Kobe Theory: Adventures in Distorted Probability

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We saw some fantastic, hard-hitting articles this week about Kobe Bryant‘s clutch reputation. I’ll go over them briefly, and then just talk about what people’s perceptions say about people in general, and running a basketball team specifically.

Henry Abbott at ESPN’s TrueHoop does a great job of just summarizing the fact that despite Kobe‘s reputation as the ultimate clutch performer, all the evidence says this is not the case.

Kelly Dwyer at Yahoo’s Ball Don’t Lie shows some moxie in making clear that he’s quite comfortable saying that if NBA GM’s don’t see the problem with Kobe’s stats, then the GM’s are in the wrong.

Zach Lowe at SI’s The Point Forward chimes in, but also emphasizes the larger trend that NBA offenses in general do terrible in the clutch. Scoring at far lower rates than they do in the rest of the game.

All very cool stuff. Here’s the most telling fact as I see it: People who reject the numbers here do it by dismissing statistics as not being as valid as what they see, which is an argument that often has merit, but is not valid at all here. So, Why isn’t it valid? and Why are people like this?

Statistics have limitations, but this is a straight forward question

Relying on statistics causes problems when the statistics themselves don’t sufficiently describe the the situation they are being used to analyze. For example, using a player’s assist totals to say definitively how good of a passer he is, is flawed because much team context has a major impact on a player’s ability to get assists, and there’s more to passing than making the passes that get credit for the assist. So using assists as part of the evaluation process is fine, but you’ve got to go beyond that stat, or really any stat to get a complete picture.

However, when people talk about Kobe being clutch, they always focused on some simple attributes that are easily translated into a statistic. A complete description of what clutch is might be difficult to put in statistical form, but evaluating these people’s basis for calling a player clutch is not. Kobe’s clutch, they say, because he makes the tough shots when it matters. So all we need to do to evaluate their basis, is actually get data of how Kobe’s shooting efficiency is when the game is on the line. This has been done by a variety of people, and the conclusion is always that Kobe doesn’t show any major ability to shoot clutch shots with unusual efficiency.

That doesn’t mean that Kobe is not clutch, but it does mean that people are concluding Kobe’s clutch based on some kind of flawed thinking. So what’s the problem? Well, there’s more than one. For one, people reject the statistical refutation of their thinking based on flawed arguments, this happens because people don’t understand stats, they feel ridiculously overconfident in their own judgment, and they’re too stubborn to look objectively at a clearly superior argument.

Human Beings have limitations, and that causes a distorted sense of probability

The root problem though is that human beings aren’t good at working with gradually accumulated large numbers without technological aids of some sort. People thus have a distorted sense of the probability that Kobe’s going to make that tough shot, because they don’t accurately remember how often he’s made similar shots in the past, compared to how often he’s missed similar shots.

And this is also why it absolutely makes sense for someone like Dwyer to say, “No, I don’t care if someone else is a millionaire because of his basketball knowledge, he’s wrong”. Because the flaw here is not one that is basketball-based at all. It’s just a human problem, and so we should expect that anyone analyzing the situation without the use technological tools is going to have problems with this. When NBA GM’s join the general chorus and exult Kobe his clutch abilities then, if they are being honest, they are unwittingly telling us that they have not properly used the tools that all humans need in order to properly analyze the situation.

Chamberlain Theory + Kobe Theory = Everybody’s Wrong Sometimes

Recently, I wrote an article describing what I called Chamberlain Theory.  Here’s how I put it:

There is more to judging the effectiveness of a scorer, or a player in general, than simply his most obvious related statistics, and pursuit of those obvious statistics without proper awareness for the rest of the court can erase most if not all of a scorer’s positive impact, even when those obvious statistics are as great as any in all of history.

So here’s a counterpart to that I’ll call Kobe Theory: Ability in sports is typically based not on the ability to successfully complete an action once, but on the ability to successfully complete actions consistently and reliably. Because human beings are not good when analyzing consistency and reliability, it is not possible for anyone, even the greatest of experts, to make precise judgments about such things without the use of tools. So everyone should be using such tools, and if they do not, or do not use them properly, then there will be flaws in the strategies that they prescribe. Thus if the decision makers on a team don’t use such tools, and use them properly, there will be related flaws in how their team plays.

In other words, the combined takeaway of Chamberlain Theory and Kobe Theory: Whether you’re a jock or a nerd, if you aren’t actively and objectively making use of every perspective and every piece of data, you’re conclusions will often be flawed.

Related Articles

• Kobe Theory and the Drowned Plant (asubstituteforwar.wordpress.com)
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