Malcolm Gladwell on NBA GMs and the Knicks
The other day I heard about Malcolm Gladwell's blog for the first time, and I must say that is wonderful. I'm sure that everyone and their grandmother has heard of Gladwell by now: in addition to being one of the most prominent and prolific New Yorker contributors over the last few years, he's also the author of the wildly successful non-fiction books The Tipping Point and Blink. He recently started a blog, hosted at his website and, to my surprise, a good portion of his first posts have been about sports, in particular the NBA. He and the ESPN columnist Bill Simmons have been engaging in a back-and-forth e-mail exchange in which they discuss issues in sports on a fairly high level. Since that's the mission of this blog as well, I was understandably very interested.
One of Gladwell's recent posts, titled "NBA Heuristics", I find particularly interesting. He poses an interesting thought experiment. He imagines himself as an NBA GM who knows nothing about anything and has as his entire drafting, signing, and trading strategy to acquire only players who attended the two best basketball schools, Duke University and University of Connecticut. For those who have read Blink, Gladwell's move here is very familiar -- he suspects that all that we think we know doesn't amount to much, and that a much simpler decision-making criterion could be just as effective. He imagines a scenario in which he plausibly could put together one of the league's best teams (featuring some combination of Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton, Ben Gordon, etc.). Under a player-acquisition strategy that any idiot could have come up with, he posits, a GM could come out looking like a pretty smart person. If NBA GMs would just admit they don't know what they are doing, swallow their pride and adopt simple schemes like Gladwell's Duke/UConn plan, teams like the Knicks would be much better off.
There are certainly logistical holes in Gladwell's argument, but I don't think that's the point -- it's a thought experiment, so we're supposed to think about the deeper issues involved. Living in New York, reading the sports section brings these types of questions to mind every single day. Knicks GM Isiah Thomas makes move after move, all in the name of stockpiling talent and getting younger and stronger, but the team just gets worse and worse. It seems that Thomas tinkers with the team because he feels he has to do something -- if he doesn't, then he won't be working to earn his very lucrative contract. But I agree with Gladwell, especially when discussing the Knicks -- if Thomas came out and said, "Look, I don't know how to run a team, but Duke and UConn seem to know what they are doing, so I'm just going to trust their judgment and acquire only their players," I think the Knicks would definitely get better than they are now. In fact, the Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Bobcats seem to have adopted a variation of this strategy -- in the last few drafts, these two teams have selected only players from championship or near-championship college or international teams (the Bulls with Argentinian Andres Nocioni, UConn's Ben Gordon, Kansas's Kirk Heinrich, and Duke's Luol Deng, and the Bobcats with UConn's Emeka Okafor and the University of North Carolina's Sean May and Raymond Felton).
What I really appreciated about Gladwell's piece was how he demystifies the task of the NBA GM. Here in NY, Isiah Thomas makes it sound like the most difficult, mysterious, and meticulous job in the universe -- it requires superhuman patience, tinkering, wheeling, dealing, and attention. But what if it isn't that difficult at all? If he'd just acquire only Dukies, for instance, the team would be better off, but he wouldn't seem so smart or clever, an image which, of course, he has a vested interest in protecting.
New York Knicks fans, of course, would like to go one step further with Thomas -- that he be barred from making any moves at all! No more trades, no more signings, no more draft picks, since with every piece he adds, the teams gets worse. Perhaps the franchise should just be left to devour itself, shedding its dead weight until they don't have enough players to suit up and take the court. At that point, at least, the physical reality would match the philosophical reality that all thinking fans already know to exist: that the Knicks have ceased to be anything resembling a functioning, viable, and vibrant basketball team.
One of Gladwell's recent posts, titled "NBA Heuristics", I find particularly interesting. He poses an interesting thought experiment. He imagines himself as an NBA GM who knows nothing about anything and has as his entire drafting, signing, and trading strategy to acquire only players who attended the two best basketball schools, Duke University and University of Connecticut. For those who have read Blink, Gladwell's move here is very familiar -- he suspects that all that we think we know doesn't amount to much, and that a much simpler decision-making criterion could be just as effective. He imagines a scenario in which he plausibly could put together one of the league's best teams (featuring some combination of Elton Brand, Shane Battier, Ray Allen, Richard Hamilton, Ben Gordon, etc.). Under a player-acquisition strategy that any idiot could have come up with, he posits, a GM could come out looking like a pretty smart person. If NBA GMs would just admit they don't know what they are doing, swallow their pride and adopt simple schemes like Gladwell's Duke/UConn plan, teams like the Knicks would be much better off.
There are certainly logistical holes in Gladwell's argument, but I don't think that's the point -- it's a thought experiment, so we're supposed to think about the deeper issues involved. Living in New York, reading the sports section brings these types of questions to mind every single day. Knicks GM Isiah Thomas makes move after move, all in the name of stockpiling talent and getting younger and stronger, but the team just gets worse and worse. It seems that Thomas tinkers with the team because he feels he has to do something -- if he doesn't, then he won't be working to earn his very lucrative contract. But I agree with Gladwell, especially when discussing the Knicks -- if Thomas came out and said, "Look, I don't know how to run a team, but Duke and UConn seem to know what they are doing, so I'm just going to trust their judgment and acquire only their players," I think the Knicks would definitely get better than they are now. In fact, the Chicago Bulls and the Charlotte Bobcats seem to have adopted a variation of this strategy -- in the last few drafts, these two teams have selected only players from championship or near-championship college or international teams (the Bulls with Argentinian Andres Nocioni, UConn's Ben Gordon, Kansas's Kirk Heinrich, and Duke's Luol Deng, and the Bobcats with UConn's Emeka Okafor and the University of North Carolina's Sean May and Raymond Felton).
What I really appreciated about Gladwell's piece was how he demystifies the task of the NBA GM. Here in NY, Isiah Thomas makes it sound like the most difficult, mysterious, and meticulous job in the universe -- it requires superhuman patience, tinkering, wheeling, dealing, and attention. But what if it isn't that difficult at all? If he'd just acquire only Dukies, for instance, the team would be better off, but he wouldn't seem so smart or clever, an image which, of course, he has a vested interest in protecting.
New York Knicks fans, of course, would like to go one step further with Thomas -- that he be barred from making any moves at all! No more trades, no more signings, no more draft picks, since with every piece he adds, the teams gets worse. Perhaps the franchise should just be left to devour itself, shedding its dead weight until they don't have enough players to suit up and take the court. At that point, at least, the physical reality would match the philosophical reality that all thinking fans already know to exist: that the Knicks have ceased to be anything resembling a functioning, viable, and vibrant basketball team.
posted by Nicholas Taylor at
2:52 PM
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