What's Wrong with Sports Today

Not enough Bill Russells…

So Bill Russell died and now all sorts of people who didn’t know him or ever meet him are going to offer opinions about him and his legacy and it looks like I’m on that list.

And we’ll start, as we often do, with a seemingly-irrelevant story about baseball.

Once I proved I was sincere about learning the game, a former-Big League Player and current friend gave me a book written by a college coach and it made an important point and here it is:

Some of the first people to pay attention to baseball analytics were people who played fantasy baseball and found analytics helpful when it came to drafting players for their imaginary teams which led to the mistaken belief that what worked in fantasy baseball would also work in real baseball and the key to winning championships was putting together a collection of individuals with great numbers.

But as the college coach’s book pointed out:

You win in fantasy baseball through individual effort; you win in real baseball with team effort.

In fantasy baseball you never want one of your players giving away an at-bat by bunting or moving a runner over with a grounder to the right side because you don’t care if his team won, you care about the player’s personal numbers.

And that attitude has leaked over into real baseball and if individual effort is what baseball is going to reward, that’s how players will play the game; they’ll be selfish and try to pad their stats and one guy who occasionally played first base (and I’m not making this up even though I wish I was) wanted to know if tagging first base after he fielded a grounder was a good idea or should he wait for the pitcher to arrive so he could flip the ball to him and get an assist and he was willing to do whichever one would help his fielding percentage the most.

And now back to Bill Russell.

He once said the best measurement of how he played was how much better he made his teammates.

Quick quiz:

Would you rather have a basketball player who averaged 15.1 points per game or a basketball player who averages 24.9 points per game and before you answer you should know the first guy is Bill Russell with 11 championship rings and the second guy is James Harden who has none and maybe that’s because Harden can’t be bothered to play defense and often leaves his teammates playing four-on-five and if you’ve never seen it, here’s 11 minutes and 31 seconds of Harding losing his man or being too lazy to move his feet or just generally not giving a shit:

And why should Harden care about playing defense when he’s a 10 time All-Star and (according to Basketball Reference) has made $271,996,502 based on his offense?

You might also notice Russell played for one team and Harden has played for four and that sometimes happens when a team thinks they’ll get a guy and fix his problems and then it turns out they can’t fix his problem because he’s got a horseshit attitude and doesn’t want to be fixed so they want him out of their clubhouse and some other team makes the same mistake and trades for him.

True story:

A Big League team (not the Royals) acquired a pitcher and the pitching coach put together a presentation about what they could do to make the pitcher even better and after the presentation the pitcher said:

“I make a lot of money now.”

Your teammates can make you better or worse

Some analytics advocates believe everything worth knowing about a player will eventually show up in the player’s numbers and let me add to that by saying some analytics advocates don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

More than one ballplayer told me that if the numbers guys didn’t know how to measure something they decided it didn’t actually exist or wasn’t worth knowing.

And one of the many things that are hard to measure is how teammates affect each other.

A veteran centerfielder helps his rookie right fielder with pitch-by-pitch positioning; that centerfielder is making the rookie better and if you trade that centerfielder and replace him with a centerfielder who doesn’t want to help anybody because he feels threatened by someone else playing well, your right fielder just got worse.

I once listened to some reporters from Los Angeles talk about Angels outfielders Vernon Wells and Peter Bourjos and because Bourjos was faster than the guy who used to play next to Wells, Bourjos would get to more balls and that also  meant Wells would get to fewer balls and then some genius would look at “Range Factor” (a metric that divides putouts and assists by the number of innings or games played) and because he was making fewer plays, conclude that Wells had lost a step even though the only thing that changed was Wells’ teammate.

Also…

I once heard a story about a backup player who was partying with a couple rookies almost every night and it didn’t matter if the backup player came in hungover (most nights he wasn’t going to start) but the rookies were, so the team had to get rid of bench guy who was making his teammates worse.

The ESPN documentary “The Captain” about Derek Jeter included a story about pitcher David Wells throwing up his hands in frustration after a defensive play was not made behind him which is how pitchers let fans know it’s not their fault, so blame the fielder and apparently Jeter got into his ass and told Wells the Yankees didn’t show up their teammates and he needed to knock that shit off.

Your teammates can make you better or make you worse and it doesn’t always show up in the numbers.

There is a theory that the only kind of real leadership is leadership by example because everything else is somebody telling you to do something he doesn’t have to do and star players who sacrifice and work hard are worth their weight in PEDs because the coach can say:

“Hey, if Bill Russell can pass the ball and get back on defense, so can you.”

You need players who say they want to win and actually mean it

Former NBA head coach and current NBA announcer Jeff Van Gundy (who always looks like he just finished a Hard Day’s Night) once said you need a team full of players who want to win and actually mean it. Van Gundy said players have all learned to say the right things about winning to the media, but then refuse to do what’s necessary to make it happen.

And he sounded kinda bitter when he said it.

Probably because Van Gundy had some players who said they wanted to win, but then didn’t want to pass the ball or set screens for somebody else or get their ass back on defense and work hard once they got back. 

In my opinion – which isn’t all that humble so let’s not pretend – too many teams and players are focused on individual achievement and we’ve all seen teams go out and get a bunch of star players and assume that’s the path to success, but then three guys think they ought to be hitting third or taking the last-second shot and at least two of them are pissed off and resent their teammates and the coach, manager or front office who isn’t giving them what they want and in my experience people usually aren’t willing to be unhappy and silent so they talk shit about the team and convince other players they’re getting screwed too and then everybody is being selfish and nobody is willing to sacrifice anything to help the team win.

Compare that to Bill Russell:

Some people think he’s the greatest basketball player ever because he won 11 championships which is supposedly why you play the game (not scoring titles) and you look up who won the second-most championships and you see Sam Jones (10) John Havlicek (8) Tom Sanders (8) K.C. Jones (8) and Tom Heinsohn (8) and guess who they all played with.

Bill Russell thought the best measurement of how he played was how much better he made his teammates and all those teammates are in the Hall of Fame so the record suggests Bill Russell made his teammates pretty damn great.  

For comparison’s sake: James Harden has more points-per-game than all of them and hasn’t won shit.  

And that’s what’s wrong with sports today.