How much of a factor (in recent years) is "load management"? For:
> It was financially good for the Warriors this past season that they were so much more successful at home (33-8) than on the road (11-30); all things being equal, teams would prefer their wins to come in front of their own fans.
How often do the Warriors play vs. sit their stars at home and on the road?
Excellent post - everyone should read Scorecasting, absolutely necessary to understand how these effects unfold.
I am most interested in the competence of the NBA refs, putting bias aside for a moment. It’s a fast game of course, but there just seems to be an incredible amount of professional ref failure in NBA games, worse than other sports, as exemplified by the 2 Minute report.
I would love to see competence rankings of NBA referees, outcomes seem to be glaringly poor in inexplicable ways.
It's a bit nonobvious that "fan pressure impacts refs and this is what swings home games on the margin" implies "virtual fan pressure impacts refs, but now with opposite directionality of sign". Plausible-sounding hypothesis, sure, yet I think the level of confidence asserted is not quite backed up by the data.
On the meta level, one wonders if this will turn into a similar situation as baseball...fans getting what they say they want (homers or nothing!), which ends up making the game even more boring on net. There's a tension between the high-minded ideals of sportsmanship and fair play vs. I guess let's call it, uh - the kayfabe aspect of sportsball fandom? Not to imply that there's a conspiracy or things are rigged (certainly not at the same explicit fakery level as wrasslin'), just that it's ultimately an entertainment product. Close games are fun, Your Team winning is fun, superstars dominating is fun. "Fairness" is kinda just tangential to these fun-building aspects. Need enough to feel like there's some real stakes, a fighting chance, skin in the game. But beyond that? I dunno, man.
Good for a first article though. Milan's got some competition now. Next thing you know, she'll be a whiz at Datawrapper charts too...
This post seems especially relevant with the recent suspect foul call that gave Jimmy Butler three free throws in the Finals and could have potentially extended the series against the Nuggets. Seems like an example that agrees with what you’re saying regarding refs being biased in favor of extending series.
I don’t think AI is capable of completely substituting for human referees right now, but maybe in the future. Very pro NBA implementing some AI to complement human referees and make simple calls like they’ve done in tennis
I suspect it depends on how much you care about fairness versus accuracy. I think you could train an AI referee to make the right call in something like 95%+ of cases (easier than self-driving car I suspect) but that means like 1 call in 20 might be totally unjustified.
I think that's the sticking point. It's one thing to have bad calls that the viewer can at least see were close or hard to tell. It's another to have bad calls that are perfectly clear to people you nevertheless have to accept.
Love, LOVE seeing a sports article here. I'm sure most of us have spent time around 538 but don't have good places to discuss that sort of content. Well-done, Maya.
I would certainly support at least a weekly sports post, whether it just be a graph on the open thread or a longer article.
Where the improvement is really noticable is between the pro and college game. They've done good work to make the NBA a better product as far as officiating. College basketball (football as well) suffer from bad officiating. I imagine one issue is the higher amount of games and thus officials. It takes a lot of money to produce a good crop.
It's like having 538 with the Slow Boring comments section. Definitely would support a weekly sports-themed post, even if it's just one of the brief open discussion posts and not a full article.
Should be seeing some mid-season baseball data covering the rule changes, for example.
Also Matt's sports opinions have been... somewhat more poorly informed relative to his average opinions about everything else. So if Maya is raising the bar, all the better!
Washington sports have been poorly PERformed relative to everything else so it's just statistically expected. (Yeah, yeah the Nats had 2019 but they've been bad recently. And Matt can't compete with Dara Lind on Nats fandom.)
Glad to see someone is picking up the torch for fivethirtyeight. It wasn’t on my favorite subject, but the research and arguments were so compelling I read to the end.
I'm a bandwagon NBA fan, and during the playoffs I'll read game threads on reddit/NBA. It's honestly awful because it's mostly people bitching about the reffing. I buy that it's gotten better, but that improvement doesn't seem to have filtered down to fan reaction!
I don't know if it will, bc fans love to complain. But if the League is legitimately cleaning up its act and officiating is getting better, I think this will keep people watching and over time hopefully public opinion will accurately shift
Just one quibble: you can’t compare changes in home team advantage in the playoffs without taking into account the relative strength of the two teams, because more games will be played on the court of the higher seed. The disparity in strength can vary by season because of differences in general competitiveness across the league. In a season where there are some very strong teams and below .500 teams are making the playoffs, the home court advantage will be larger than a season where teams are more evenly balanced
This issue is perhaps even more pronounced in college sports. Non-conference games are overwhelmingly held at the home field of the stronger team (e.g., in football, UNLV and Bowling Green play at Michigan this year; a Michigan/Bama/OSU would never travel to play those types of teams). That said, you can solve this problem by restricting your sample set to conference games, so perhaps these studies did that.
Also, ref bias is higher stakes in college MBB bc March Madness is single elimination. This makes you appreciate the 7 game series! Individual biases / bad calls matter less
Totally agree; I think some of the studies I looked at tried to adjust for team performance/strength but this is obviously really hard to do. Definitely gets at a broader issue around how hard it is to mitigate the enormous amount of potentially confounding variables around officiating.
How much of a factor (in recent years) is "load management"? For:
> It was financially good for the Warriors this past season that they were so much more successful at home (33-8) than on the road (11-30); all things being equal, teams would prefer their wins to come in front of their own fans.
How often do the Warriors play vs. sit their stars at home and on the road?
Excellent post - everyone should read Scorecasting, absolutely necessary to understand how these effects unfold.
I am most interested in the competence of the NBA refs, putting bias aside for a moment. It’s a fast game of course, but there just seems to be an incredible amount of professional ref failure in NBA games, worse than other sports, as exemplified by the 2 Minute report.
I would love to see competence rankings of NBA referees, outcomes seem to be glaringly poor in inexplicable ways.
It's a bit nonobvious that "fan pressure impacts refs and this is what swings home games on the margin" implies "virtual fan pressure impacts refs, but now with opposite directionality of sign". Plausible-sounding hypothesis, sure, yet I think the level of confidence asserted is not quite backed up by the data.
On the meta level, one wonders if this will turn into a similar situation as baseball...fans getting what they say they want (homers or nothing!), which ends up making the game even more boring on net. There's a tension between the high-minded ideals of sportsmanship and fair play vs. I guess let's call it, uh - the kayfabe aspect of sportsball fandom? Not to imply that there's a conspiracy or things are rigged (certainly not at the same explicit fakery level as wrasslin'), just that it's ultimately an entertainment product. Close games are fun, Your Team winning is fun, superstars dominating is fun. "Fairness" is kinda just tangential to these fun-building aspects. Need enough to feel like there's some real stakes, a fighting chance, skin in the game. But beyond that? I dunno, man.
Good for a first article though. Milan's got some competition now. Next thing you know, she'll be a whiz at Datawrapper charts too...
Flopping, rip thrus, and going floppy on real contact, I think, also has had an impact on how fans watch the game.
This post seems especially relevant with the recent suspect foul call that gave Jimmy Butler three free throws in the Finals and could have potentially extended the series against the Nuggets. Seems like an example that agrees with what you’re saying regarding refs being biased in favor of extending series.
Isn't AI refereeing the obvious solution? Take the humans out of the equation. It doesn't need to be perfect only decent and unbiased!
I don’t think AI is capable of completely substituting for human referees right now, but maybe in the future. Very pro NBA implementing some AI to complement human referees and make simple calls like they’ve done in tennis
I suspect it depends on how much you care about fairness versus accuracy. I think you could train an AI referee to make the right call in something like 95%+ of cases (easier than self-driving car I suspect) but that means like 1 call in 20 might be totally unjustified.
I think that's the sticking point. It's one thing to have bad calls that the viewer can at least see were close or hard to tell. It's another to have bad calls that are perfectly clear to people you nevertheless have to accept.
Love, LOVE seeing a sports article here. I'm sure most of us have spent time around 538 but don't have good places to discuss that sort of content. Well-done, Maya.
I would certainly support at least a weekly sports post, whether it just be a graph on the open thread or a longer article.
Where the improvement is really noticable is between the pro and college game. They've done good work to make the NBA a better product as far as officiating. College basketball (football as well) suffer from bad officiating. I imagine one issue is the higher amount of games and thus officials. It takes a lot of money to produce a good crop.
Great article on a topic near and dear to my heart!
What a fantastic article!
We need to get a sports-related post from Maya each week.
It's like having 538 with the Slow Boring comments section. Definitely would support a weekly sports-themed post, even if it's just one of the brief open discussion posts and not a full article.
Should be seeing some mid-season baseball data covering the rule changes, for example.
Also Matt's sports opinions have been... somewhat more poorly informed relative to his average opinions about everything else. So if Maya is raising the bar, all the better!
Washington sports have been poorly PERformed relative to everything else so it's just statistically expected. (Yeah, yeah the Nats had 2019 but they've been bad recently. And Matt can't compete with Dara Lind on Nats fandom.)
Dan Snyder inflicted a generation of one of the worst sports performances in history.
Great article! I hope to read more from Maya Bodnick on Slow Boring and also more about the NBA.
1. It's not fixed, it's improved. But 60% is still 10 percent higher than fixed.
2. Bad umpiring/refereeing isn't nefarious. It just makes the game less enjoyable to watch. Which makes me watch less.
Glad to see someone is picking up the torch for fivethirtyeight. It wasn’t on my favorite subject, but the research and arguments were so compelling I read to the end.
I'm a bandwagon NBA fan, and during the playoffs I'll read game threads on reddit/NBA. It's honestly awful because it's mostly people bitching about the reffing. I buy that it's gotten better, but that improvement doesn't seem to have filtered down to fan reaction!
I don't know if it will, bc fans love to complain. But if the League is legitimately cleaning up its act and officiating is getting better, I think this will keep people watching and over time hopefully public opinion will accurately shift
Just one quibble: you can’t compare changes in home team advantage in the playoffs without taking into account the relative strength of the two teams, because more games will be played on the court of the higher seed. The disparity in strength can vary by season because of differences in general competitiveness across the league. In a season where there are some very strong teams and below .500 teams are making the playoffs, the home court advantage will be larger than a season where teams are more evenly balanced
This issue is perhaps even more pronounced in college sports. Non-conference games are overwhelmingly held at the home field of the stronger team (e.g., in football, UNLV and Bowling Green play at Michigan this year; a Michigan/Bama/OSU would never travel to play those types of teams). That said, you can solve this problem by restricting your sample set to conference games, so perhaps these studies did that.
Also, ref bias is higher stakes in college MBB bc March Madness is single elimination. This makes you appreciate the 7 game series! Individual biases / bad calls matter less
Totally agree; I think some of the studies I looked at tried to adjust for team performance/strength but this is obviously really hard to do. Definitely gets at a broader issue around how hard it is to mitigate the enormous amount of potentially confounding variables around officiating.