Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Read Online Free
with financial incentive clauses that were designed for the Rockets not to match, so Philadelphia could sign Malone without providing any compensation to Houston.
The case ultimately ended up in arbitration, where the 76ers were determined to have violated multiple league rules in the structure of their offer sheet, and the Rockets eventually matched the modified version. That then allowed the Rockets to trade Malone to the 76ers in exchange for forward Caldwell Jones and the 1983 first-round pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers, who were expected to be terrible and in contention for the No. 1 overall pick. (As it turns out, the Rockets collapsed without Malone, winning just fourteen games in 1982–83 and winning the coin flip for No. 1 themselves. They selected Ralph Sampson with that pick, and also got Rodney McCray at No. 3 with the pick obtained from the Cavaliers through the 76ers.)
Meanwhile, the 76ers had just acquired the big-time rebounder and defender they needed to add to a terrific core of Julius Erving, Andrew Toney, Bobby Jones, and Maurice Cheeks. From the outset, Philadelphia’s new arrival, even though he was the reigning league MVP, seemed to understand his role.
“I know it’s Doc’s show,” Malone told the Philadelphia Inquirer after the trade, referencing Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s status as the team’smain star, “and I’m happy to be part of Doc’s show. . . . Doc’ll still be the show, but maybe nowit’ll be a better show.”
Indeed, it was. The expected uptick in offensive rebounding thanks to Malone’s arrival helped close the projected offensive efficiency gap between the 76ers andLakers in Guth’s model, and bumped his regular-season forecast for the 76ers up to sixty-six wins. He was pretty much spot on. The 76ers ended up corralling 1,334 offensive rebounds (a top-50 total in NBA history), went 65–17, and rolled to their first world championship in sixteen seasons, going 12–1 in the playoffs and sweeping the Lakers in the Finals.
“The 76ers were not the one [Malone] would contribute the most to,” Guth recalled when asked about the analysis, “but when he came to them, it led to the prediction that they would advance.”
Had this happened maybe twenty years later, Guth would have received more recognition and interest in his work, but he said after the 76ers’ projection panned out, he didn’t hear from any NBA teams about his system. There just wasn’t much interest at the time in computer analysis.
“It was almost a one-shot deal,” Guth said. “We probably did it for a couple of years, then I got heavily involved in the baseball [antitrust] hearings, and also got involved with the PGA Tour.”
Still, Guth thinks back to the days of the Hewlett-Packard mainframe and its findings, many of which turned out to be very prescient, even with the relatively limited amount of information at the time. Seeing what the industry has become today, with billion-dollar franchise values and entire submarkets built around Big Data analysis, he wonders what might have happened had he stuck with it and trusted his innate sense that all things in sports were undervalued in that era.
“If I applied my own analysis,” Guth noted, “I should have built my own consulting firm.”
The principal keeping of basketball statistics, basically since the beginning of the game, has centered around “counting” stats—the numbers observers can compile just by watching the game and adding. It’s easy to track the number of points a team or player scores in a game, or their scoring averages, or how many shot attempts and makes there were. You can easily count rebounds for individual players, and sum them up for each team. You can track assists by whatever definition you create to identify one. Eventually, “steals” and “blocked shots” also became official categories. And all of those stats ended up being compiled into box scores that were printed in newspapers around the nation as
The case ultimately ended up in arbitration, where the 76ers were determined to have violated multiple league rules in the structure of their offer sheet, and the Rockets eventually matched the modified version. That then allowed the Rockets to trade Malone to the 76ers in exchange for forward Caldwell Jones and the 1983 first-round pick of the Cleveland Cavaliers, who were expected to be terrible and in contention for the No. 1 overall pick. (As it turns out, the Rockets collapsed without Malone, winning just fourteen games in 1982–83 and winning the coin flip for No. 1 themselves. They selected Ralph Sampson with that pick, and also got Rodney McCray at No. 3 with the pick obtained from the Cavaliers through the 76ers.)
Meanwhile, the 76ers had just acquired the big-time rebounder and defender they needed to add to a terrific core of Julius Erving, Andrew Toney, Bobby Jones, and Maurice Cheeks. From the outset, Philadelphia’s new arrival, even though he was the reigning league MVP, seemed to understand his role.
“I know it’s Doc’s show,” Malone told the Philadelphia Inquirer after the trade, referencing Julius “Dr. J” Erving’s status as the team’smain star, “and I’m happy to be part of Doc’s show. . . . Doc’ll still be the show, but maybe nowit’ll be a better show.”
Indeed, it was. The expected uptick in offensive rebounding thanks to Malone’s arrival helped close the projected offensive efficiency gap between the 76ers andLakers in Guth’s model, and bumped his regular-season forecast for the 76ers up to sixty-six wins. He was pretty much spot on. The 76ers ended up corralling 1,334 offensive rebounds (a top-50 total in NBA history), went 65–17, and rolled to their first world championship in sixteen seasons, going 12–1 in the playoffs and sweeping the Lakers in the Finals.
“The 76ers were not the one [Malone] would contribute the most to,” Guth recalled when asked about the analysis, “but when he came to them, it led to the prediction that they would advance.”
Had this happened maybe twenty years later, Guth would have received more recognition and interest in his work, but he said after the 76ers’ projection panned out, he didn’t hear from any NBA teams about his system. There just wasn’t much interest at the time in computer analysis.
“It was almost a one-shot deal,” Guth said. “We probably did it for a couple of years, then I got heavily involved in the baseball [antitrust] hearings, and also got involved with the PGA Tour.”
Still, Guth thinks back to the days of the Hewlett-Packard mainframe and its findings, many of which turned out to be very prescient, even with the relatively limited amount of information at the time. Seeing what the industry has become today, with billion-dollar franchise values and entire submarkets built around Big Data analysis, he wonders what might have happened had he stuck with it and trusted his innate sense that all things in sports were undervalued in that era.
“If I applied my own analysis,” Guth noted, “I should have built my own consulting firm.”
The principal keeping of basketball statistics, basically since the beginning of the game, has centered around “counting” stats—the numbers observers can compile just by watching the game and adding. It’s easy to track the number of points a team or player scores in a game, or their scoring averages, or how many shot attempts and makes there were. You can easily count rebounds for individual players, and sum them up for each team. You can track assists by whatever definition you create to identify one. Eventually, “steals” and “blocked shots” also became official categories. And all of those stats ended up being compiled into box scores that were printed in newspapers around the nation as
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