How good was Michael Jordan, really?

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 For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:21Noam 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.

• 1:32Noam 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?

• 2:20Noam 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

• 3:04Noam 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.

• 3:17Noam 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.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Tom Haverstrum, it is a pleasure to have you in the flesh at this desk with revelations to present to me.

• 3:56Noam Hassenfeld?

  Happy to be here, Pablo.

• 3:58Speaker 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.

• 4:10Noam Hassenfeld?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 03

  As if people know what that is typically.

• 4:13Noam 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?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  Right. In our defense, Sloan became a thing that got mentioned in season nine of The Office.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Hey, so Wade wants to send people to the Sloan Conference? We got to compile a list of our target clients.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  Already on it. But in reality, what this is, is a giant nerd fest.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 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.

• 5:04Speaker 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.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  So you were like putting these historical performances into statistical context as a, as a matter of the beat that you were on.

• 5:36Speaker 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.

• 5:55Speaker 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.

• 6:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 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.

• 6:29Speaker 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.

• 6:37Speaker 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.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's, Daryl Morey is the head of Dorkapalooza, which I think Bill Simmons coined, is that he is

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Dork Elvis.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  Dork Elvis of Dorkapalooza, which is the Sloan Conference. I'm not so sure how Daryl feels about that nickname.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  It fits.

• 7:11Speaker 04

  But he is the, the face of it.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  The guy who claimed famously that empirically speaking, James Harden is a better scorer than Michael [bleep] Jordan.

• 7:21Speaker 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.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  Based on the math.

• 7:35Speaker 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.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  So, obviously, he's now running the Sixers.

• 7:48Speaker 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.

• 8:08Speaker 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.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  And then, of course, like, there's, I mean, Mr. Moneyball himself.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  My god. And he's at Sloan.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  Yes, Billy Bean himself shows up.

• 8:28Speaker 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.

• 8:43Speaker 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.

• 9:01Speaker 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.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Which I did not know about until you called me up. Like deeply excited to explain what this is.

• 9:18Speaker 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.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  This is how to optimize the game. What's the most efficient way to score a basketball? Here's a study.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Before Sloan, you guys were doing this on this message board.

• 9:44Speaker 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

• 10:28Speaker 04

  Nick the Quick, Nick Van Exel."

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yes, in the Laker game where he has like a zillion assists.

• 10:34Speaker 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."

• 10:50Speaker 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?

• 11:03Speaker 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.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  That feels like an assist by neither the letter or the spirit of the law.

• 11:51Speaker 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.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  That's the only reason I remember it.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  So I remember this moment and now I'm learning it's all a lie.

• 12:19Speaker 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?

• 12:30Speaker 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.

• 12:56Speaker 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,

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Turns out you can't actually trust the thing that you wanted to make your career around.

• 13:15Speaker 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.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  And for 13 years, this story was dead until the Jaren Jackson Jr. story happens.

• 13:26Speaker 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.

• 13:45Speaker 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.

• 14:03Speaker 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.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but you know what is on eBay? A lot of old documents.

• 14:18Speaker 04

  One of which is what's called a media guide.

• 14:22Speaker 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.

• 14:31Speaker 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.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  A physical book.

• 14:39Speaker 04

  A book to look at, oh, this person was the 13th pick in the 1992 draft.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, here's the phone number for the assistant PR person.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  That is where I needed to go. I needed to find, Pablo, the 1996, 97 Vancouver Grizzlies media guide.

• 14:59Speaker 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?

• 15:11Speaker 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.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Tom, you've been dangling this reveal in front of me for so long.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  This right here.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  It's like a, basically a clip art, a clip art cover.

• 15:35Speaker 04

  Very glossy. Look at this bare paw right here.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  A bare paw over an IBM mouse.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  This is so 1997. Look at this.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Brian Big Country Reeves in the middle, holding a basketball with two giant paws, as it were.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  We got Sharif Abdurrahim, number three. Very excited Sharif, by the way.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  And a literal map of the NBA, in case you didn't know where the Indiana Pacers were located.

• 15:58Speaker 04

  So I want you to do something.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Okay. I want you to open up to page-

• 16:03Speaker 03

  This is real. I've never held this before in my life.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  How's it feel?

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Oh, it's weighty.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  I want you to open up to page 177. What does it say?

• 16:11Speaker 03

  Vancouver Grizzlies courtside crew, italics, T lettering, sans serif font. Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 04

  Okay, lower on down.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  There is a title there. Game caller slash technical. The name next to that is Alex.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:28Speaker 04

  Alex Rucker.

• 16:32Speaker 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.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  The media guide falls to the floor in my mind's eye at your home and immediately, yeah, this voice plays.

• 16:51Speaker 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.

• 17:02Speaker 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?

• 17:21Speaker 04

  I call him.

• 17:31Speaker 00

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• 20:51Speaker 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?

• 20:59Speaker 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.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  The revolution was around the accuracy of what was being recorded.

• 21:22Speaker 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.

• 21:36Speaker 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.

• 22:01Speaker 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.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  There were headlines.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  The Philadelphia Inquirer had the headline, "Sixers Team of NBA Stats Gurus Is Taking Analytics To The Next Level."

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  And a big picture of Alex. Then Daryl Morey comes in, and he takes over for basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  It's just always incestuous, this loneliness of everything.

• 22:32Speaker 04

  Here comes Dork Elvis, you know?

• 22:34Speaker 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.

• 22:43Speaker 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.

• 22:56Speaker 06

  Nah, man.

• 22:57Speaker 04

  And then we'll roll.

• 22:59Speaker 06

  Happy to chat.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  All right. Three, two, one.

• 23:05Speaker 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?

• 23:18Speaker 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.

• 23:33Speaker 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.

• 24:12Speaker 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?

• 24:31Speaker 04

  He gets the idea to do this almost immediately upon arrival in Vancouver.

• 24:37Speaker 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,

• 25:20Speaker 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.

• 25:54Speaker 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.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  So the team itself was actually in favor of this happening.

• 26:08Speaker 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.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 26:28Speaker 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.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 26:38Speaker 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.

• 26:56Speaker 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.

• 27:05Speaker 04

  He was actually congratulated after the game. Think about that.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  By his employers.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  By his employers saying, hey, good job out there. We're definitely going to be on SportsCenter now.

• 27:15Speaker 03

  That's incredible.

• 27:16Speaker 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.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  That cartoon bear, the claws.

• 27:29Speaker 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.

• 27:37Speaker 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?

• 27:50Speaker 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.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  Okay, two plus blocks.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  It's not exactly subtle so far.

• 28:22Speaker 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.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  So the invisible hand of Alex from the Navy, Alex Rucker, is is pretty obvious in retrospect.

• 28:40Speaker 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.

• 28:54Speaker 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?

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I looked at the data of just which teams saw a large disparity between their home blocks and their away blocks.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 29:15Speaker 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.

• 29:50Speaker 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.

• 30:12Speaker 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.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  And so I'm like, all right, well, then this is an expansion story.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:32Speaker 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.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, an incredible fraud on its own.

• 30:40Speaker 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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• 32:29Speaker 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?

• 32:42Speaker 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.

• 32:54Speaker 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?

• 33:32Speaker 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-

• 33:42Speaker 03

  I've never seen this before, Tom. It's just this egregious.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  There are halftime scorers that would be final scorers 20 years ago.

• 33:50Speaker 03

  No question.

• 33:51Speaker 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?

• 34:06Speaker 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.

• 34:33Speaker 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.

• 34:44Speaker 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.

• 34:54Speaker 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.

• 35:19Speaker 04

  And so he thinks it's clean now.

• 35:23Speaker 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.

• 35:51Speaker 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,

• 36:14Speaker 03

  what does that gap actually look like in your understanding?

• 36:17Speaker 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.

• 36:50Speaker 03

  But like an extra freebie block for every three you get is literally like the difference between an all defensive team nomination potentially.

• 36:59Speaker 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.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  You want to know what 84 was? The gap between home and away blocks?

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Please.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  1,102.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Exponentially larger than the 61 block difference of today.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  And when we look at the 97, 98 season, it's still over 1,000.

• 37:38Speaker 03

  Man.

• 37:38Speaker 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.

• 38:05Speaker 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.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  And this kind of matters because when I think about my childhood.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:28Speaker 04

  I think about like, like, take LeBron, okay? LeBron versus MJ, right? This is the most radioactive debate amongst maybe in sports, right?

• 38:39Speaker 03

  Yes, we're reciting numbers like we are making arguments about, you know, uh, my dad could beat up your dad.

• 38:47Speaker 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.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  Yes, this is an enormous plank in the Michael Jordan political campaign.

• 39:02Speaker 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.

• 39:12Speaker 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.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  That's pretty bad.

• 39:34Speaker 04

  80%.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  When it comes to like, how obvious that gap is.

• 39:39Speaker 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.

• 39:51Speaker 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?

• 40:11Speaker 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.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Sure. Having Benny the Bull around was somehow this inspirational, uh, yeah, phenomenon for him defensively.

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Yes. And hearing the music coming out onto the floor just made him...

• 40:30Speaker 03

  Alan Parsons Project made him that much of a better defender.

• 40:32Speaker 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?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  That's the thing, is your big picture analysis that shows that individually, maybe all of these things can make it very noisy.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  And hard to isolate why this is happening. But the big picture makes it pretty clear that this difference has vanished.

• 41:05Speaker 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?

• 41:21Speaker 03

  The Toronto Raptors. He made basketball in Canada a thing.

• 41:25Speaker 04

  At what time, what era was this? The late 90s. And so, of course, I look...

• 41:31Speaker 03

  So, what, wait, so, okay, what is on the Vince Carter resume that now looks quite different in the light of day?

• 41:37Speaker 04

  His rookie season, he averaged 1.5 blocks, which by the way, for a guard, that's insane.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  That's a lot.

• 41:43Speaker 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.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  Not good. Doesn't make me feel good.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Those thirsty Canadian scorekeepers, man.

• 41:58Speaker 04

  Man, not Vince Carter too.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Half man, half inflation.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  Right, and the 60s were too. Like 60s had 130 possessions a game in Wilt's era. Like, the Oscar Robertson era had-

• 42:10Speaker 03

  And now you're coming for Wilt and Oscar.

• 42:12Speaker 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!

• 42:33Speaker 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.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  The deeper we go in NBA history, it feels like the more we don't know.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  What else are you trying to ruin here, Tom?

• 43:18Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, these are the emotions I was going through was, wait a minute.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  It's all a lie.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  And this is the part where it gets uncomfortable for us.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  I mean, we gotta go there, right? Like, we gotta talk about what this all means.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  Tom, we have made careers zagging away from the zig of the eye test. Right? Trust the numbers.

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 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-

• 44:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  And these numbers, we have something that is the closest thing to truth.

• 44:06Speaker 04

  We thought.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  We thought.

• 44:09Speaker 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.

• 44:21Speaker 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.

• 44:49Speaker 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?

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Because we now have the statistical controls on the scorekeepers to fact check them in real time.

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Is the human element removed from the game?

• 45:12Speaker 03

  What do you think?

• 45:14Speaker 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.

• 45:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 45:27Speaker 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.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Right. Like the league office deciding, we want faster paced games that are more open.

• 45:49Speaker 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.

• 46:18Speaker 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.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Who deserves that title now that we've done our investigation?

• 46:32Speaker 04

  Uh, the era that we're most nostalgic about.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  It's the Jordan era.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  It's our [bleep] childhoods, man.

• 46:39Speaker 04

  The Alan Parsons Project, the Bulls, um, just the, the dream team.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  The eighties and the nineties.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Magic Larry. That's the pure league, right?

• 46:51Speaker 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.

• 47:26Speaker 04

  Start trusting the data till the data's impure.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. Tom Haberstro, uh, thank you for ruining everything that we hold dear.

• 47:38Speaker 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...

• 47:46Speaker 03

  This cardigan has never been sweatier.

• 47:58Speaker 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.

• 48:53Speaker 11

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