832 lines
47 KiB
Markdown
832 lines
47 KiB
Markdown
---
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created_at: '2010-05-14T04:18:10.000Z'
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title: An NBA Superstar with No Stats (2009)
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url: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all
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author: shadowsun7
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points: 279
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story_text: ''
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comment_text:
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num_comments: 52
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story_id:
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story_title:
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story_url:
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parent_id:
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created_at_i: 1273810690
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_tags:
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- story
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- author_shadowsun7
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- story_1346536
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objectID: '1346536'
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year: 2009
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---
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**Early on, Hoop Scoop magazine** named Shane Battier the fourth-best
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seventh grader in the United States. When he graduated from Detroit
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Country Day School in 1997, he received the Naismith Award as the best
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high-school basketball player in the nation. When he graduated from Duke
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in 2001, where he won a record-tying 131 college-basketball games,
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including that year’s N.C.A.A. championship, he received another
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Naismith Award as the best college basketball player in the nation. He
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was drafted in the first round by the woeful Memphis Grizzlies, not just
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a bad basketball team but the one with the worst winning percentage in
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N.B.A. history — whereupon he was almost instantly dismissed, even by
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his own franchise, as a lesser talent. The year after Battier joined the
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Grizzlies, the team’s general manager was fired and the N.B.A. legend
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Jerry West, a k a the Logo because his silhouette is the official emblem
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of the N.B.A., took over the team. “From the minute Jerry West got there
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he was trying to trade me,” Battier says. If West didn’t have any
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takers, it was in part because Battier seemed limited: most of the other
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players on the court, and some of the players on the bench, too, were
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more obviously gifted than he is. “He’s, at best, a marginal N.B.A.
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athlete,” Morey says.
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The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in his
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third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each of
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his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season, Battier
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was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48. In his
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first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then, last year,
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went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. Only the 1971-2
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Los Angeles Lakers have won more games consecutively in the N.B.A. And
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because of injuries, the Rockets played 11 of those 22 games without
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their two acknowledged stars, Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, on the court
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at the same time; the Rockets player who spent the most time actually
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playing for the Rockets during the streak was Shane Battier. This year
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Battier, recovering from off-season surgery to remove bone spurs from an
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ankle, has played in just over half of the Rockets’ games. That has only
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highlighted his importance. “This year,” Morey says, “we have been a
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championship team with him and a bubble playoff team without him.”
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Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside
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the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by
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superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some
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magical ability to win.
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Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job. In
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2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire new
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management for his losing team and went looking specifically for someone
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willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,” Alexander told
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me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data. And I wanted to
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use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl, it was because I
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wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking at players in the
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normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right
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way.”
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The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use of
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statistics to find new and better ways to value players and strategies,
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has found its way into every major sport. Not just basketball and
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football, but also soccer and
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[cricket](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/cricket_game/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier "More articles about Cricket (Game).")
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and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now supports
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a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to be played
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but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the fact, all
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but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer beater, of
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course the Pittsburgh Steelers won the [Super
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Bowl](http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/super_bowl/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier "More articles about the Super Bowl.")
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— are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact.
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The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern
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thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of course
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to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence the
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new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense
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interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on
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his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture
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inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture
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inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is
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that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.
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When Alexander, a Wall Street investor, bought the Rockets in 1993, the
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notion that basketball was awaiting some statistical reformation hadn’t
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occurred to anyone. At the time, Daryl Morey was at Northwestern
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University, trying to figure out how to get a job in professional sports
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and thinking about applying to business schools. He was tall and had
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played high-school basketball, but otherwise he gave off a quizzical,
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geeky aura. “A lot of people who are into the new try to hide it,” he
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says. “With me there was no point.” In the third grade he stumbled upon
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the work of the baseball writer Bill James — the figure most responsible
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for the current upheaval in professional sports — and decided that what
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he really wanted to do with his life was put Jamesian principles into
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practice. He nursed this ambition through a fairly conventional academic
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career, which eventually took him to M.I.T.’s Sloan School of
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Management. There he opted for the entrepreneurial track, not because he
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actually wanted to be an entrepreneur but because he figured that the
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only way he would ever be allowed to run a pro-sports franchise was to
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own one, and the only way he could imagine having enough money to buy
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one was to create some huge business. “This is the 1990s — there’s no
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Theo,” Morey says, referring to Theo Epstein, the statistics-minded
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general manager of the Boston Red Sox. “Sandy Alderson is progressive,
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but nobody knows it.” Sandy Alderson, then the general manager of the
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Oakland Athletics, had also read Bill James and begun to usher in the
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new age of statistical analysis in baseball. “So,” Morey continues, “I
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just assumed that getting rich was the only way in.” Apart from using it
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to acquire a pro-sports team, Morey had no exceptional interest in
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money.
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Photo
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He didn’t need great wealth, as it turned out. After graduating from
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business school, he went to work for a consulting firm in Boston called
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Parthenon, where he was tapped in 2001 to advise a group trying to buy
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the Red Sox. The bid failed, but a related group went and bought the
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Celtics — and hired Morey to help reorganize the business. In addition
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to figuring out where to set ticket prices, Morey helped to find a new
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general manager and new people looking for better ways to value
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basketball players. The Celtics improved. Leslie Alexander heard
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whispers that Morey, who was 33, was out in front of those trying to
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rethink the game, so he hired him to remake the Houston Rockets.
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Advertisement
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[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-4)
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When Morey came to the Rockets, a huge chunk of the team’s allotted
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payroll — the N.B.A. caps payrolls and taxes teams that exceed them —
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was committed, for many years to come, to two superstars: Tracy McGrady
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and Yao Ming. Morey had to find ways to improve the Rockets without
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spending money. “We couldn’t afford another superstar,” he says, “so we
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went looking for nonsuperstars that we thought were undervalued.” He
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went looking, essentially, for underpaid players. “That’s the scarce
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resource in the N.B.A.,” he says. “Not the superstar but the undervalued
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player.” Sifting the population of midlevel N.B.A. players, he came up
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with a list of 15, near the top of which was the Memphis Grizzlies’
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forward Shane Battier. This perplexed even the man who hired Morey to
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rethink basketball. “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and
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obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to
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see it.”
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Alexander wasn’t alone. It was, and is, far easier to spot what Battier
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doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are
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unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block
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many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that,
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it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to
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come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s
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the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says.
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“Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t
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guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive
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situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be
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open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier
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scoring when he hasn’t exactly been open. Some large percentage of them
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came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon
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Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is
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probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says.
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“But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several
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times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s
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worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from
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physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow
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and hasn’t got much body control.”
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**Battier’s game is a weird** combination of obvious weaknesses and
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nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get
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better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot
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worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny
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ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but
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when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a
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knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the
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same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely
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guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces
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their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the
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defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by
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helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey
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says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And
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everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect
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instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the
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hundredth percentile of every category.”
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There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss as
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there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information, and
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the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that the
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big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things.
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The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of
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their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle
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interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need
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something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful
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statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much
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what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds,
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assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped
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perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says,
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“and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for
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example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team.
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Another example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder,
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you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the
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team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.
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There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the
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team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts
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the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the
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group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice
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his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport
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masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player
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nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to
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selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there
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being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single
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time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy.
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Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point
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guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In
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football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that
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selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for
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being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for
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instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their
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sins tend to occur off the field.
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It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game
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— where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his
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own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently
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complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is
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making them.
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Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious
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example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an
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assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court
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for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a
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trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational
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dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal
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assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,”
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Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the
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ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love
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the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it becomes
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a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets the
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ball back. Dikembe Mutombo, Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous
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for blocking shots, “has always been the best in the league in the
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recovery of the ball after his block,” says Morey, as he begins to make
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a case for Mutombo’s unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even
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to Dikembe there’s a selfish component. He made his name by doing the
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finger wag.” The finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it
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against his hip and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house\!
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“And if he doesn’t catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the
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finger wag. And he loves the finger wag.” His team of course would be
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better off if Mutombo didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his
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finger wag. “We’ve had to yell at him: start the break, start the break
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— then do your finger wag\!”
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When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that can’t
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benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard.
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“Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that
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can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on
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defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player
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accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this
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deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says.
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“We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and
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the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They all
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maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs.
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“It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of
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teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re
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getting paid.”
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Advertisement
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[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-5)
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Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey has
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come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish
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basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one
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step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle,
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hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests.
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“Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to
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shoot more,” Morey says. “I’m not sure that that ever happened.” Last
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season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was
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assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili
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comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the
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minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick
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Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered
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the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put
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me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”
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One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is
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plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any
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given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly
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perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s
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four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have
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a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his
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play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential
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distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render
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plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A
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good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more
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per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season,
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the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the
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Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of
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Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his
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career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the
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difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players
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who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy
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McGrady.
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Photo
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**As the game against** the Lakers started, Morey took his seat, on the
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aisle, nine rows behind the Rockets’ bench. The odds, on this night,
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were not good. Houston was playing without its injured superstar,
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McGrady (who was in the clubhouse watching TV), and its injured best
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supporting actor, Ron Artest (cheering in street clothes from the
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bench). The Lakers were staffed by household names. The only Rockets
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player on the floor with a conspicuous shoe contract was the center Yao
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Ming — who opened the game by tipping the ball backward. Shane Battier
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began his game by grabbing it.
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Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts
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obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his
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efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents.
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They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose
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their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized
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Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred
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or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject —
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which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how,
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instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier
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would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser
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rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own
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man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a
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Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot
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goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center
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for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to
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maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without
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having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when
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Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather
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than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When
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you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in
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front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We
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didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could
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say we did, but we didn’t.”
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People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but
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that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special
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package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey
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says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most
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players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re
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thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete
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zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different
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places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in
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different relationships to other players — how well he scored off
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screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier
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learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually
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assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that Allen Iverson
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is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his
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right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State
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Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. “Steve
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Jackson,” Battier says, “is statistically better going to his right, but
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he loves to go to his left — and goes to his left almost twice as
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often.” The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is a statistical freak:
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he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there is no one way to play
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him that is better than another. He is equally efficient both off the
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dribble and off the pass, going left and right and from any spot on the
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floor.
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Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than
|
||
everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points
|
||
for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he
|
||
drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to
|
||
his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he
|
||
shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when
|
||
he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also
|
||
if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute
|
||
worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant
|
||
is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it,
|
||
“the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the
|
||
Rockets can see which teams think about the game as they do is by
|
||
identifying those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal
|
||
outcome, from the Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to
|
||
dribble left and pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen
|
||
often enough and you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40
|
||
points on 40 shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not
|
||
to keep him from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as
|
||
possible.” The court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him
|
||
what percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it
|
||
might as well.
|
||
|
||
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift for
|
||
encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of doing
|
||
this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when
|
||
Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the
|
||
game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the
|
||
N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense
|
||
should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is
|
||
on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A.
|
||
athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive
|
||
threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
|
||
|
||
And if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from
|
||
watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent
|
||
much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like. Bryant
|
||
shot early and often, but he looked pretty good from everywhere. On
|
||
defense, Battier talked to his teammates a lot more than anyone else on
|
||
the court, but from the stands it was hard to see any point to this. And
|
||
yet, he swears, there’s a reason to almost all of it: when he decides
|
||
where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly
|
||
reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an
|
||
hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either
|
||
refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s
|
||
any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the
|
||
numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle
|
||
difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an
|
||
intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might
|
||
kind of sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because
|
||
there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”
|
||
|
||
Advertisement
|
||
|
||
[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-6)
|
||
|
||
Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy
|
||
with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard
|
||
the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in
|
||
basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot
|
||
afford to let it distract him. Only once during the Lakers game did we
|
||
glimpse a clean, satisfying comparison of the efficient strategy and the
|
||
inefficient one — that is, an outcome that reflected the odds. Ten feet
|
||
from the hoop, Bryant got the ball with his back to the basket; with
|
||
Battier pressing against him, he fell back and missed a 12-foot shot off
|
||
the front of the rim. Moments earlier, with Battier reclining in the
|
||
deep soft chair that masquerades as an N.B.A. bench, his teammate Brent
|
||
Barry found himself in an analogous position. Bryant leaned into Barry,
|
||
hit a six-foot shot and drew a foul. But this was the exception;
|
||
normally you don’t get perfect comparisons. You couldn’t see the odds
|
||
shifting subtly away from the Lakers and toward the Rockets as Bryant
|
||
was forced from 6 feet out to 12 feet from the basket, or when he had
|
||
Battier’s hand in his eyes. All you saw were the statistics on the
|
||
board, and as the seconds ticked off to halftime, the game tied 54-54,
|
||
Bryant led all scorers with 16 points.
|
||
|
||
## Newsletter Sign Up
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[View all New York Times newsletters.](/newsletters)
|
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|
||
But he required 20 possessions to get them. And he had started moaning
|
||
to the referees. Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the history of
|
||
the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a slow-motion
|
||
replay of the Yankees’ third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box.
|
||
Glancing back to see where the catcher has set up is not strictly
|
||
against baseball’s rules, but it violates the code. A hitter who does it
|
||
is likely to find the next pitch aimed in the general direction of his
|
||
eyes. A-Rod, the best hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing
|
||
back by moving not his head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It
|
||
was like watching a billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction
|
||
to take on his tax returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized:
|
||
this is the instinct that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant
|
||
has the same instinct. Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was
|
||
grabbing his jersey, Battier was pushing when no one was looking,
|
||
Battier was committing crimes against humanity. Just before the half
|
||
ended, Battier took a referee aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe
|
||
does this all the time. I’m playing him honest. Don’t fall for his
|
||
stuff.” Moments later, after failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the
|
||
ball, screamed at the ref and was whistled for a technical foul.
|
||
|
||
Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted by a
|
||
tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has picked
|
||
up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the
|
||
final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the
|
||
wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly
|
||
at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He
|
||
heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds.
|
||
Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s
|
||
shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our stats,”
|
||
Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team might
|
||
not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”
|
||
|
||
Tonight, the ball landed in Battier’s hands milliseconds before the half
|
||
finished. He moved just slowly enough for the buzzer to sound, heaved
|
||
the ball the length of the floor and then sprinted to the locker room —
|
||
having not taken a single shot.
|
||
|
||
**In 1996 a young writer** for The Basketball Times named Dan Wetzel
|
||
thought it might be neat to move into the life of a star high-school
|
||
basketball player and watch up close as big-time basketball colleges
|
||
recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then spent five months
|
||
trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered high-school
|
||
basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and hundreds and
|
||
hundreds of kids — really every single prominent high-school basketball
|
||
player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s this public perception
|
||
that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of them are really good
|
||
guys, and some of them are very, very bright. Kobe’s very bright.
|
||
LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never been anything like
|
||
Shane Battier.”
|
||
|
||
Photo
|
||
|
||
Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take
|
||
charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six
|
||
schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and Michigan
|
||
State — and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set
|
||
out to minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere
|
||
with his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit
|
||
Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He
|
||
granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him.
|
||
These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in the
|
||
world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no
|
||
exceptions. When the Kentucky coach Rick Pitino, who had just won a
|
||
national championship, tried to call Battier outside his assigned time,
|
||
Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What 17-year-old has the
|
||
stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off Rick Pitino because he
|
||
calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own question: “It wasn’t
|
||
like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’ It was like, ‘This
|
||
isn’t real.’ ”
|
||
|
||
Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The
|
||
minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational
|
||
high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named Elton Brand — and
|
||
talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the
|
||
Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,”
|
||
Wetzel says. “He was Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
|
||
|
||
Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day School,
|
||
watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against Kobe
|
||
Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both of
|
||
whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he
|
||
said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by
|
||
refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention
|
||
to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.
|
||
|
||
I pointed to his footwork; he pointed to a gorgeous young woman in the
|
||
stands wearing a Battier jersey. (“You don’t see too many good-looking
|
||
girls with Battier jerseys on,” he said. “It’s usually 12 and under or
|
||
60 and over. That’s my demographic.”) I noted the uncanny way in which
|
||
he got his hand right in front of Bryant’s eyes before a shot; he
|
||
motioned to his old high school library (“I came in here every day
|
||
before classes”). He took my excessive interest in this one game as
|
||
proof of a certain lack of imagination, I’m pretty sure. “I’ve been
|
||
doing the same thing for seven years,” he said, “and this is the only
|
||
game anyone wants to talk about. It’s like, Oh, you can play defense?”
|
||
It grew clear that one reason he didn’t particularly care to watch
|
||
himself play, apart from the tedium of it, was that he plays the game so
|
||
self-consciously. Unable to count on the game to properly measure his
|
||
performance, he learned to do so himself. He had, in some sense, already
|
||
seen the video. When I finally compelled him to watch, he was knocking
|
||
the ball out of Bryant’s hands as Bryant raised it from his waist to his
|
||
chin. “If I get to be commissioner, that will count as a blocked shot,”
|
||
Battier said. “But it’s nothing. They don’t count it as a blocked shot.
|
||
I do that at least 30 times a season.”
|
||
|
||
Advertisement
|
||
|
||
[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-7)
|
||
|
||
In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes I’ve
|
||
come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they tell
|
||
you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other than
|
||
where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless, for
|
||
instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker
|
||
room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the
|
||
people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern
|
||
is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had
|
||
huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a
|
||
swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his
|
||
throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit
|
||
Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back
|
||
where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in
|
||
what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what
|
||
happened when he was 12.
|
||
|
||
When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he was already
|
||
conspicuous at 6-foot-4, and a year later he would be 6-foot-7. “Growing
|
||
up tall was something I got used to,” he said. “I was the kid about whom
|
||
they always said, ‘Check his birth certificate.’ ” He was also the only
|
||
kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough, the
|
||
school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris
|
||
Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national
|
||
high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high
|
||
school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the
|
||
next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard
|
||
of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur
|
||
Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found
|
||
himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too
|
||
soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of
|
||
the problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the
|
||
black A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,”
|
||
Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop.
|
||
I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”
|
||
|
||
Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was
|
||
either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully be
|
||
devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence that
|
||
many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his
|
||
character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more
|
||
pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city
|
||
asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of
|
||
some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he
|
||
played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a
|
||
white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular
|
||
season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the
|
||
black people. “On Martin Luther King Day, everyone in class would look
|
||
at me like I was supposed to know who he was and why he was important,”
|
||
Battier said. “When we had an official school picture, every other kid
|
||
was given a comb. I was the only one given a pick.” He was awkward and
|
||
shy, or as he put it: “I didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth
|
||
grade\! I’m just trying to fit in\!” And yet here he was shuttling
|
||
between a black world that treated him as white and a white world that
|
||
treated him as black. ‘‘Everything I’ve done since then is because of
|
||
what I went through with this,” he said. “What I did is alienate myself
|
||
from everybody. I’d eat lunch by myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort
|
||
of lost myself in the game.”
|
||
|
||
Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting into
|
||
the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high
|
||
school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then
|
||
he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,”
|
||
Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him
|
||
better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we lost
|
||
his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even when
|
||
he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at will, he
|
||
was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a mistake
|
||
to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or ambition, or
|
||
even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me the story of
|
||
this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber won three
|
||
state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the Naismith Award. I
|
||
won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the Naismith Awards.
|
||
All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I was in the eighth
|
||
grade.”
|
||
|
||
“Who’s they?” I asked.
|
||
|
||
“Pretty much everyone,” he said.
|
||
|
||
“White people?”
|
||
|
||
“No,” he said. “The street.”
|
||
|
||
**As the third quarter** began, Battier’s face appeared overhead, on the
|
||
Jumbotron, where he hammed it up and exhorted the crowd. Throughout the
|
||
game he was up on the thing more than any other player: plugging
|
||
teeth-whitening formulas, praising local jewelers, making public-service
|
||
announcements, telling the fans to make noise. When I mentioned to a
|
||
Rockets’ staff member that Battier seemed to have far more than his fair
|
||
share of big-screen appearances, he said, “Probably because he’s the
|
||
only one who’ll do them.”
|
||
|
||
I spent the second half with Sam Hinkie, the vice president of
|
||
basketball operations and the head of basketball analytics in the
|
||
Rockets’ front office. The game went back and forth. Bryant kept missing
|
||
more shots than he made. Neither team got much of a lead. More
|
||
remarkable than the game were Hinkie’s reactions — and it soon became
|
||
clear that while he obviously wanted the Rockets to win, he was
|
||
responding to different events on the court than the typical Rockets (or
|
||
N.B.A.) fan was.
|
||
|
||
Photo
|
||
|
||
“I care a lot more about what ought to have happened than what actually
|
||
happens,” said Hinkie, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford. The routine
|
||
N.B.A. game, he explained, is decided by a tiny percentage of the total
|
||
points scored. A team scores on average about 100 points a game, but two
|
||
out of three N.B.A. games are decided by fewer than 6 points — two or
|
||
three possessions. The effect of this, in his mind, was to raise
|
||
significantly the importance of every little thing that happened. The
|
||
Lakers’ Trevor Ariza, who makes 29 percent of his 3-point shots, hit a
|
||
crazy 3-pointer, and as the crowd moaned, Hinkie was almost distraught.
|
||
“That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” he said. “Because it’s a
|
||
near-random event. And it’s a 3-point swing.” When Bryant drove to the
|
||
basket, instead of being forced to take a jump shot, he said: “That’s
|
||
three-eighths of a point. These things accumulate.”
|
||
|
||
Advertisement
|
||
|
||
[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-8)
|
||
|
||
In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier and
|
||
Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With
|
||
most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but
|
||
with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which
|
||
way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had
|
||
once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even
|
||
when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the
|
||
Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can
|
||
do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an
|
||
inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95,
|
||
Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called
|
||
timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens
|
||
from here on will be randomness.”
|
||
|
||
The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by
|
||
Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I
|
||
looked up at the scoreboard:
|
||
|
||
Bryant: 30.
|
||
|
||
Battier: 0.
|
||
|
||
Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,” he
|
||
said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if Battier
|
||
wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12. No matter what
|
||
happens now, none of our coaches will say, ‘If only we could have gotten
|
||
a little more out of Battier.’ ”
|
||
|
||
**One statistical rule** of thumb in basketball is that a team leading
|
||
by more points than there are minutes left near the end of the game has
|
||
an 80 percent chance of winning. If your team is down by more than 6
|
||
points halfway through the final quarter, and you’re anxious to beat the
|
||
traffic, you can leave knowing that there is slightly less than a 20
|
||
percent chance you’ll miss a victory; on the other hand, if you miss a
|
||
victory, it will have been an improbable and therefore sensational one.
|
||
At no point on this night has either team had enough of a lead to set
|
||
fans, or even Rockets management, to calculating their confidence
|
||
intervals — but then, with 2:27 to play, the Lakers went up by 4: 99-95.
|
||
Then they got the ball back. The ball went to Bryant, and Battier shaded
|
||
him left — into Yao Ming. Bryant dribbled and took the best shot he
|
||
could, from Battier’s perspective: a long 2-point jump shot, off the
|
||
dribble, while moving left. He missed, the Rockets ran back the other
|
||
way, Rafer Alston drove the lane and hit a floater: 99-97, and 1:13 on
|
||
the clock. The Lakers missed another shot. Alston grabbed the rebound
|
||
and called timeout with 59 seconds left.
|
||
|
||
Whatever the Rockets planned went instantly wrong, when the inbound
|
||
pass, as soon as it was caught by the Rockets’ Carl Landry, was swatted
|
||
away by the Lakers. The ball was loose, bodies flew everywhere.
|
||
|
||
55 . . . 54 . . . 53 . . .
|
||
|
||
On the side of the court opposite the melee, Battier froze. The moment
|
||
he saw that the loose ball was likely to be secured by a teammate — but
|
||
before it was secured — he sprinted to the corner.
|
||
|
||
50 . . . 49 . . . 48 . . .
|
||
|
||
The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in
|
||
the N.B.A. One way the Rockets can tell if their opponents have taken to
|
||
analyzing basketball in similar ways as they do is their attitude to the
|
||
corner 3: the smart teams take a lot of them and seek to prevent their
|
||
opponents from taking them. In basketball there is only so much you can
|
||
plan, however, especially at a street-ball moment like this. As it
|
||
happened, Houston’s Rafer Alston was among the most legendary
|
||
street-ball players of all time — known as Skip 2 My Lou, a nickname he
|
||
received after a single spectacular move at Rucker Park, in Harlem.
|
||
“Shane wouldn’t last in street ball because in street ball no one
|
||
wants to see” his game, Alston told me earlier. “You better give us
|
||
something to ooh and ahh about. No one cares about someone who took a
|
||
charge.”
|
||
|
||
The Rockets’ offense had broken down, and there was no usual place for
|
||
Alston, still back near the half-court line, to go with the ball. The
|
||
Lakers’ defense had also broken down; no player was where he was meant
|
||
to be. The only person exactly where he should have been — wide open,
|
||
standing at the most efficient spot on the floor from which to shoot —
|
||
was Shane Battier. When Daryl Morey spoke of basketball intelligence, a
|
||
phrase slipped out: “the I.Q. of where to be.” Fitting in on a
|
||
basketball court, in the way Battier fits in, requires the I.Q. of where
|
||
to be. Bang: Alston hit Battier with a long pass. Bang: Battier shot the
|
||
3, guiltlessly. Nothing but net.
|
||
|
||
Rockets 100, Lakers 99.
|
||
|
||
43 . . . 42 . . . 41 . . .
|
||
|
||
At this moment, the Rockets’ front office would later calculate, the
|
||
team’s chances of winning rose from 19.2 percent to 72.6 percent. One
|
||
day some smart person will study the correlation between shifts in
|
||
probabilities and levels of noise, but for now the crowd was ignorantly
|
||
berserk: it sounded indeed like the largest crowd in the history of
|
||
Houston’s Toyota Center. Bryant got the ball at half-court and dribbled
|
||
idly, searching for his opening. This was his moment, the one great
|
||
players are said to live for, when everyone knows he’s going to take the
|
||
shot, and he takes it anyway. On the other end of the floor it wasn’t
|
||
the shooter who mattered but the shot. Now the shot was nothing, the
|
||
shooter everything.
|
||
|
||
Advertisement
|
||
|
||
[Continue reading the main story](#story-continues-9)
|
||
|
||
33 . . . 32 . . . 31 . . .
|
||
|
||
Bryant — 12 for 31 on the night — took off and drove to the right, his
|
||
strength, in the middle of the lane. Battier cut him off. Bryant tossed
|
||
the ball back out to Derek Fisher, out of shooting range.
|
||
|
||
30 . . . 29 . . .
|
||
|
||
Like everyone else in the place, Battier assumed that the game was still
|
||
in Bryant’s hands. If he gave the ball up, it was only so that he might
|
||
get it back. Bryant popped out. He was now a good four feet beyond the
|
||
3-point line, or nearly 30 feet from the basket.
|
||
|
||
28 . . .
|
||
|
||
Bryant caught the ball and, 27.4 feet from the basket, the Rockets’
|
||
front office would later determine, leapt. Instantly his view of that
|
||
basket was blocked by Battier’s hand. This was not an original
|
||
situation. Since the 2002-3 season, Bryant had taken 51 3-pointers at
|
||
the very end of close games from farther than 26.75 feet from the
|
||
basket. He had missed 86.3 percent of them. A little over a year ago the
|
||
Lakers lost to the Cleveland Cavaliers after Bryant missed a 3 from 28.4
|
||
feet. Three nights from now the Lakers would lose to the Orlando Magic
|
||
after Bryant missed a shot from 27.5 feet that would have tied the game.
|
||
It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be good.
|
||
|
||
Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit the
|
||
floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a
|
||
party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he
|
||
laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never
|
||
could control.**
|
||
|
||
[Continue reading the main story](#whats-next)
|