Pod Insights Unexplainable How good was Michael Jordan, really? About this episode It's easy to assume there is objective truth in basketball stats. A clear story of what happened in the past. But our friends at Pablo Torre Finds Out uncovered something that throws an entire era into question.
Guest: Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out
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Transcript 7,859 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:21 Noam Hassenfeld? One of the things that always blows my mind, no matter how many times I think about it, is that I've never really touched anything.
1:32 Noam Hassenfeld? Like, I can feel my chair. It feels solid. I'm sitting on it right now. But no part of me is actually touching it. I'm just feeling the electromagnetic force between my atoms and the ones in the chair. I'm kind of hovering. We're all hovering, all the time. This kind of thing tends to happen a lot. The closer you look, things get sort of wiggly. Even simple questions, things I've taken for granted my whole life. Like this great one I came across recently. Exactly how good was Michael Jordan? You know, the basketball GOAT? How good was he at actually playing basketball?
2:20 Noam Hassenfeld? So the way any normal basketball fan would try to answer this question is by going to the stats, right? You'd look up any given game, you'll see how many points he had, how many blocks, how many assists. But then you start asking yourself, how do they know how many he had? Well, the answer is that an official in the stadium entered those things into a database. And like, okay, points are easy. You know, you put in one point for a free throw, two points for a layup, three points for a three-pointer. Simple. But everything else, blocks, assists, they're kind of judgment calls. Those numbers that get etched into basketball history as records, that fans end up viewing as somewhere
3:04 Noam Hassenfeld? between objective truth and almost scripture. A lot of those numbers are just something we assume happened. Like, my butt assumes it's touching my chair.
3:17 Noam Hassenfeld? I started thinking about this after I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Pablo Torre Finds Out, where they pulled on this thread of NBA stats, and they sort of ended up unraveling the whole sweater. So we wanted to share it with you. As they say in the episode, in a very unexplainable way, the deeper we go in NBA history, it feels like the more we don't know. Okay, here's Pablo.
3:49 Speaker 03 Tom Haverstrum, it is a pleasure to have you in the flesh at this desk with revelations to present to me.
3:56 Noam Hassenfeld? Happy to be here, Pablo.
3:58 Speaker 03 You being a protagonist of this story matters, because this story begins really in my, in my life, at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which we just call Sloan.
4:10 Noam Hassenfeld? Yeah.
4:11 Speaker 03 As if people know what that is typically.
4:13 Noam Hassenfeld? It's very embarrassing when you're at like a cocktail party, or you're at an event, and you're just like, yeah, I'm going to Sloan next weekend. Or I just got back from Sloan, and people are like, what are you talking about?
4:23 Speaker 03 Right. In our defense, Sloan became a thing that got mentioned in season nine of The Office.
4:28 Speaker 01 Hey, so Wade wants to send people to the Sloan Conference? We got to compile a list of our target clients.
4:34 Speaker 03 Already on it. But in reality, what this is, is a giant nerd fest.
4:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
4:41 Speaker 03 Where the celebrities there in the VIP room, which is very well guarded, by the way. Those celebrities include people like you. Because, because we'll get to the, the big names in sports, but like you made your career on numbers, right? Like, forgive me for simplifying your life, but I have always considered you like basketball analytics expert, Tom Haberstro.
5:04 Speaker 04 I grew up loving basketball, playing basketball, baseball, football, and just loving the math side of the game. And then kind of broke into ESPN being a stats researcher. The biggest break I could ever imagine is at 25 years old, I'm going down to Miami to cover LeBron James, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh in 2010, at a time when their analytics wasn't a word.
5:28 Speaker 03 So you were like putting these historical performances into statistical context as a, as a matter of the beat that you were on.
5:36 Speaker 04 Right, like when Skip Bayless is saying, oh, LeBron doesn't have a clutch gene. I actually go into the data and I say like, actually, here's what the data says. He's much more efficient than Dwyane Wade and Kobe Bryant and Ray Allen. And I was covering the, the team, the biggest team in sports, with an analytical lens, using statistics to tell stories.
5:55 Speaker 03 Right, and so when we go to Sloan, which is a thing that started at an MIT lecture hall, by the way, right? That has since bloomed, mutated into something that takes over like the largest convention centers in Boston, as it will this Friday, actually. What we're doing is going to a place where you, Tom Haberstro, are something of a celebrity. And both of us have, you know, moderated panels at Sloan, which is what a brag.
6:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:22 Speaker 03 This is the panel I'm moderating because, as Charles Barkley put it, I couldn't get girls in high school. So thank you.
6:29 Speaker 04 Welcome to Basketball 100 Panel. We're supposed to look into the future and tell everybody what it's gonna look like in 25 years. So, good luck with that.
6:37 Speaker 03 At a certain point, to be a kid in America who loves sports went from, "I wanna be an athlete", to "I wanna be a general manager", and this is like the power center where that stuff actually seems possible because you see the people who count as like heroes and idols to, uh, yeah, to sports nerds.
6:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, there's, Daryl Morey is the head of Dorkapalooza, which I think Bill Simmons coined, is that he is
7:04 Speaker 03 Dork Elvis.
7:05 Speaker 04 Dork Elvis of Dorkapalooza, which is the Sloan Conference. I'm not so sure how Daryl feels about that nickname.
7:11 Speaker 03 It fits.
7:11 Speaker 04 But he is the, the face of it.
7:13 Speaker 03 The guy who claimed famously that empirically speaking, James Harden is a better scorer than Michael [bleep] Jordan.
7:21 Speaker 05 If you look to date at the time, once he had the ball in his hands, and it's still true to this day, and I get a lot of [bleep] because, you know, someone asked me who's a better scorer, him or Michael Jordan, and, and it's just factual that James Harden is a better scorer than Michael Jordan now.
7:34 Speaker 03 Based on the math.
7:35 Speaker 05 Based on literally, like, you give, you give James Harden the ball, and before you're giving up the ball, how many points do you generate? Which is how you should measure offense. Uh, James Harden is by far number one.
7:46 Speaker 03 So, obviously, he's now running the Sixers.
7:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, running the Sixers. And then there's Alex Rucker, who is a stats nerd, who rose in the, the front office of the Toronto Raptors, who figured out like SportView data and camera tracking, and how to arrange the defensive players optimally, and rose to become the executive VP of basketball operations for an NBA team.
8:08 Speaker 06 Now, I, I used to kind of oversee analytics and the research and development, the, the data scientists, the computer geeks, if you will. Uh, and so now I oversee all the departments within basketball operations.
8:20 Speaker 03 And then, of course, like, there's, I mean, Mr. Moneyball himself.
8:23 Speaker 04 My god. And he's at Sloan.
8:26 Speaker 03 Yes, Billy Bean himself shows up.
8:28 Speaker 07 The game is really smart. In fact, I would say that baseball's become one of the most intelligent industries in the world, in my opinion. Uh, and you see it now with the use of analytics. The, the, the people running baseball teams are much different than when I started. And I think it's a compliment to the intelligence of the game.
8:43 Speaker 03 And so this conference now, as it's gotten more and more expensive and more exclusive and hard to get into, it's very clearly part business school, part Silicon Valley, big tech, and also, if we're being just very honest about ourselves and each other, it's also part, you know, internet forum come to life.
9:01 Speaker 04 Yes, internet forum come to life. The reason why we're sitting here today, Pablo, is because of an internet forum back in 2009. It all starts here, in the APBR Metrics Forum.
9:13 Speaker 03 Which I did not know about until you called me up. Like deeply excited to explain what this is.
9:18 Speaker 04 This is a meeting of the minds. It is the NBA Reddit before NBA Reddit existed. So I used to be in this forum all the time. Every day I would check in to kind of like see what's gonna be happening in the future. Like it was a glimpse into this is where the industry is going.
9:32 Speaker 03 Yes.
9:32 Speaker 04 This is how to optimize the game. What's the most efficient way to score a basketball? Here's a study.
9:39 Speaker 03 Before Sloan, you guys were doing this on this message board.
9:44 Speaker 04 And then one night, Tuesday, July 14th, 2009, someone posted the headline, "Scorekeeper's Story With A Bomb." The revelation in this, that a poster had heard from a friend, tell him a story about his experience as a stat keeper in the NBA. He's a stat keeper from 1997, the Vancouver Grizzlies, okay? This is peak Jordan era. I'm 11 years old. I'm reading this forum, and this scorekeeper is saying, he was cooking the books for the Vancouver Grizzlies. "I remember vividly, Pablo, sitting at my island kitchen table, watching SportsCenter and
10:28 Speaker 04 Nick the Quick, Nick Van Exel."
10:31 Speaker 03 Yes, in the Laker game where he has like a zillion assists.
10:34 Speaker 04 23 assists. And this guy, this is what he said, "Because I'm a Laker fan, I gave Nick Van Exel like 23 assists one game. If he was vaguely close to a guy making a shot, I found a way to give him an assist."
10:50 Speaker 03 So immediately, I want to just start fact checking this, right? So when you look at this game, when you go back into the archive, Tom, and you go and see this game now with fresh eyes, what does it actually look like?
11:03 Speaker 04 If you watch the film, the very first assist that Nick Van Exel has, it's not even on the screen. So the Vancouver Grizzlies just make a shot. Sharif Abdurrahim, the star young player, makes a shot. Eldon Campbell takes the ball out and passes it to Nick Van Exel ostensibly. But we don't actually see it on film because we cut away to Sharif Abdurrahim. And then suddenly on the left side of the court, Eddie Jones is dribbling up and takes five dribbles on the left side and then pulls up for a pump fake three pointer. Way after the fact of maybe there was a Nick Van Exel phantom pass. We don't see it. It's not on the tape. When you look at the box score, I couldn't believe it, but the timestamp of that play is reflected in the box score and it says Van Exel assists.
11:46 Speaker 03 That feels like an assist by neither the letter or the spirit of the law.
11:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah. And so there were 23 of these. Now, to be fair, there were legit assists here in this game. The idea isn't that he didn't have a good game, Nick Van Exel. It's that it wasn't a 15 assist game. It was a 23 assist game. And the key is, you're more interested in 23 assists.
12:11 Speaker 03 That's the only reason I remember it.
12:13 Speaker 04 So I remember this moment and now I'm learning it's all a lie.
12:19 Speaker 03 So I should say, maybe this is obvious. This is an enormous problem for the integrity of like the NBA itself. And so where does the story go from here?
12:30 Speaker 04 It doesn't get contained in that internet forum. Tommy Craggs at Deadspin picks it up. This is Deadspin. We're talking here at the peak of its powers. Craggs gets on the phone and talks to the stat keeper. But all I can think about is who is this guy? And in the story, all we know is his name is Alex and he works in the Navy. And we also know that he worked for the Vancouver Grizzlies in the late 90s.
12:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, what I'm laughing at already is just the idea that this is your message board, Tom. You're a poster on this nerd forum. And here's a guy who is basically taunting you. Guy who worships numbers saying, by the way,
13:11 Speaker 03 Turns out you can't actually trust the thing that you wanted to make your career around.
13:15 Speaker 04 Yeah, and so like, part of me is just like, I need to know if this person's real. There's a mystery figure here.
13:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
13:20 Speaker 04 And for 13 years, this story was dead until the Jaren Jackson Jr. story happens.
13:26 Speaker 03 Right, so, okay, so this Jaren Jackson alleged conspiracy on Reddit, another internet forum story, ends up being debunked, but it rekindles in your brain the actual conspiracy that you believe to be a lot deeper than people may, on the surface, realize.
13:45 Speaker 04 Right, and so it dawns on me, like, I need to go to the internet to find my answer of who Alex is, but I'm going about it the wrong way. I'm going about it on Google. I should have been going to eBay.
14:03 Speaker 03 So when you called me saying that you went to eBay and you found something, I was personally a little worried for your sanity.
14:11 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, but you know what is on eBay? A lot of old documents.
14:18 Speaker 04 One of which is what's called a media guide.
14:22 Speaker 03 For the kids who don't appreciate the institution of the media guide, back in our day, they used to print directories and send them out to media members.
14:31 Speaker 04 Yeah, like, hey, uh, what are the statistics from last year? There's no basketball reference. You need to open up the media guide.
14:38 Speaker 03 A physical book.
14:39 Speaker 04 A book to look at, oh, this person was the 13th pick in the 1992 draft.
14:45 Speaker 03 Yeah, here's the phone number for the assistant PR person.
14:49 Speaker 04 That is where I needed to go. I needed to find, Pablo, the 1996, 97 Vancouver Grizzlies media guide.
14:59 Speaker 03 How in demand was this lost artifact? What if literally no one but you, Tom Haberstro, even gives the beginning of a shit about this?
15:11 Speaker 04 There is one person who is not only giving a shit, but willing to sell that shit to anybody who wanted it for $5.
15:23 Speaker 03 Tom, you've been dangling this reveal in front of me for so long.
15:30 Speaker 04 This right here.
15:31 Speaker 03 It's like a, basically a clip art, a clip art cover.
15:35 Speaker 04 Very glossy. Look at this bare paw right here.
15:38 Speaker 03 A bare paw over an IBM mouse.
15:41 Speaker 04 This is so 1997. Look at this.
15:44 Speaker 03 Brian Big Country Reeves in the middle, holding a basketball with two giant paws, as it were.
15:49 Speaker 04 We got Sharif Abdurrahim, number three. Very excited Sharif, by the way.
15:53 Speaker 03 And a literal map of the NBA, in case you didn't know where the Indiana Pacers were located.
15:58 Speaker 04 So I want you to do something.
16:00 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:00 Speaker 04 Okay. I want you to open up to page-
16:03 Speaker 03 This is real. I've never held this before in my life.
16:05 Speaker 04 How's it feel?
16:06 Speaker 03 Oh, it's weighty.
16:07 Speaker 04 I want you to open up to page 177. What does it say?
16:11 Speaker 03 Vancouver Grizzlies courtside crew, italics, T lettering, sans serif font. Yeah.
16:16 Speaker 04 Okay, lower on down.
16:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:18 Speaker 04 There is a title there. Game caller slash technical. The name next to that is Alex.
16:27 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:28 Speaker 04 Alex Rucker.
16:32 Speaker 04 I'm telling you Pablo, it's felt like in Usual Suspects. When the reveal happens, the Kaiser So Say moment, when he dropped the mug on the floor.
16:43 Speaker 03 The media guide falls to the floor in my mind's eye at your home and immediately, yeah, this voice plays.
16:51 Speaker 06 I used to kind of oversee analytics and the research and development, the data scientists, the computer geeks, if you will. And so now I oversee all the departments within basketball operations.
17:02 Speaker 03 In some ways, this was like an inside job on a number of levels. Like, he's an, this is an analytics guy. He should know full well about the sanctity of stats. So what do you do with this information now that you know who Alex from the Navy actually is?
17:21 Speaker 04 I call him.
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20:51 Speaker 03 I want to make sure that people out there who don't know Alex Rucker intuitively, Tom, understand why this name means something. Who is Alex Rucker?
20:59 Speaker 04 So Alex Rucker is one of the most well-known figures in the NBA analytics movement. He was a pioneer of the SportView data. SportView is the camera tracking data where we can now see where everyone is on the floor, how fast they're going.
21:16 Speaker 03 The revolution was around the accuracy of what was being recorded.
21:22 Speaker 04 If you want the most efficient way to put two points in that basket, start learning how to do these predictive models with camera tracking data. And Alex Rucker was at the forefront. And not to say he was the only one, but this is one of the more well-known characters in this space.
21:36 Speaker 03 Yes, and he used that to then, and I remember this intimately, to then follow his former boss, Brian Colangelo, he of the very normal collars, find a new slant, to the Philadelphia 76ers, replacing Sam Hinkie, of course, of the process fame and my own personal neuroses. Alex Rucker was the VP of Analytics and Strategy, the Executive VP of Basketball Operations.
22:01 Speaker 04 In 2020, he's running the 76ers alongside Elton Brand, the GM of the team. This is a guy who is that well-known, that respected.
22:10 Speaker 03 There were headlines.
22:12 Speaker 04 The Philadelphia Inquirer had the headline, "Sixers Team of NBA Stats Gurus Is Taking Analytics To The Next Level."
22:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
22:20 Speaker 04 And a big picture of Alex. Then Daryl Morey comes in, and he takes over for basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers.
22:29 Speaker 03 It's just always incestuous, this loneliness of everything.
22:32 Speaker 04 Here comes Dork Elvis, you know?
22:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, big footing, the previous guy. But that, by the way, that's where I left Alex Rucker in my, in my brain. I didn't think about him until this story.
22:43 Speaker 04 And until I picked up that media guide, I hadn't really thought about Alex Rucker. But I had to confirm, I had to go straight to the source. I don't know how long we'll go, but you let me know if there's a hard out that you need to be gone for.
22:56 Speaker 06 Nah, man.
22:57 Speaker 04 And then we'll roll.
22:59 Speaker 06 Happy to chat.
23:01 Speaker 04 All right. Three, two, one.
23:05 Speaker 03 So when you make this Zoom call, it turns out, which I imagine is fairly uncomfortable for, for Alex Rucker. What does he say when you confront him with the evidence that actually he might be the scammer who selectively edited NBA history?
23:18 Speaker 04 Well, he owned up to it, first off. Like, pretty quickly, he owned, that was me. But here's why that happened. He was 20, Pablo. 20 years old, running the stats for a professional NBA team.
23:33 Speaker 06 I was immature, I handled things in a way that I certainly wouldn't today. But no, that's just a part of my life journey, right? Like, you know, I, it's funny, as you kind of reach adulthood to the extent that I've reached it, it's like every time, I'll sit here and think back to how I was two or three years ago. And I always look back like, man, like, why did I do that? Why did I think of that? And hopefully I continue on an arc of becoming, you know, a continually better person and refining who I am and, you know, having an impact on others in a positive and loving way. With all due respect, you put a 19, 20-year-old in charge of anything and you're playing with fire, so.
24:12 Speaker 03 So the very basic fact that a 19, 20-year-old was in charge of the sacred numbers that we came to revere as just historical fact is already like jarring to me. How does somebody that young get the idea to even like do this to get away with this?
24:31 Speaker 04 He gets the idea to do this almost immediately upon arrival in Vancouver.
24:37 Speaker 06 When I first got the role, I'm bringing the computers home. I'm practicing by myself. I'm trying to develop these skills so that I can do the best I can once the first jump ball happens. My job is to create the most accurate, you know, historical record of what occurred in a game. And I learned very quickly that that was not the prevailing viewpoint. And I went to the training in Detroit. Part of this training is they would show us video clips. You know, they show a Stockton to Malone clip and, you know, there's a discussion and like there's, you know, that wasn't an assist, it was a pass. And then, you know, Malone dribbled a couple of times, pump fake, pump fake, and then, you know, made a tough shot. And that's great, but like that's to me not, I didn't, there's no real connection. There's no causal connection between the pass and the basket. And the majority opinion by a mile was, oh,
25:20 Speaker 06 no, that's definitely an assist. I was like, what? Like, well, that's John Stockton. Like, I understand, but so? I left there clearly understanding that, you know, yes, we are supposed to create the most accurate representation we can, but the NBA is also an entertainment business and it's up to us in very small part, statisticians, to support or reinforce stars and excitement and fun. And that message was definitely reinforced internally within the Grizzlies.
25:54 Speaker 03 So what he says to you there, Tom, is, is to me, like, pretty important, right? This message was definitely reinforced internally within the Grizzlies.
26:04 Speaker 03 So the team itself was actually in favor of this happening.
26:08 Speaker 04 It wasn't just Alex Rucker lone actor here. This was something endemic. This was something understood that you grease the wheels or you you pump up the stats for your guys. When he says, yeah, John Stockton, the assertion right there is like, we need John Stockton to be a star. So we're making that in a sense.
26:27 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:28 Speaker 04 But the the key here is this is the Vancouver Grizzlies, right? They're the new expansion team. They're in Canada. People don't know there's a team in Vancouver.
26:38 Speaker 03 Right.
26:38 Speaker 04 So how does a stat keeper market the team or have a role in marketing the team? Well, it's that. It's what if Sharif Abdurrahim has 10 boards instead of nine boards? Because 10 will get you on SportsCenter. So how do you do that? You cook the books.
26:56 Speaker 03 So the Nick Van Exel thing, that phantom assist that wasn't even on screen. How did the Grizzlies feel about that? Because that's the opposing player.
27:05 Speaker 04 He was actually congratulated after the game. Think about that.
27:09 Speaker 03 By his employers.
27:11 Speaker 04 By his employers saying, hey, good job out there. We're definitely going to be on SportsCenter now.
27:15 Speaker 03 That's incredible.
27:16 Speaker 04 Like, that's how you market the team. Tom Haberstroh in a in a kitchen in Connecticut is now going to see that teal Vancouver Grizzlies aesthetic.
27:27 Speaker 03 That cartoon bear, the claws.
27:29 Speaker 04 There's Bryant Reeves. That's where he ended up in the NBA on the Vancouver Grizzlies. So that's part of how they marketed the team was through the stat keeper.
27:37 Speaker 03 So when you adult grown up, Tommy, look at the numbers, right? And you see Sharif Abdurrahim's stats, how obvious is it that this was actually materially happening?
27:50 Speaker 04 This was this was pretty heartbreaking because when you look at what Alex is alleging, and then you look at the numbers on Basketball Reference and you search or you you filter for his best block games. What I found out that was in Sharif Abdurrahim's first two seasons with the Grizzlies, he registered three plus blocks, at least three blocks in 13 games. In all 13 games, he was playing at home.
28:19 Speaker 04 Okay, two plus blocks.
28:20 Speaker 03 It's not exactly subtle so far.
28:22 Speaker 04 Yeah. How about multiple blocks? Okay, in those first two seasons, he had 38 games in which he had two plus blocks. Thirty-two of them were at home.
28:33 Speaker 03 So the invisible hand of Alex from the Navy, Alex Rucker, is is pretty obvious in retrospect.
28:40 Speaker 04 Yeah, and he, in so many words with Deadspin, he admitted that like, a lot of the blocks and steals and assists, like, you could fudge a little bit. And Bryant Reeves and Sharif Abdurahim were part of that fudgery.
28:54 Speaker 03 The fudgery as an incentive for specifically a team desperate for attention, how obvious was this to you when you look at the record beyond Vancouver?
29:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I looked at the data of just which teams saw a large disparity between their home blocks and their away blocks.
29:14 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly.
29:15 Speaker 04 Okay, so I went from 1984 now to the present. That's when blocks started getting charted in the NBA officially, 1984. We had 1,000 teams in NBA history that we have their block, home, away, block record. The top four teams in disparity from home and away were the Toronto Raptors, the Toronto Raptors, and the Toronto Raptors. In this time period, three of the top four, 200% inflation at home. The Toronto Raptors in 97, 98, 99, 2000, like this era.
29:50 Speaker 03 The other expansion team in Canada. The thing that's almost offensive about this, though, is how unsubtle the expansion teams were doing this. Like, yeah, the Canadian teams wanted people to know that they existed, which meant they needed to be on SportsCenter, like a top 10 plays highlight reel. And so they were juicing the statistics that involved this element of human subjectivity.
30:12 Speaker 04 That's right. And the expansion teams, the Raptors and the Grizzlies, like, we know about them, but also I've looked into the Pelicans, too. When New Orleans got their team and renamed it the Pelicans, they had huge block, home, away disparities, too.
30:27 Speaker 03 Of course.
30:27 Speaker 04 And so I'm like, all right, well, then this is an expansion story.
30:31 Speaker 03 Yes.
30:32 Speaker 04 This is just like, these new teams need to market, and how do you do that? You kind of, you know, twist the knobs a little bit.
30:38 Speaker 03 Yeah, an incredible fraud on its own.
30:40 Speaker 04 But then I figured out that this was much more widespread than just the expansion teams. This was everywhere and I had the data to back that up.
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32:29 Speaker 03 Before we get deeper into your numbers, which I am legitimately concerned about, what is Alex Rucker doing now? Like when you call him up and you zoom with him, where is he?
32:42 Speaker 04 It turns out, he's out of the NBA completely. He is the CEO of a boys and girls club in Texas. Gainesville, Texas.
32:54 Speaker 03 But I do feel obliged to mention that one thing Alex Rucker never fudged, it seems, was his own military resume. Because after leaving the Grizzlies and messing with all those statistics, he did graduate from law school and he did become an actual United States naval aviator. For more than like a decade. The dude really was Alex from the Navy. And so when he is watching the NBA game as this guy who is molding, I presume, with, in good faith, the, the futures of the youth of Gainesville, Texas, what is he thinking about basketball?
33:32 Speaker 04 I didn't know how he was gonna interpret this scoring era. Cause like, we're talking about inflation and Luka Doncic scoring 73, Embiid 70, all these crazy, like, there's-
33:42 Speaker 03 I've never seen this before, Tom. It's just this egregious.
33:46 Speaker 04 There are halftime scorers that would be final scorers 20 years ago.
33:50 Speaker 03 No question.
33:51 Speaker 04 And so here, I wanted to ask Alex Rucker, who was one of the architects of this fudgery inflation in the late 90s. And I wanted to ask him, like, what does he think about today's NBA?
34:06 Speaker 06 Is it bad for the league that, what is it? There's a four 70-point performances in two years when it used to be one a decade? No. I mean, I mean, if it was happening every game, I might be concerned. But it's like, this is a natural byproduct of a higher pace and a much higher efficiency and just frankly, a better quality of offensive gameplay. And if, you know, if I'm sitting down and we're sitting around, you know, living room, just chatting about it, to me, this is the best basketball we have ever seen.
34:33 Speaker 03 So what Alex Rucker is saying is that he is, A, a fan of the modern game and B, does not suspect that anyone like him is cooking the books to get the numbers to the historic highs they are now.
34:44 Speaker 04 And initially, I was thinking like, oh, this guy is gonna identify, this is scamming too. Like, it wasn't just me back in the day, this is happening right now. And he said the opposite.
34:54 Speaker 03 And he's saying also that the era of a stat scammer, a stat keeper scammer, it, it, it seems to be done. Like, he's saying that, don't even worry about someone like me doing something like what I did. Every play from a game is immediately seen by all of these eyeballs across the world as if we're all fact-checking the game in real time now.
35:19 Speaker 04 And so he thinks it's clean now.
35:23 Speaker 06 There's so much more scrutiny oversight review of it now where you should have a lot more faith and confidence in the data that's pumped out now than the data that was pumped out 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. You know, in the 90s, ironically, it's probably in the low 90s is my guess, right? Like if you look at a stat sheet among the non-points stats, probably 90% ish accurate, maybe higher. And now I would guess that it's north of 95.
35:51 Speaker 03 I want to translate this estimation that Alex Rutgers is doing for us, right? Because he's saying like, back in the day when he was stat keeping, it was like, you know, I don't know, a B+, A-, at best, 90-ish percent accurate. But now it's an A+, it's north of 95. He's not worried at all. But in the historical basketball record, Tom, as the numbers guy,
36:14 Speaker 03 what does that gap actually look like in your understanding?
36:17 Speaker 04 So he described it as assists were being given out like candy, like in the 90s when he was around. I think blocks were highly subjective. And the data bears out that when we go back to 1984, when blocks were first introduced into the box score, there is a 25% gap between the home block rate and the away block rate. Okay? What does that mean? That means for every three blocks, there's another fourth that's given to the home team.
36:50 Speaker 03 But like an extra freebie block for every three you get is literally like the difference between an all defensive team nomination potentially.
36:59 Speaker 04 That's a huge gap between the two. But when you look at the numbers now, okay, the number of blocks for the home team this year, 4,087, okay? The number of blocks for the away team is 4,026. So that's a gap of 61 blocks. It's basically equal.
37:19 Speaker 03 Right.
37:20 Speaker 04 You want to know what 84 was? The gap between home and away blocks?
37:24 Speaker 03 Please.
37:25 Speaker 04 1,102.
37:28 Speaker 03 Exponentially larger than the 61 block difference of today.
37:33 Speaker 04 And when we look at the 97, 98 season, it's still over 1,000.
37:38 Speaker 03 Man.
37:38 Speaker 04 So what does that look like in a graph? You can see in 1984, on the left there, there's a pretty big gap between the home team block rate, 5.8 per game or per 48 minutes, and the away team is 4.7. But as we go through time, it starts to shrink. That gap continues to fade away until you get to now, where it's just about gone.
38:05 Speaker 03 So what is undeniable is that the difference between home and road in terms of blocks has basically converged into nothing when it comes to the difference between being away and getting your friendly neighborhood scorekeeper to cook your books for you.
38:22 Speaker 04 And this kind of matters because when I think about my childhood.
38:27 Speaker 03 Right.
38:28 Speaker 04 I think about like, like, take LeBron, okay? LeBron versus MJ, right? This is the most radioactive debate amongst maybe in sports, right?
38:39 Speaker 03 Yes, we're reciting numbers like we are making arguments about, you know, uh, my dad could beat up your dad.
38:47 Speaker 04 Yes, yes. And in the context of Michael Jordan, LeBron, this is really important. A lot of times we say LeBron didn't win DPOY Defensive Player of the Year. Michael Jordan did in 1988.
38:58 Speaker 03 Yes, this is an enormous plank in the Michael Jordan political campaign.
39:02 Speaker 04 So I had this moment of like, I mean, I had Jordan posters in my room, right? And I'm like, wait, the, the 88 DPOY can't be a lie.
39:12 Speaker 04 Please don't. When I pulled up basketball reference, this is what I saw in his stat line. Home and away splits, 165 steals at home, 94 steals away. 84 blocks on at home, 47 blocks, about half away.
39:32 Speaker 03 That's pretty bad.
39:34 Speaker 04 80%.
39:35 Speaker 03 When it comes to like, how obvious that gap is.
39:39 Speaker 04 It's huge. And like, maybe that's random variation, right? But we can't know for sure. But what we have here is Alex Rucker saying, in that era, it was endemic that stat keepers for their home team were juicing the stats.
39:51 Speaker 03 I remember Alex Rucker saying, the NBA is entertainment too. And they were, they were trying actively to create, to boost their stars, the John Stockton's of the world. So why would Michael Jordan be exempt from the same training that literally the scorekeepers were given to make the sport more popular?
40:11 Speaker 04 It's possible Michael Jordan was just really good at, at blocks at home. Like, it's possible that he was 80% better at home at blocking shots.
40:19 Speaker 03 Sure. Having Benny the Bull around was somehow this inspirational, uh, yeah, phenomenon for him defensively.
40:25 Speaker 04 Yes. And hearing the music coming out onto the floor just made him...
40:30 Speaker 03 Alan Parsons Project made him that much of a better defender.
40:32 Speaker 04 Springy, more springy, or anticipating the shots better. And there's, there's some theory that like, um, this isn't stat keeper bias. This is like, the opponent is worse on the road and so therefore easier to block. But why wouldn't that be true right now?
40:49 Speaker 03 That's the thing, is your big picture analysis that shows that individually, maybe all of these things can make it very noisy.
40:58 Speaker 04 Yes.
40:58 Speaker 03 And hard to isolate why this is happening. But the big picture makes it pretty clear that this difference has vanished.
41:05 Speaker 04 And it also brings in my other childhood hero, Vince Carter. Like, watching him at North Carolina completely enchanted me. He was high flying, could shoot, the way he moved, it was beautiful. And what team did he join?
41:21 Speaker 03 The Toronto Raptors. He made basketball in Canada a thing.
41:25 Speaker 04 At what time, what era was this? The late 90s. And so, of course, I look...
41:31 Speaker 03 So, what, wait, so, okay, what is on the Vince Carter resume that now looks quite different in the light of day?
41:37 Speaker 04 His rookie season, he averaged 1.5 blocks, which by the way, for a guard, that's insane.
41:43 Speaker 03 That's a lot.
41:43 Speaker 04 That's a lot. He wins Rookie of the Year. But then you look at the splits, 55 blocks at home, 22 on the road.
41:51 Speaker 03 Hmm.
41:52 Speaker 04 Not good. Doesn't make me feel good.
41:55 Speaker 03 Those thirsty Canadian scorekeepers, man.
41:58 Speaker 04 Man, not Vince Carter too.
42:01 Speaker 03 Half man, half inflation.
42:03 Speaker 04 Right, and the 60s were too. Like 60s had 130 possessions a game in Wilt's era. Like, the Oscar Robertson era had-
42:10 Speaker 03 And now you're coming for Wilt and Oscar.
42:12 Speaker 04 What I'm coming for, Pablo, is everybody. Everybody. And I think, going through this, it makes me appreciate that like, maybe the 60s era, Wilt's 100 points and the Oscar Robertson, we can't even fact check that because there's no film!
42:33 Speaker 03 It is worth noting, by the way, how hard it is to even get film of games from the late 1990s, let alone the 60s. Like, that Van Exel clip from 97 that we showed you earlier in the episode, that came to us because of a young NBA fan in Latvia, named Reinis Latsis. And Reinis runs a site called LamarMatic.com. And what he told Tom is that he had gotten his Van Exel video from an underground internet marketplace, where people trade digitized VHS tapes of old NBA games. That is what it takes to fact check statistics from the 1990s.
43:10 Speaker 04 The deeper we go in NBA history, it feels like the more we don't know.
43:16 Speaker 03 What else are you trying to ruin here, Tom?
43:18 Speaker 04 I'm just saying, these are the emotions I was going through was, wait a minute.
43:24 Speaker 04 It's all a lie.
43:25 Speaker 03 And this is the part where it gets uncomfortable for us.
43:29 Speaker 04 I mean, we gotta go there, right? Like, we gotta talk about what this all means.
43:34 Speaker 03 Tom, we have made careers zagging away from the zig of the eye test. Right? Trust the numbers.
43:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:44 Speaker 03 It's the thing in our civilization that stands as proof of objectivity. Sports, and specifically statistics, it's not, it's not an artistic subjective review because there's definitionally a scoreboard-
44:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:01 Speaker 03 And these numbers, we have something that is the closest thing to truth.
44:06 Speaker 04 We thought.
44:08 Speaker 03 We thought.
44:09 Speaker 04 This is one thing Alex Rucker mentioned to me and it stuck with me in my head is it's good to have a healthy appreciation, a healthy respect, a healthy skepticism of data.
44:21 Speaker 03 Right. If the incentives are to make the game popular by giving people what they want, which is points, and we lose the ability to both interview the people who were, as Alex Rucker was, self admittedly guilty of juicing the game themselves, and also we lose the ability to even look at the tape. As you put it, it just feels like we are obligated to ask more questions about the things that we consider historical, quote unquote, fact.
44:49 Speaker 04 Right. Statistical record. It's now we have to revisit it. Look, is today's NBA objectively pure, Pablo? Like, is this, is this the purest form of basketball?
45:03 Speaker 03 Because we now have the statistical controls on the scorekeepers to fact check them in real time.
45:08 Speaker 04 Is the human element removed from the game?
45:12 Speaker 03 What do you think?
45:14 Speaker 04 I think the human element is appearing in a different form. The NBA knows, because they've done this with focus groups, they tell the viewers to dial up how much enjoyment you're getting out of watching a game.
45:26 Speaker 03 Right.
45:27 Speaker 04 People are dialing it up, their enjoyment, when there's high scoring, more scoring, right? So is there manipulation in today's NBA game? I don't think it's taken the form of a stat keeper on the sidelines. I think the manipulation comes in kind of like behind the scenes, like from up top.
45:44 Speaker 03 Right. Like the league office deciding, we want faster paced games that are more open.
45:49 Speaker 04 We're going to introduce freedom of movement rules so that Steph Curry can break free and get shots off. So Pablo, what I found out today is that there's two inflations we're talking about here, right? There's the inflation of, hey, there's so many, so many points being scored now. The games are 150 and 152 and, and Luka Doncic is 73. That's a certain type of inflation. And so there's that, like where the league is prioritizing certain parts of the game that they want to see.
46:18 Speaker 03 But the title of the most inflated era in NBA history, which is what so many people are declaring the modern game to be.
46:28 Speaker 03 Who deserves that title now that we've done our investigation?
46:32 Speaker 04 Uh, the era that we're most nostalgic about.
46:36 Speaker 04 It's the Jordan era.
46:37 Speaker 03 It's our [bleep] childhoods, man.
46:39 Speaker 04 The Alan Parsons Project, the Bulls, um, just the, the dream team.
46:44 Speaker 03 The eighties and the nineties.
46:46 Speaker 04 Magic Larry. That's the pure league, right?
46:51 Speaker 03 Back when men were men and were earning every point and every block, except for when a guy in a media guide tells you, actually, I was boosting, literally inflating the numbers because this whole thing has been show business in a way that was quite real. What we have found out today is that the human element has always been a part of the thing that we made our careers on, which is you guys need to stop trusting your eyes and start trusting math.
47:26 Speaker 04 Start trusting the data till the data's impure.
47:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. Tom Haberstro, uh, thank you for ruining everything that we hold dear.
47:38 Speaker 04 I'm sorry. Oh, man. I just need to take a bath after that one. Speaking of impure, I just need to clean myself up and...
47:46 Speaker 03 This cardigan has never been sweatier.
47:58 Speaker 03 For more Tom Haberstro, by the way, tomthefinder.com is a Substack. You'll find high-level, data-driven insights and analyses. But for now, this has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Metalark Media production, and we'll talk to you next time.
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