Being right is not enough

It took the greatest show on earth for people to act as though 3 is greater than 2.

A decade ago (somehow), Wardell Stephen Curry II, aka Steph, Chef, or the Baby-faced Assassin, was making and shaping history. Unbound by unwritten rules of engagement, carefree and without conscience, he had learned there was nothing and nobody who could stop him raining long-range bombs on shell-shocked opponents. Bang! Bang!

Already the reigning MVP and his Warriors the defending champions, Steph was on his way to becoming the first and only unanimous MVP and 73 wins in the NBA’s 82-game season, besting Jordan’s Bulls’ 72, which for the two decades prior many had treated less as a record and more akin to death and taxes.¹ He revealed himself as comfortably the greatest shooter of a basketball ever in such euphoric fashion that he force-fed a new geometry of the game to a rapidly dwindling number of haters.²

The NBA brought in the 3-point line in 1979, 35 years before Curry went nuclear. Suddenly there was an area of the court from which made shots were worth 50% more points. Surely, one might have thought, the game would change beyond all recognition, and sharpish. Yet the proportion of possessions that ended with a 3-point shot ticked up slowly, from 2.7% that first season, to 19.5% in Curry’s first season, with the 5 seasons up until 2009-10 below the long-run trend. Despite all the nerds and their spreadsheets saying it was, shall we say, suboptimal (like, leaving as good as one-third of the expected value on the floor suboptimal), the world’s best players stubbornly kept jacking it up from inside their comfort zone 18 or 20 or 22 feet from the hoop, instead of from 23 feet and 9 inches.³

Me and my childhood nickname Statto enter the story in 2014. I was passing the time between tweets by managing an international clinical research project spending tens of millions of euros to generate new charts and tables that might persuade doctors who hadn’t already been persuaded by half a century of best practice or a battery of contemporary randomized controlled trials to save their patients’ lives using anticoagulants. Anticoagulants, you see, are a problem for the poorly calibrated: don’t prescribe them, and the many strokes or heart attacks you fail to prevent are acts of God; prescribe them, and on your head be the handful of hemorrhages you cause. So I was all too familiar with being right not being enough, and with people leaving expected value - nay, expected lives - all over the fucking floor in order to avoid that fate worse than death: straying beyond the zone of one’s own comfort.⁴

The battle for the soul of the NBA was raging. The rate at which 3-point attempts were increasing had almost doubled since Steph entered the league, and Nate Silver was publishing probabilistic prediction models that had the upstart Warriors, who had never won a playoff series but shot a lot of threes, as Western Conference favourites. Charles Barkley, 1993 MVP turned not-in-my-day punditry personified, was yelling that analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent. I picked my side, fluttering on the Warriors at 16/1,⁵ a stake which got me invested enough to start watching regularly as they became the greatest show on earth.⁶

It wasn’t just Steph. Splash Brother Klay Thompson was maybe the second best shooter of a basketball ever. Skeleton key Draymond Green unlocked the Warriors’ Death Lineup which laid waste to the league by playing shooters at all five positions without derailing the dominant and oft-forgotten defense.⁷ Coach Steve Kerr’s egalitarian system (and Steph’s enthusiasm for moving off the ball) leveraged the long-range threat into uncontested dunks. All those pieces mattered. And Steph was the piece that mattered most, in fact and in the popular imagination.⁸

Not for Steph the athlete’s sense of supreme talent and its trappings as crosses to bear. No doubt dedicated to his craft, he doesn’t take himself too seriously. His range made him undeniable, and his on-court demeanor made him undeniably cool, our joy watching born of his joy doing. He became the baby-faced poster child for the analytics revolution, and in spite of the reactionary and tribal headwinds to individual transcendence in team sports, he became almost universally beloved. I fell in love twice over, once because he was the greatest showman, and again because he was proving the numbers right.

@nbaIt's been 10 years since this moment🕺 #NBA #basketball #StephenCurry #Warriors

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Nobody else yet has come close to joining Steph all the way out at the long-range volume-efficiency frontier. Not for lack of trying: general managers wantonly drafting wannabes, coaches giving them the green light, and everyone chucking with gleeful abandon. The 3-point attempt rate leapt from 24% in Steph’s first MVP season to 34% five seasons later. In a copycat league, the time when the game changed beyond recognition, and sharpish, wasn’t when three being greater than two became knowable, or known, or written down, but when it rained down, night after night in glorious high definition, as the greatest show on earth, and ended in a parade.

The first of Steph’s four parades.

The inimitable Andy Masley wrote recently about how his own blog’s success is proof, if more were needed, that there’s a ready and willing audience for numbers and their implications. That seeming exactly right, based on my own appetite for analytics blogs and the thriving communities it’s led me into, underpins the existence of this blog. And it leaves open the question of how to reach consequential decision-makers and action-takers who haven’t yet found our corner of the Internet, or haven’t found it’s for them.

A chart made by my editor, who with some prompting did a much better job more quickly than I would have alone.

I read Steph’s teaching as, whenever there are deadly serious charts or tables getting less attention than their implications warrant, or lines which if they went up would make the world a better place, I should package them up in the most entertaining blog I can muster and send it. I’m betting sporting storytime is one of a million untried or under-tried ways to bring nuanced analysis to life in ways that land not as dry lecture but as entertainment, droll or otherwise. And there’s a version of this anybody dedicated to solving pressing problems can do every day, working not in secret or with a dour sense of duty, rather as showmen, shooting our best long shots.

Training data

• 📺Analytics are just some crap some people who were really smart made up just to get in the game because they had no talent (2015). This, to me, is Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

• 📝Stephen Curry is the Revolution (2015) and The Case For Stephen Curry, MVP (2017). The prophets didn’t stop posting just because Steph was incarnate, and these from Benjamin Morris at fivethirtyeight.com (rip) are gospel.⁹

• 📺Steph Curry Drains the Game Winner vs Oklahoma City (2016). The single most memorable moment of Steph’s ascension. The pursuit of 73 wins, the last second of overtime in a game he’s already hit 11 threes, the sheer audacity of pulling from that deep, the double bang, the shimmy.

• 🎵Science Fiction (2018). “I want to make a simple point about peace and love / But in a sexy way where it’s not obvious / Highlight dangers and send out hidden messages / The way some science fiction does.”¹⁰

• 📺Why Steph Curry might be the best offensive player ever (2021). Preach.

1. The 73-win Warriors would famously go on to blow a 3-1 lead in the best-of-7 Finals to LeBron’s Cavs (having themselves overcome a 3-1 deficit in the previous round). Steph was injured earlier in the playoffs and was a notch short of his most incandescent self. LeBron went full GOAT for 3 straight games, wrapping Game 7 with The Block, one of the most iconic plays in NBA history.

2. If this blog goes on to say much of anything, it will surely say it about cost effectiveness, calibration, and probabilistic thinking amid uncertainty. For now we can be so bold as to say with near certainty that Steph's 2012-16 contract, signed at a below-market rate in the wake of some inopportunely timed ankle injuries that served only to postpone his going supernova, was the bargain to end all basketball bargains. (And let’s not today get into everything it enabled in 2016 free agency with the cap spike and the Hamptons and the cupcakes and whether or not Kevin Durant was a worthy Finals MVP in ‘17 and ‘18 or coasting to uncontested dunks on Curry’s coat tails.)

3. The established orthodoxy’s way of thinking about individual efficiency (and, for those able to go one step past “yay points!”, reputation, value, and associated salary), was field goal percentage (FG%), which by dividing makes by attempts made no attempt to account for the 50% bonus some field goals earned. This was easily fixed, on the Internet at least, by switching to effective field goal percentage (eFG%). Today we have true shooting percentage (TS%), which also captures free throws, and adjusted true shooting percentage (aTS%), which also also captures turnovers. Not to mention the volume metrics, and efficiency-volume composites. There is not yet The One True Number.

4. Doctors, it turns out, have a lot in common with coaches who play not to lose, or not to be blamed for losing. GARFIELD (the Global Anticoagulant Registry in the Field) launched in 2010, and in the first cohort more than 1-in-3 atrial fibrillation patients at high risk for stroke went untreated (subsequent analyses found only a small minority of them were reported as refusing treatment; for the rest it was “clinician’s choice”). The Hippocratic harm principle might work fine for bumper stickers, but it’s DOA in a clinical setting defined by tradeoffs, which is to say all clinical settings. It’s been established since the 1950s that crude risk-scoring algorithms better predict patient outcomes than doctors with their expert clinical judgement and pesky cognitive biases.

5. My dalliance with the online “exchanges” ended abruptly when a comrade became a professional gambler and told me, an amateur, in no uncertain terms, to cut it out, what with people like him having (for better or worse) parlayed their physics degrees into sophisticated systems for extracting cash from these markets and people like me being rather on the wrong end of that structural advantage. To underscore the extent to which this particular wager was good fortune in a good bet’s clothing: I hadn’t understood that “winning the Western Conference” required winning three playoff series, not just topping regular season standings. Luckily the lads came through on both on their way to the title.

6. No better commitment device than money on the line, so Steph and the Warriors immediately became a serious contender for my sporting affections. Even watching the Warriors blow a 3-1 lead was a lot more fun than watching Arsenal collapse approaching the line in the 2016 Premier League title race, out-lasted by Leicester City, who had opened the season as 5000/1 no-hopers.

7. Not that Draymond never derailed anything. To take just one example, the turning point of the 2016 Finals was when he decided during Game 4 to punch LeBron in the balls, getting himself banned for the pivotal Game 5.

8. Basketball is a star-driven sport to begin with, and on top of what Steph could do on his own, the effect he had on his team mates lapped the field. Threes aren’t just 50% higher: they warp the game by forcing defenses to cover the whole floor and opening up the area around the basket. Steph’s gravity got his team mates wide open, and in 2017 (for example) their true shooting percentage was 7.3 percentage points lower when he was off the court, compared to 3.9 for LeBron’s team mates, and the rest even further back.

9. Note that in 2017, after unanimously winning MVP, advanced stats showed Steph was still under-rated by MVP voters.

10. “...But I've a feeling that the whole thing / May well just end up too clever for its own good / The way some science fiction does.”