Sam Hinkie gone :(

[Crow]

How do you or anyone propose to evaluate process from the view of a fan analyst, owner or GM? Isn't it likely that teams have more than one process style for different decisions or at least more than one mix of behaviors, weights and speeds for different decisions even within a general style?

One way to characterize process is by length of view while doing your process but you can also characterize it by willingness to use length of time for the process. Tearing down and slowly improving has been suggested as being a strategy to keep a GM job a long time or at least longer than for those who go for now or soon, or make or break (like Nets). Perhaps part of Ujuri's temptation to trade Lowry was preference for the tear down, rebuild slowly, stay employed, get more credit with my guys model.
he was wrong about Lowry's talent. Perhaps he was wrong about player / coach / playing style / other player fit. Perhaps he was wrong about likelihood to re-sign. Perhaps he liked some other target better. He could have wrong on any of these things. Until they go deeper in playoffs be might not be certainly better off having that trade rejected. From the outside, results, ultimate results are easier to judge than strategy or process.

Process and grand strategy are two different things, imo. "The process" is really more strategy to me. I don't know which Hinkie should be scored higher or lower on.

[Crow]

Building a grand strategy model:

Characterize win records into achievement levels. What about less than 20, 21-35, 35-45, 45-52, 53-60, over 60?

Characterize moving 3 yr win trends.

Characterize trying. Acquisitions above average that are expected to add immediate or near term value vs. not or much later. Starter changes. Coach and GM changes. Play style changes. Total spending.

Chart every team for 10 plus years. Movement thru win achievement levels. Trying to win levels associated with those movements. Calculate league averages. How quickly did people move between win achievement levels? (I previously calculated average length between 20 wins or less and second round of playoffs but we really need the whole set of movements.) Calculate the trends in trying. Early, middle, late, variable, continuous. What pattern works best on average? Roland mentioned 7 recent cases but we probably need to look at at least ten times that. There have been hints that Morey studied this deeply before picking what could be called the middle, struggle / rebuild quickly path. Hinkie was surely in on it and may have done more independently later. He chose a different path for a different team. He and Morey both could have been right on average for their start state. Since they probably had same data and yet choose different strategies suggests that there are different right strategies for different starting points according to that data. Are folks willing to accept that or are some arguing that one strategy is flat better or worse regardless of start state nuance?

[Statman]

There are better ways to go than total tanking...

BTW, I completely agree.

My tepid support of the Hinkie "approach" has absolutely nothing to do with the concept of tanking as much as it has to do with acquisition of draft picks and talent evaluation (particularly young players) & development. Philly acquired draft picks (which I support), BUT they appeared to tank big time (don't support), & the only young player they "discovered" in their talent evaluation & development outside of draft picks is TJ McConnell. Young players in general don't seem to be getting better in their system, & it's been that way for a while. So, part of me can't tell if they are outright tanking or their just bad at young talent evaluation & development. Or maybe both?

[mystic]

There are better ways to go than total tanking...

In average? Yes, tanking is not a promising strategy, because you can't control the luck needed in order to get the talent via draft or trade. In fact, most bad teams stay bad for a longer period. But the overall strategy obviously depends on the starting conditions. And at this point I seriously doubt that the 76ers would have been that much better right now as say the Lakers, if they would have tried to win-as-much-as-possible (or tried their hardest). What really should be taken into account is the fact that the 76ers had a massive talent/asset drain in just one stupid trade, when DiLeo acquired Bynum while giving up Iguodala, Vucevic, Harkless and the pick while also had to take on Richardson. The whole deal was beyond stupid, because the 76ers were giving up the assets to acquire Howard, but they just received an injured Bynum.
The core of the 76ers was more than reasonable healthy, but the team went from being +4 (and 5th in the league) in 2012 to -3.9 (24th) at the end of the 2013 season. That team had not much talent overall. When evaluating Hinkies work, we should appreciate that as well.

I also don't think that picking some examples is a good way of showing that tanking doesn't work or other ways are better, because such approach has the tendency to end up in a confirmation bias and nothing else. Also, the amount of wins in the NBA is limited, and if the 76ers would have won more games, another team had to lose to them. We also have to take into account that the talent is limited in the NBA as well. You can only sign one LeBron James, there isn't a second one in the league.

Nevertheless, I agree that the screams by some internet fans for a rebuild is not based on facts or takes the realities of the business into account. Those people actually believe in a quick fix by using tanking as a short-term strategy to gain a high draft pick and then get the necessary talented player with that pick. They completely overestimating the chances of getting such great player, because in their world tanking teams always get the next Shaquille O'Neal, Tim Duncan, LeBron James or Kevin Durant. They using cherry-picked examples in order to rationalize their belief that tanking is the easy-fix, while they completely ignoring the negative effects on the business side of the coin. Back in October 2013 I wrote in a post on RealGM: "It (tanking) is anything, but a reliable strategy. In fact, this kind of strategy will get a GM rather fired."

[Crow]

So 2011-12 Rockets had exactly same win total as Sixers before Hinkie? Lot of trying / change, well beyond Harden trade. Big pace increase, change in every starter, change in every PG (including Dragic and Lowry?). Spending lagged though. No change essentially in 2012-13, in bottom 20%. Got to 14th last season. 8th this season.

What happens next year on spending and level of trying to win now? struggle / rebuild quick hit a big bump or wall this season. Problem with process? Knowing your coach / getting effort, picking players who aren't leaders, valuing defense, evaluating potential and rate of development? Bending too much to Howard / Parsons agent? Missing on other free agents after costly removals of Asik and Lin contracts. Ariza underperforming? Lawson. Howard under-utilized, bad fit and / or under-performing expectations? With the exception of the Royce White pick, the draft pick productivity looks ok but did the pieces actually fit a design? Doesn't seem like the fit was that good for the now. Lots of process errors or just bad outcomes? Go for more struggle for quick rebuild or strip away a lot of what was done? Long way from goal, it would appear at this time. Last fall 4th on ESPN future power ranking?? Nate Silver gave them second best chances of a title in 5 years just 16 months ago. Right now would these rankings be more like 14th or worse? What will they be this fall or next?

[Crow]

How much are various achievements worth to team owners and GMs?

Is a title worth 5-10-20 times more than a second round playoffs appearance? Is a 50 win season but a first round exit worth that much more than 40 wins and no playoffs? Is the latter value much more than 25-30 wins? Is 25-30 wins worth much more than 15? If you assigned value to all the outcomes that would help in evaluating a grand strategy, the sum of all the data points on the path to wherever you get and wherever you are going baring change.

It is quite possible than owners, GMs, fans and media value these things differently. It could be a pretty big factor in evaluating various situations / scenarios.

Can you have a wise grand strategy without making these appraisals? I guess you could value the final data point exclusively but many will appraise and sum the value of each season outcome. Tolerance of low score years, expected and disappointments, will vary.

[ampersand5]

Responding to a few different points raised --

I find it incredibly challenging to analyze most NBA GMs because of how little information we have outside of outcome. As a bit of a side point, did you know that the Sloan Conference awarded their best analytics organization prize to the Spurs in 2015 and Warriors in 2016. Were the organizers trying to create a belief that teams only become great due to utilizing analytics, or did they really let outcomes cloud their judgments that much?
Some factors I look at: do they have a coherent strategy, do they have patience, are they creating value, are they exploiting inefficiencies, over the long run - do their moves generally turn out to be positive/negative, do their moves accord to what analytics suggests/is there evidence they are utilizing or ignoring analytics. Basically, it really comes down to how much available evidence there is that the GM has a smart/dumb outlook on decision making and the NBA.

Crow asked what the tradeoff is between championships and wins in other seasons, which is an important question. The thing is, to win a championship requires the team to be elite, and teams that are elite for one year, are almost always elite for several years. This is because the NBA system gives structural advantages for teams that become elite - that make it incredibly rewarding. This is a huge issue in the current NBA, and the fact that the NBA has chosen to ignore it, leads me to believe that they value it and find it beneficial for the finances of the league.

The biggest issue is the artificial max contract rule. With this, teams are not only gaining an advantage because they get to underpay an elite player, but true max players become a schelling point for other players to sign undervalued contracts with the team. The fact that NBA teams can go over the salary cap to re-sign their own players only exacerbates the problem.

In regards to tanking - it is important to note it actually has a positive value. For every NBA season, only a few teams can be elite, and a handful more that can seriously contend. Because the NBA is zero-sum, inevitably there has to be teams that are bad. Once a team has been relegated from contending status, tanking/developing young players creates a metric other than wins for fans to value. Without the draft, do you know how much worse things would be for 76ers fans?

------

Consider this example, imagine the NBA through a mechanical lens where having more assets = more wins. Ofcourse then, teams are trying to do whatever possible to accumulate more assets.

Assets come in three ways - the draft, trades or free agency.
For the draft - the worse you are, the more the assets you get.
For trades - you can try and outsmart the rest of the league and try and marginally increase total assets every transaction, but this is incredibly challenging.
For free agency - the better you are, the more assets you get

This means that the only way a team can systematically improve is by
a) being bad
b) outsmarting the rest of the league
c) by already being good

All teams want to get to C.

Given the existence of C, and the fact that it is near impossible to genuinely outsmart the league (even if a GM is smarter than the rest, there simply aren't enough transaction to exploit), this means teams have two options of trying to improve their status. A team can either be bad --- or they can employ high variance strategies that despite having a neutral or poor expected value, can in some outcomes get a team to the C - level.

[Crow]

The public analysis of the Sixers mostly focuses on what happened. How much did the owners know or not know about what Hinkie intended to do in next 6-24 months? How much of their unrest was about the plan vs. the process to date? So far we don't know and it does not appear that the Sixers want to discuss it.

[Crow]

If I were to pick the most likely team to hire Hinkie as GM, I'd guess the Grizzlies in 1-3 years. Assuming they were ready to move on from current team version and wanted someone to rip hard and deep. Especially if the Griz owner was considering moving the team and needed low attendance to get that option.

[mystic]

So 2011-12 Rockets had exactly same win total as Sixers before Hinkie?

That season had only 66 games; the Rockets had a 34-32 record, thus the same amount of wins as the 76ers in 2013, but 16 losses less.

And trying to compare teams just based on the amount of wins they had (or win%) isn't really useful, because one team could have been just unlucky with injuries, etc. while the other team may just have been incredible lucky overall, thus both teams end up with the same win%, but there are not similar talented overall. And that's just the issue with the existing roster, which would ignore the amount of picks owned by each team. It makes a difference for acquiring future players via draft as well as being flexible in trade talks. For example, I suggested back in 2014 when rumors said that the Kings want to trade their 8th pick which eventually became Nick Stauskas that the Kings and Bulls should make a trade: Bulls send the #16 and the Kings future pick while getting the #8 back. Most people were opposed, because they believed the 8th pick would be so much more valuable than the #16 while in reality the difference in expectations based on the past performance level of players acquried with such picks wasn't that big to begin with. But they also underestimated the value of having the own future pick available in trade talks. There are restrictions regarding the possibility of trading future picks, and most people are simply not aware of that.

So, overall the point would be that it is not as easy as to say: team x had the same amount of wins in year y as team z, but now team x is good while team z is bad, and then conclude that the GM of team x must have done better than the GM of team z. As ampersand pointed out, it is important to judge how a GM arrived at that stage; a GM who simply got lucky isn't someone I would trust to make the right decision in the future even if the team is doing better than expected right now.

Once a team has been relegated from contending status, tanking/developing young players creates a metric other than wins for fans to value. Without the draft, do you know how much worse things would be for 76ers fans?

I agree with the most things you wrote so far in this thread, but I think that is one of the biggest mistakes in the thought-process mainly by internet fans. There is the strong belief among those primarily very vocal fans on the internet that a team has to be either a contender or should be rebuilding via young players and draft picks. That does not seem to be a notion for fans willing pay for a basketball product by buying arena tickets or being willing to spend money for TV plans. Those fans who actually pay for all the stuff are usually not willing to pay, if the team is bad. They will come back when the team is good again, but during the bad period the income of such team will decrease. A team can avoid losses by reducing the costs (which the 76ers did), but the overall revenue will decrease.

It is quite an interesting phenomena, because you can find a lot of people on the internet, who believe that they would speak for a majority and have the weird idea that they would make smarter decisions everytime than the people in charge. Similar things can be said about media people, who do nothing else than critize each and everyone, while proposing transactions which are completely unrealistic or would actually not even help the team, because the players involved are usually just evaluated based on their PPG/RPG/APG (maybe steals or blocks, if the belief is there that this would help their case). That all looks like a Dunning-Kruger effect, where those people overestimate their own abilties as well as underestimate the abilities of the people in charge. That usually gets accompanied by cherry-picking, confirmation and hindsight bias. I wouldn't put much into the things those fans value.

[ampersand5]

So 2011-12 Rockets had exactly same win total as Sixers before Hinkie?

That season had only 66 games; the Rockets had a 34-32 record, thus the same amount of wins as the 76ers in 2013, but 16 losses less.

And trying to compare teams just based on the amount of wins they had (or win%) isn't really useful, because one team could have been just unlucky with injuries, etc. while the other team may just have been incredible lucky overall, thus both teams end up with the same win%, but there are not similar talented overall. And that's just the issue with the existing roster, which would ignore the amount of picks owned by each team. It makes a difference for acquiring future players via draft as well as being flexible in trade talks. For example, I suggested back in 2014 when rumors said that the Kings want to trade their 8th pick which eventually became Nick Stauskas that the Kings and Bulls should make a trade: Bulls send the #16 and the Kings future pick while getting the #8 back. Most people were opposed, because they believed the 8th pick would be so much more valuable than the #16 while in reality the difference in expectations based on the past performance level of players acquried with such picks wasn't that big to begin with. But they also underestimated the value of having the own future pick available in trade talks. There are restrictions regarding the possibility of trading future picks, and most people are simply not aware of that.

So, overall the point would be that it is not as easy as to say: team x had the same amount of wins in year y as team z, but now team x is good while team z is bad, and then conclude that the GM of team x must have done better than the GM of team z. As ampersand pointed out, it is important to judge how a GM arrived at that stage; a GM who simply got lucky isn't someone I would trust to make the right decision in the future even if the team is doing better than expected right now.

Once a team has been relegated from contending status, tanking/developing young players creates a metric other than wins for fans to value. Without the draft, do you know how much worse things would be for 76ers fans?

I agree with the most things you wrote so far in this thread, but I think that is one of the biggest mistakes in the thought-process mainly by internet fans. There is the strong belief among those primarily very vocal fans on the internet that a team has to be either a contender or should be rebuilding via young players and draft picks. That does not seem to be a notion for fans willing pay for a basketball product by buying arena tickets or being willing to spend money for TV plans. Those fans who actually pay for all the stuff are usually not willing to pay, if the team is bad. They will come back when the team is good again, but during the bad period the income of such team will decrease. A team can avoid losses by reducing the costs (which the 76ers did), but the overall revenue will decrease.

It is quite an interesting phenomena, because you can find a lot of people on the internet, who believe that they would speak for a majority and have the weird idea that they would make smarter decisions everytime than the people in charge. Similar things can be said about media people, who do nothing else than critize each and everyone, while proposing transactions which are completely unrealistic or would actually not even help the team, because the players involved are usually just evaluated based on their PPG/RPG/APG (maybe steals or blocks, if the belief is there that this would help their case). That all looks like a Dunning-Kruger effect, where those people overestimate their own abilties as well as underestimate the abilities of the people in charge. That usually gets accompanied by cherry-picking, confirmation and hindsight bias. I wouldn't put much into the things those fans value.

Losing isn't better than winning, but losing is certainly a lot more enjoyable for fans when they have a pick to look forward to. Compare the fanbase right now in Brooklyn to Philly. I'm just saying that there is some benefit to rewarding teams that are bad.

I agree with you that internet fans are way too gungho (sp?) on tanking and definitely do not represent the average ticketbuyer. Even if fans support the tanking process, the evidence shows that people stop buying tickets when the team sucks.

Here's a chart I made on this issue:


Does anyone know of any research/commentary on the economics of tanking (ie A case study of lost revenue vs potential future gains)? I'd be curious to see what the numbers suggest.

Also ----- I just want to note that I don't think the question of whether tanking is a good or bad idea is a good proxy for measuring Hinkie's quality as a GM.
Hinkie would have only entered this project after a significant amount of research on the issue, and enthusiasm from his owners.
Sam Hinkie represents a lot more than just tanking.

Crow -- I have no idea where Hinkie will land. It completely depends on the mindset of ownership, which aside from special cases like Mark Cuban, we have no insight into. I can't imagine he would want join another rebuilding job for the foreseeable future though; seems like this was his baby, and that the experience took too much out of him.

[permaximum]

I think some forget being bad is not enough to get talent. You must evaluate talent with high accuracy and you really need to be lucky.

One thing Crow mentioned really got my attention. What's the worth of the championship? or a win or wins in the Finals? or getting swept in the Finals? or getting to WCF/ECF? or second round? or first round exit? I mean what you should risk for each one of them? I believe most people have different opinions...

Say, you want to increase your title chance from 5 to 10%. What should be risked for that? Championship should be worth 20 times more than what you're risking or otherwise it's a wrong move. Now, what do you think should be risked?

As for owners, they couldn't care less about championship or these stuff. They are only means to an end. I believe they certainly have a projection on the targeted profit in 1-2-3-4-5-10 years. Looking at from this perspective, the owners of 76ers probably decided it's passed the point where Hinkie's predicted success now would end up with a significant profit for them.

BTW while we're talking about the owners, that letter of Hinkie's (I'm ashamed for him) probably made the owners even question how could they hire Hinkie in the first place. It seems Hinkie came to job as an analytics person but left as a philosophe wannabe. There were some analytical arguments in the letter but those were worse. They were generally about his reliance on ESPN predictions to support his arguments. After everything, I don't believe for a moment Hinkie will get a GM job again in NBA. He's dona as a GM.

[mystic]

I'm just saying that there is some benefit to rewarding teams that are bad.

Of course, there is that, especially when we are talking about a cartel-like structure as the NBA, where owners need to know that at one point there get a chance to become better again, because, as pointed out before, the talent and wins are limited in the NBA, and it is impossible to have all teams to be very good at the same time, because the comparison made is not based on an independent basis, but based on the league average. There will always be a similar amount of teams above and below average.

That's also a reason why the Stepien rule is in place; just to save owners from themselves, and give the fanbase overall at least some hope of drafting that superstar player in the nearby future.

Even if fans support the tanking process, the evidence shows that people stop buying tickets when the team sucks.

Indeed, and that doesn't even take the ticket prices into account. The attendance isn't really the measuring stick here, but it should be the overall revenue adjusted for league averages. Also, new arenas have the effect that they attract some more people at the beginning.

Also ----- I just want to note that I don't think the question of whether tanking is a good or bad idea is a good proxy for measuring Hinkie's quality as a GM.
Hinkie would have only entered this project after a significant amount of research on the issue, and enthusiasm from his owners.
Sam Hinkie represents a lot more than just tanking.

I agree with that. We also should note that the ownership must have been in agreement here, because otherwise they wouldn't have hired Hinkie in the first place.

[ampersand5]

I think some forget being bad is not enough to get talent. You must evaluate talent with high accuracy and you really need to be lucky.

One thing Crow mentioned really got my attention. What's the worth of the championship? or a win or wins in the Finals? or getting swept in the Finals? or getting to WCF/ECF? or second round? or first round exit? I mean what you should risk for each one of them? I believe most people have different opinions...

Say, you want to increase your title chance from 5 to 10%. What should be risked for that? Championship should be worth 20 times more than what you're risking or otherwise it's a wrong move. Now, what do you think should be risked?

As for owners, they couldn't care less about championship or these stuff. They are only means to an end. I believe they certainly have a projection on the targeted profit in 1-2-3-4-5-10 years. Looking at from this perspective, the owners of 76ers probably decided it's passed the point where Hinkie's predicted success now would end up with a significant profit for them.

BTW while we're talking about the owners, that letter of Hinkie's (I'm ashamed for him) probably made the owners even question how could they hire Hinkie in the first place. It seems Hinkie came to job as an analytics person but left as a philosophe wannabe. There were some analytical arguments in the letter but those were worse. They were generally about his reliance on ESPN predictions to support his arguments. After everything, I don't believe for a moment Hinkie will get a GM job again in NBA. He's dona as a GM.

I've never been a fan of a team that has come close to winning an NBA title, so my opinion might be biased by that, but I lean towards not valuing championships very much. I have no idea what the economics of winning a championship are (or being an elite team) - although after getting Lebron, I know that the value of the Cavs increased like crazy.
Some owners only care about the bottom line, but many actually do care about wining qua winning; Mark Cuban is the best example of this.

I reject the idea that a person is an "analytics" or a "philosophy" person - these are merely tools to help aid one's understanding of the problems in front of them. I pity the person who doesn't embrace both (and many others) tools.
I disagree with you on your view of the letter - I think it was brilliant, and I am quite confident that I am not alone in that opinion.
There are people who think like that, and there are people who don't; I believe dialogue between those groups on these issues is going to be incommensurable.

[Nate]

...
Does anyone know of any research/commentary on the economics of tanking (ie A case study of lost revenue vs potential future gains)? I'd be curious to see what the numbers suggest.
...

Rather than speculating about "tanking" we can just look at attendance effects of win/loss records and high draft picks. (There seems to be some publications about those.) My understanding is that gate revenue will be better over time for teams that don't tank.

The topic of economics is significantly more complex because we don't have a good notion of value. Team revenues are informed by the revenue sharing agreement, and the GM, coach, and owner all have their own agenda. If you only care about the championship, then there's no difference between second place, and last.