win a title. The Heat opened at 75-1. Did you know Jimmy Butler wakes up early?
Basketball analysts have scrambled to compose their series breakdowns. Will Anthony Davis wreck the Heat’s confounding zone defense? Can Frank Vogel keep up his excellent coaching or will Erik Spoelstra’s masterclass continue? One thing is clear: this series has a prohibitive favorite. But we couldn’t help but notice that there isn’t such clear consensus on who that favorite actually is…
Vegas loves the Lakers. They opened as -450 favorites at the Westgate SuperBook and still have implied series odds above 75% according to betting markets. But basketball today is run by number crunchers, so we looked to Nate Silver’s statheads over at 538… and saw this:
That’s a huge divergence by any measure, and someone is going to look silly in a couple of weeks, but will it be the Gamblers or the Geeks?
What the gamblers may be missing
The Lakers are the definition of a “public team”—a fan favorite that casual bettors are more likely to wager on. Kobe had the best selling jersey in America from 2013-15 despite playing a total of 46 games over that period for a terrible Lakers team. The Lakers have five times and three times as many followers on Reddit and Instagram, respectively. The Lakers’ local TV deal is worth $100 million per year more than the Heat’s deal. It’s plausible that loyal fans have pushed the Lakers’ chances higher.
The bookies may be anchored to their prior beliefs. Starting with everyone’s favorite behavioral economists Kahneman and Tversky, study after study has shown humans don’t adjust their priors well enough for new information. Economists even found evidence of this with Australian horse-racing bookies failing to properly adjust odds when confronted with late scratches. So the Lakers’ superior odds at the start of the bubble may have Vegas underweighting the Heat’s strong recent play in the line offered.
The bookies’ tools may not work in 2020. Bookies rely on large data sets to set lines, and factor in regular season data. But given the long layoff and unique environment, that data may be less reliable than normal. For instance, it’s undeniable how much the Heat have leveled up in the bubble, with their current team in no way resembling the regular season version. The Heat’s most common regular season lineup (Nunn / Robinson / Butler / Bam / Meyers Leonard) has played zero minutes together in the playoffs. Goran Dragic is playing like he’s five years younger. Tyler Herro’s true shooting percentage has increased by 5%, which is like going from Jimmy Butler as a shooter to Steph Curry. Will these things continue? The bookies don’t think so, but they didn’t think so after the Milwaukee series either. More upsets, you say? Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
What the model may be missing
The Heat have inferior players as measured by 538’s own stats. Given the Lakers’ regular season and playoff dominance, we would expect 538 to lay out a convincing case for its model’s counterintuitive prediction. But their own stats paint the opposite portrait. At first, we looked at regular season performance given the longer sample size. But the Lakers were the better regular season team and their players scored more highly than the Heat players in 538’s “RAPTOR” rankings. So we wondered if 538 weighs postseason performance more heavily. Guess what team has improved their level of play in the playoffs (as measured by net rating, and also captured in 538 RAPTOR rankings) even more than the Heat? The Lakers! Try as we might, we could not explain the prediction using 538’s numbers for this season.
The model appears to be overweighting its preseason predictions. Bereft of any 2019/2020 data to support a pro-Miami case, we plumbed 538’s site and found their Player Predictions, which do not appear to have been updated since the start of the season. This 538 model says that it bases its predictions of performance based on the “trajectory of similar NBA players.” Unfortunately, those trajectories are off course. 538’s model predicted LeBron to regress meaningfully this year (to “borderline all-star” level) and predicted Rondo to be a “scrub.” By contrast, Jimmy Butler was projected to be worth $10M more this season than the King. In other words, 538’s model appears to not be adjusting its priors to account for new information... just the bias that we accused the bookies of potentially making!
It’s not just the Heat players who have improved. It’s true that Herro and Dragic have taken a significant step forward. But what about Playoff Rondo? The Ringer found that of 79 active players in 2018 with 50 career playoff games, Rondo had the largest improvement in PER in the playoffs. Dwight Howard and Markieff Morris have also seriously stepped up their game of late. Both teams are playing better than their regular-season selves.
Maybe Nate Silver just likes assigning 70%+ probabilities to things that won’t happen. Hey, he’s done it before.
Plenty of flaws to be found on both sides. We see a few elements that will tip the balance:
The Lakers against the zone. Miami is going to wall off the paint and force the Lakers’ secondary players to make threes. This playoffs, when the Lakers have made at least 30% of their threes, they’ve won. We hope KCP and Danny Green are getting their shots up.
The 4th quarters. The Heat are probably the best conditioned team in the playoffs (see STL’s section on Jimmy Butler’s Work Ethic ™ below). And LeBron? It turns out that getting old sucks. [1]
AD vs. Bam. While LeBron and Jimmy Butler soak up more airtime, we can’t wait to see two athletic specimens (and former Kentucky Wildcats) match up. Both are athletic freaks who can handle the ball, create offense for their teams and defend tenaciously. AD has been better when they played in the regular season. Can Bam raise his game to match?
So, finally, are we Team Gambler or Team Geek? Disappointingly, we can’t be either. Asses perched firmly atop the fence, STL predicts a close and hard fought series. Those eager to be wrong are welcome to pick a side; we predict a great finals.
TWEET OF THE WEEK
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY
The NBA Bubble has been by many metrics a massive success. In fact, it’s been so successful, it can be easy to forget just how strange and unprecedented it is for a huge group of millionaire giants to uproot their lives and congregate in Walt Disney World for months with no outside contact, while occasionally playing incredibly high level sport. And before it all comes to an end, never to be repeated (right?) we wanted to wade into the weirdness for a moment. Thus, for posterity, we present the STL GUIDE TO THE NBA BUBBLE:
The ESPN Wide World of Sports, location of the actual broadcast courts, as seen here.
Practice ‘courts.’ A deeply odd combination of hardwood and wedding ballroom.
The route from Hotel to Arena. It’s 8 minutes long, which is apparently plenty of time for Tacko Fall to pass out.
The Gran Destino, home of the top four seeds in each conference. Billed as a mid-tier offering by the Points Guy. Apparently the $170 million the NBA dropped on the bubble didn’t include the top tier accommodations.
Location of Big Face Coffee, Jimmy Butler’s extortionate brainchild. Which led to teammate Goran Dragic starting Little Face Coffee, which led to Jimmy Butler trying to squeeze LFC out of business, because of course.
The Pop-up Barbershop.50 enter, only six survive.
The swimming pool where Enes Kanter attempted to drown Tacko Fall.
Coronado Springs Resort, a smaller, crappier hotel for referees and the media. Don’t creep on the refs’ intense pickleball tournament, apparently.
Lake Buena Vista, the NBA players’ favorite golf course. Apparently Seth Curry can mash, Tacko Fall, not so much. And then there’s Furkan Korkmaz.
Bass fishing. Seriously. Apparently the players love it.
The Yacht Club. It’s okay. Seems the NBA didn’t want the worst teams invited to the bubble to get too high and mighty.
Massive blue fences, to let you know what’s off limits in the Bubble.
STL INVESTIGATES
Is Rob Pelinka secretly a genius?
Everybody loves a good body swap movie. What if a black guy was a white guy? What if a teenager was her own mom?! What if an earnest cop had a face transplant with the criminal-mastermind-target-of-his-own-investigation!?!!
So it was with much delight that STL learned of Rob Pelinka’s hiring as General Manager of the Los Angeles Lakers back in 2017. An agent's job is to negotiate contracts and take people to dinner. A GM’s job is to know basketball scouting, strategy, and analytics at such a deep level that you can master the dark arts of constructing a winning basketball team. These are not related skill sets, but… what if an agent was a GM?!
As our story kicked off, things looked grim. The Lakers were coming off a 28-win season in which Swaggy P and Jordan Clarkson were two of their top 5 scorers. Kobe Bryant had retired. Luol Deng and Timofey Mozgov had just been signed to albatross contracts less than a year earlier.
But then came a moment of brilliance. Rob Pelinka might not know a lot about basketball, but he did know a lot about being a sports agent! Perhaps he could go back to politicking and taking people out to dinner? So he did. Pelinka went all in on Klutch Sports, the agency run by LeBron James’ close friend Rich Paul. Paul had just botched the chance to sign Kentavious Caldwell-Pope to a 4 year/$80 million contract extension, and found no takers anywhere near that number in free agency. In swooped Pelinka with a contract that monstrously overpaid him. James signed with the Lakers less than a year later.
Blessed with the signing of the most talented basketball player in the world, our hero needed to build a contender around him. But the choice of Luke Walton, a head coach with no head coaching experience didn’t pan out. Pelinka had already included future All-Star D’Angelo Russell in a trade just to get out of Timofey Mozgov’s horrendous contract, and traded promising young center Ivica Zubac to the cross-town rival Clippers for essentially nothing. It has long been a truism that you surround LeBron with shooters, but he didn’t sign any of those. The Lakers were a disaster, and a LeBron James-led team missed the playoffs entirely. People started throwing around words like “incompetent” and “idiot.”
What was our hero to do? Klutch harder! Not satisfied with just KCP and LeBron, the Lakers eventually signed Klutch clients Markieff Morris, Dion Waiters, and J.R. Smith. They even traded a second round pick and sent $2.2 million to the Orlando Magic so they could draft Klutch client Talen Horton-Tucker, a player they had never worked out. As of today, 40% of the Lakers roster is repped by Klutch and fully 25% of the Klutch Sports client roster plays for the Lakers.
And all the agent politics had its reward. When Klutch Sports’ megastar Anthony Davis wanted out of New Orleans, guess where he wanted to go? Sometimes success isn’t about being a jack of all trades, but rather a master of one. Now the Lakers find themselves four wins from an NBA championship, and STL can’t wait to see how our story ends.
AT THE BUZZER
The Athletic’s finals preview: don’t forget about AD (sub required)
The NBA’s space race (we were practicing the Sombor Shuffle in the driveway last week)
Inside the Clippers’ high stakes plan to replace Doc Rivers
Meet Curly, the Curling robot
AT THE BUZZER, JIMMY BUTLER’S WORK ETHIC EDITION
Jimmy Butler starts working out at 5 a.m.
Jimmy Butler isn’t happy with Derrick Rose’s work ethic
Jimmy Butler is deeply impressed by Mark Walhberg’s work ethic
Jimmy Butler isn’t happy with Karl Anthony Towns’ work ethic
Jimmy Butler isn’t happy with Ben Simmons’ work ethic
Now Jimmy Butler starts working out at 3:30 a.m.
Jimmy Butler loves Tyler Herro’s work ethic
Notes
[1] Data from before Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals. We suspect LeBron dedicated his Game 5 4th quarter performance to Henry Abbott.