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Very interesting excerpt from last week's SI
Excerpt, not the whole article from last week's SI (cover featuring Colin K)
The Numbers
Head up Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, wind your way along the canyon roads, and you'll eventually come to the home of Haralabos Voulgaris. Nestled in the Hollywood Hills, his neighborhood is the kind where every mansion has a Range Rover in front and a grandiose water feature in the back. It's the L.A. people who have never been to L.A. imagine.
Voulgaris is many things (the son of a Canadian businessman and gambler, a tournament poker player with more than $1 million in lifetime winnings, a former consultant to an NBA team), but he is foremost an NBA gambler—and a very successful one. His first big bet came in 1999 when, as a philosophy major at Manitoba University, he saved up $80,000 working as a skycap. He bet on the Lakers to win the title before the season, and when L.A. started the season slowly after acquiring Shaquille O'Neal, the bookmakers downgraded the team's odds.
Voulgaris deemed it a rash overreaction. He laid down the rest of his $80K. When the Lakers won the following spring, he had his bankroll.
These days Voulgaris, who is 37, wiry and handsome in a coolest-guy-at-the-Apple-Genius-Bar way, relies less on intuition and more on data. Over the past five years, with the help of a staff of five, he has created and honed a vast statistical database that uses information from the last 12 NBA seasons to determine the value of every player in the league. The system is not reactive, like most player rankings, but predictive. Voulgaris's goal, after all, is purely financial: to beat the betting line. (He says NBA teams have tried to buy the system from him.) To inform his bets, he spends seven nights a week watching every NBA game, looking for tendencies and anomalies. On the subject of Carmelo Anthony, he may be as close to an objective arbiter as one can find.
I visited Voulgaris on a recent January evening at his gated home, where he lives with his Jack Russell terrier, Coltrane. We sat in the living room facing two media towers, each of which held three flat-screen TVs. A seventh, larger flat screen was in the middle. The Knicks were playing the Spurs, and Voulgaris, though wary of too much publicity—he was recently featured in Nate Silver's book The Signal and the Noise—had agreed to discuss Anthony, whom he finds fascinating.
As it turns out, Voulgaris is a big fan of Carmelo's, though not for the reason you might think. "We've made more money on the Knicks this season than on any other team," he explains. (Voulgaris asked me not to print any figures, but based on the results he showed me, I can confirm that it is indeed a large sum of money.) You see, when Anthony doesn't play, Voulgaris bets big.
On the Knicks.
"We make money because people think he's worth more than he is," explains Voulgaris, who won especially big when New York beat Miami on Dec. 6, a game in which he bet on New York to win straight up, at 7--1 odds. "It's not that we think he's bad; it's that the market thinks he's better than he actually is."
To prove his point, Voulgaris pulls up a spreadsheet on one of his MacBooks. In his system a rating of --3 points per 48 minutes equals a replacement NBA player. A rating of zero is average. The best players, such as LeBron James and Dirk Nowitzki, rate +6 to +9.
"We don't really have [Anthony] as valuable at all," Voulgaris says, scrolling down. "We've had him in the past as high as +4 per 48 minutes and as low as --1." This season, Voulgaris says, "we've had him as zero most of the time. Both Chandler and Kidd have been more valuable. [Anthony's] offensive numbers have improved as the year has progressed. He's gone from average to above average pretty quickly, which is a function of how they're using him. What hasn't changed is he's been a very consistently poor defensive player. Basketball is two sides of the game." Voulgaris pauses. "Everyone's going to think I'm a crackpot, but...."
What fascinates Voulgaris is that Anthony, unlike a player such as Thunder guard Kevin Martin—consistently the worst defender in his system—has the ability to defend. "In 2009, when Denver went to the conference finals, he was a lot better by our numbers. He's been a horrific defender in his career, as bad as --4 over 48 minutes. But in 2009 he was a neutral defender. He wasn't hurting you or helping you."
Of course numbers are only what you read into them, and there are plenty when it comes to Carmelo. Synergy Sports, which tracks every play in the league, rates him as good to excellent in almost every facet of offense. Go to basketball-reference.com, and you'll find a different perspective. Scan down to his similarity score, a comparison with historical players based on a stat called Win Shares, and these are some of the names that come up as similar: Sam Perkins, John Drew, Shareef Abdur-Rahim. There is not an MVP among them.
SO WHICH is it? Is Anthony an elite player or merely the highest-paid, most productive role player in the league? Have the Knicks been successful this season because Anthony has made sacrifices or because the team has accommodated him, the way Larry Brown and the 76ers once built an entire roster to complement Allen Iverson's strengths and rode it to the Finals?
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Originally Posted by mcduggly
