I thought it might be interesting to create a thread about behavior that is in the best interest of the individual, but isn't necessarily in the interest of winning basketball. I wrote this up for an NBA sub-reddit, but since it had a lot of content related to the Blazers I thought it might be worth discussing here. Players: 1. Take the last shot of the quarter juuuuuust after the buzzer goes. Won't get yelled at by the coach, and the almost certain miss won't hurt your precious three point percentage (even more precious in the modern NBA). 2. Don't take the charge. This happened just the other night. Those two Nuggets had absolutely no intention of getting in LeBron's way, because that shit hurts. You see all these super speedy 6' to 6'4 guys out there. You think they aren't quick enough to get between Giannis and the rim? Uh, no. Guys can get in the lane and stop a drive, but frankly it's just not something that's likely to get you paid on your next contract. But there's a small chance it might get you a career-defining injury. 3. Go through the motions on defense. They say defense wins championships. But offense gets paid. If you want to maximize your salary in the NBA and all else is equal, practice three pointers. You know why the hard working defender is called a "lunch pail guy?" It's because he can't afford to eat out. Coaches: 1. Ahead by 3 on the final shot, don't foul. Sometimes it makes sense to let them shoot, but often it doesn't. But when a coach elects not to foul announcers always say "he's going to trust his defense", which means the coach is making it the players' problem. The coach is almost never crucified after the game for not fouling. If they lose in such an event, the storyline is always about the other team's heroics and not your team's coaching ineptitude. 2. Playing veterans over youngsters. By the time a kid has really matured, you're already out of the job. Why develop a young prospect just for somebody else to coach? Go with the guy who has the proven track record. GM's 1. Avoid trade inside your conference or division. This is always brought up as a reason why a trade "will never happen." But nobody ever asks "Why?" The primary reason IMO is that the GM doesn't want his ownership to be forced to confront a glaring trade mistake he made 3 or 4 times during the season. People will remember bad trades in the abstract, but if the guy you traded goes off on you twice in the last month, well fuck that's just a really bad look. 2. Draft the guy who isn't Best Player Available. BPA is one of the biggest cliches in the NBA and for good reason. And teams often do. But not always, and I feel like it's often intentional. If you draft a project shooting guard who is going to take 3 years to develop, you again may be out of a job by then. There's a built-in incentive to just plug an existing gap. Besides, if you do draft BPA, you are exposing yourself to judgment twice--who you drafted, and who you traded away to make the BPA fit. 3. Don't innovate. It's pretty amazing to see how long it took the league to value three point shooting. A typical GM gets judged on a small handful of decisions. It takes some serious balls to do what Morey or Hinkey did. Most GM's just kind of play it safe with fairly conservative strategies. It's a copycat league because you are copying guys who are keeping their jobs by copying other guys who are keeping their jobs. 4. Don't trade a Star Player. I've watched Portland hold onto CJ McCollum for 8 seasons now, despite everyone seeing plain as day you can't win it all with the defensive sieve that is our back court. Yet here we are. I think the problem is loss aversion. Portland values the bird in hand and isn't too critical of its GM for his inactivity. We get some nice regular season wins and Dame is happy and we even sometimes win a playoff series or two. That's a pretty cushy deal for our GM. But the moment he trades CJ it will be the career-defining trade for Olshey. If you fuck this up you are done. And let's face it, if you trade him to the Eastern Conference (see GM #1), there's a pretty good chance CJ is an All-Star, and suddenly you're the guy who "Traded All Star CJ McCollum for this Nobody." Fuck that. Let's kick the tires on Mario Hezonja. I won't get fired for tinkering at the edges. 5. Don't trade youngsters. "We can't trade Rudy Fernandez/ Sergio Rodriguez/ Travis Outlaw/ Martel Webster/ Zach Collins/ Meyers Leonard! He could be the next Jermaine O'Neil!" Portland has been dying on the hill of "promising youngsters who are clearly untradeable" since at least 2000. In that time, in hindsight every single one of them except Dame was actually very, very, veeeeeeryy tradeable. Even Brandon Roy we could have sold early on and netted so much more than we got out of him. (I realize this is heresy. But it's true.) Nobody ever holds GM's feet to the fire on this because by the time Greg Oden is clearly a bust, the fans and franchise and everyone has moved on to the next shiny toy. But at one point the Spurs said Tim Duncan was on the table if we wanted to give up Oden. Our GM didn't. I've never heard anybody ever criticize him for that non-move, but imagine where our franchise would've been if he'd dared to do it. Instead, we made absolutely, positively sure that he wasn't going to be the next Jermaine O'Neil. Those are the ones I always think about. Did I miss some?
Different, but related: There's also long term gain vs. short term gain... load management dunking less driving less
"I was really happy for Nassir. It's good that he had that nice game knowing that he won't get more than 5 minutes in another game this season"
Yeah, there definitely are different priorities depending on where you are. I don't know that I expect any NBA player to take a charge from LeBron coming full steam down the court in mid-February. That's minimal short-term gain with lots of potential long-term pain. And not everybody is wired like Westbrook. That guy is all out all the time. That's just not a normal human behavior.
This is a good list and I think it can all (maybe aside from working on offense, not defense) be summed up under a specific category: risk aversion. Human nature is such that you are rarely going to be crucified for a risk not taken (even if it was the right move, when considering risk and reward) but you are very likely to be crucified for a risk taken that fails to pan out (again, even if it was the right move, process-wise, before knowing the outcome). That creates a perverse incentive for groupthink--if you do what everyone agrees is the safe thing, or the right thing, it insulates you from criticism even if you and your team would have been better off taking a risk. Often "the book" or "conventional thinking" is wrong, either in general or in specific situations. But players, coaches and GMs are not rewarded (by and large) for thinking that way unless they're so good that they almost always win their bets.
That groupthink is rampant on s2: /start "Hey, I'd go with drafting the high risk, high reward player X" "You picked player X, you could have had player Y, who's a borderline all-star." "Olshey is an idiot, he passed on player Y" me: "You didn't mention the 15 other GMs who passed on player Y" "Shut up!" /return to start
I struggle with the BPA gripe, because of just how subjective it is. And what is best, exactly? Best right now? Best potential/upside? Everyone is going to interpret it different. So you go BPA, say, and you have Cleveland drafting Garland right after Sexton, and then they get shit on for having 2 6'1 guys in the backcourt. People on here shit on Olshey's infatuation with small guards, but then come draft time, suggest a shit load of small guards. A lot of the GM gripes are stuff easily judged in hindsight.
I don't think BPA is always a clear standard we can use to judge GMs. It's more of a philosophy that I hope (but can't know) that the GM of my team is employing. I think you always want to be optimizing your draft picks (which come in fixed positions) for maximum talent and then use tools that can be calibrated (like free agency, where you can spend more or less, or trades, where you can add more or less to your end or their end of the package) to sort out composition. Of course, you can also trade up and down in the draft and if a GM does that to get the player they think fills a specific need at the right point in the draft for the player's value, I have no problem with that. I guess I just never want to hear a GM say something like, "You could say so-and-so has more talent, but he doesn't fill a role on our team that we needed." I think that's a bad way to manage a draft. But aside from very specific smoking gun quotes like that, I'd agree that you can't just look at who got selected and infer the GM's philosophy.
One reason BPA is not a clear standard is that many ignore Tiered drafting, which is what Neil does, and appropriately so.
Tiered drafting is completely rational when players are clumped. In the NFL, outside of maybe the top-5, I think tiered drafting is pretty much a necessity. Probably in baseball, too, though I've never been much of a baseball draft aficionado. Basketball drafts involve a lot fewer players, so is less prone to clumping, but I think at least outside the top-ten, there's still going to be enough clumping that you can viably say "Need breaks the tie between similarly talented players."
