In October of 2006, Gregory Mankiw wrote a column entitled The Pigou Club Manifesto.
For those not familiar with the work of economist Arthur Pigou (1877-1959), Pigou is known (among other things) for advocating what has become known as a Pigovian tax. This is described at Investopedia as follows:
A special tax that is often levied on companies that pollute the environment or create excess social costs, called negative externalities, through business practices. In a true market economy, a Pigovian tax is the most efficient and effective way to correct negative externalities.
Whenever Mankiw observes a politician (or columnist, economist, etc…) advocating a tax to combat a negative externality, Mankiw declares that this person is now a member of the Pigou club. According to Mankiw, members of this club include Paul Krugman, Al Gore, Gary Becker, Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, and many others.
The WoW Club
In the spirit of the Pigou club, I propose the Wages of Wins Club, or WoW Club. What do you have to say to gain entry into this group?
The primary story told about basketball in The Wages of Wins is that players are not primarily paid to win. Players are primarily paid to score. And the scoring doesn’t have to be efficient. Basically, the more points a player scores – whether efficiently or inefficiently – the more money the player will receive.
Whenever a player, coach, pundit, etc… notes this basic story (whether they acknowledge The Wages of Wins or not) then I will declare that person as a member of the WoW Club.
For example, back in 1994 Glenn Robinson became a member of the WoW Club. As we note in the book (page 261 of the paperback):
Five games into his NBA career Glenn Robinson made the following observation quoted in an Associated Press article written by Jim Litke (1994): “I expect to do what I’m supposed to do. But a lot of people that don’t know the game, they think it’s all about scoring. I look at it from a team perspective. We have to do well as a team. I don’t need to go out there and score 30 points a game and have us lose. That won’t do us any good. It would help me individually.” Robinson added: “But I want to see all of us get something done.” So a very young Robinson notes that scoring helps him individually but may not help the team. It is interesting that this quote captures the essence of the argument we make in this chapter. Scoring does help a player earn more money. Wins, though, are about more than scoring.
Another member is Stephon Marbury. Back in November I posted the following excerpt from a New York magazine article by Tommy Craig:
In the midst of our upbeat Charleston conversation about religion and the new season, he raised the subject of his reputation for selfishness. “If I didn’t play the way how I played, I wouldn’t have gotten no max contract,” he said. “They can talk about whatever they wanna talk about me, because I got maxed. I’m a max player. Don’t get mad at me, because I’m telling you what’s real. One plus one is two, all day long, and it’s never gonna change. And that’s factorial.”
And now we have the following from a Play Magazine (New York Times) article by Chuck Klosterman. In Klosterman’s story is the following quote from Doc Rivers – head coach of the Boston Celtics:
“Most veterans in our league have had their day and chased the idea of being a star, and now they’ve fallen back to whatever they really are. They know who they are. Young guys always want to prove they’re better than whatever role you give them. They won’t buy into the system. They always say that they will, but the minute they have the chance to score, they’ll try to prove that they can be a scorer.”(hat tip to Kent for linking to this quote in the comments)
Rivers is saying that a player will choose scoring over winning. Again, players have an incentive to follow this course of action.
In the same article, Brian Scalabrine makes a similar argument (hence joining Rivers in the WoW Club).
The thing that really bothered me about last year’s team was the individualism during all the losses. Individual play was trumping the result of the game. If somebody went out and got 16 points in a loss, he would be like, ‘Hey, I got my 16.’ That was the culture of last year.”
Again, Scalabrine emphasizes how the focus on scoring can trump the focus on winning.
One should note that Rivers and Scalabrine are not the only Celtics in the club. As The Wisdom of Red Auerbach (a post from November of 2006) notes, Red Auerbach was perhaps the first member of the WoW Club. This is from a biographical sketch posted at ESPN.com.
Auerbach didn’t focus on the individuals on his teams. He looked at the “whole package.” While many of his players were outstanding, the Celtics were the first organization to popularize the concept of the role player. “That’s a player who willingly undertakes the thankless job that has to be done in order to make the whole package fly,” Auerbach said.
…. Auerbach said that the Celtics represent a philosophy that in its simplest form maintains that victory belongs to the team. “Individual honors are nice, but no Celtic has ever gone out of his way to achieve them,” he said. “We have never had the league’s top scorer. In fact, we won seven league championships without placing even one among the league’s top 10 scorers. Our pride was never rooted in statistics.”
I also noted in November of 2006 the following:
Auerbach also bemoaned in an interview broadcast on ESPN Classic that the focus of today’s players is on statistics, as opposed to winning. In Auerbach’s view, Bill Russell was a great player because he didn’t obsess on his own statistics, but rather sacrificed his stats so the team could win.
S0 there you have it. Members in the WoW Club include Glenn Robinson, Stephon Marbury, Doc Rivers, Brian Scalabrine, and Red Auerbach. Are there any other candidates?
Another Approach to the Story
In The Wages of Wins the incentive players have to pursue scoring is noted by looking at the relationship between free agent salary and player statistics. The regression indicates that scoring dominates player pay (a result found in a number of studies examining decision-making in the NBA).
For those looking for a different approach, I recommend a post at Arbitrarian titled “NBA Game Theory.” This column argues – using a simple Prisoner Dilemma game – that NBA players have an incentive to shoot (rather than pass to teammates). In other words, scoring is more important than winning. Again, that simply theoretical story fits the WoW Club story (so I guess Arbitrarian is also a member).
About those Celtics…
I should end this column with the Arbitrarian link, but I want to comment briefly on the Celtics performance this season.
The Klosterman article emphasizes that the Celtics improvement -which will probably by the biggest one-year leap in the history of the Association – is all about Kevin Garnett. Certainly adding Ray Allen helped. But it’s Garnett – a player who some believed was not a truly great player in Minnesota – that has transformed the Celtics into the NBA’s best (in terms of both wins and efficiency differential).
When we look at Wins Produced – reported in Table One – that’s indeed the story we see. Table One offers two projections of the Celtics. The first assumes that what the players on the Celtics did last year on a per-minute basis will be offered again this year (except for the rookies). The second projects what we have seen so far to the end of the season.
Table One: The Boston Celtics in 2007-08
The first projection – based on last year – says this team will win 59 games. The second says 66 victories. In other word, whether we look at this year’s numbers, or what these player did last year, we would expect Boston to be quite good.
When we look at the Celtics this year, it’s quite clear that Garnett is the most productive player on the team. And this is the same scenario we saw last year in Minnesota. But unlike Garnett’s experience in Minnesota, in Boston he has help. Paul Pierce, Rajon Rondo, and Ray Allen were all above average players last year. And each is above average again. Kendrick Perkins – who was above average in 2004-05 and 2005-06 – is again posting numbers beyond what we see from an average center. James Posey, Leon Powe, and Eddie House are also above average performers.
Two things to note about this list…
1. Last year in Minnesota, Garnett only had one teammate who was above average.
2. With the exception of Eddie House, all of Garnett’s teammates who are above average have a history of above average play.
In sum, the Celtics success this year is not because of great coaching (not to take anything away from Doc Rivers), great team chemistry, or simply the development of a winning attitude. The Boston success story is due to the decisions of Danny Ainge. It’s the general manager of this team that assembled these players (and now he has added another above average player in Sam Cassell).
Given what these players had done in the past, it was expected that this team would perform well this season. And that is the other basketball story told in The Wages of Wins. Player performance in the NBA -relative to what we see in football and baseball – is quite consistent. Not sure what to name the club emphasizing that particular observation.
– DJ
Our research on the NBA was summarized HERE.
The Technical Notes at wagesofwins.com provides substantially more information on the published research behind Wins Produced and Win Score
Wins Produced, Win Score, and PAWSmin are also discussed in the following posts:
Simple Models of Player Performance
What Wins Produced Says and What It Does Not Say
Introducing PAWSmin — and a Defense of Box Score Statistics
Finally, A Guide to Evaluating Models contains useful hints on how to interpret and evaluate statistical models.
Wages of Wins Journal 
Kent
March 4, 2008
This is a great column. Nice job.
Pete23
March 4, 2008
I can’t find the snake mittens.
Tball
March 4, 2008
I think you need to redefine the WoW Club. The premise you introduce is that to enter a person needs to acknowledge that players are paid to score, not to win – that the incentives are directed to scoring.
I can see the connection to this thought from Robinson, Marbury and Red. Scalabrine’s comment is iffy in my mind, but I’ll stick to the easier battle.
The Doc quote is about players who don’t want to be pigeon-holed. No one ever complains if a scorer decided to play some defense or chase a rebound (unless he’s in foul trouble), but if a player is in the game to defend and rebound tries to take his man off the dribble, there is an issue. As a result, the Celtics have players who seem reluctant to shoot because they’ve been told it is not their job. Rondo has passed up uncontested layups, particularly early in the season, and Perkins will only shoot if he can dunk it (which may or may not be appropriate). I think this philosophy can stunt the growth of young players and lead to offensive inefficiency. If a role player, or any player, has a good chance to score, they should take it. The statement is pretty far removed from the WoW password.
MarkT
March 4, 2008
Good column. I read mankiw’s blog a lot. Good blog he does.
I think the incentives are a bit more complex than scoring vs winning.
Owners like winning a lot. It tends to put fans in the seats and generates a lot of psychic income for owners too. There are players who are paid well because they do (or have done) nonscoring things well. Przybilla, Ratliff, Bowen, JKidd to name a few different skill sets.
Scoring is another way to put fans in the seats and sell ancillary items because most people understand offense better than defense and a high scoring player / team looks good and exciting to them. Scorers get more attention from the media and that is free advertising to the owner.
Also, a bit more subtly, winning fulfills a fan’s hope only at the end of a game. Scoring fulfills hopes of the fan of a scoring team everytime it happens. Thus, scoring generates customer satisfaction and reinforces customer loyalty very well.
If you look around the league, good teams with defensive images like Detroit and Spurs generate less enthusiasm compared to good teams with offensive images like Phoenix and the same is true of players.
One of the things that complicates incentives is the CBA. It requires a certain minimum payroll, limits the maximum payroll, places hurdles in front of payroll restructuring, and also salaries are, at the highest range capped, the so-called max contract, so that if scoring is sufficient to get a player a max contract, there is only a psychological incentive, not a financial one, to do more, and then one has the problem of diminishing marginal utility anyway.
So I don’t think it’s just dumb owners/players focus on scoring vs smart owners/players focus on winning. From a business and financial perspective, the incentive structure is complex and you can see a number of reasons why a rational owner/player becomes satisfied with scoring.
Rick
March 4, 2008
The fact that Glenn Robinson and Steph Marbury are your inaugral members is ironic since they are probably the most stat-hungry (esp scoring hungry) ballers of all time…Glenn has Duncan to thank for his championship ring..
andrew
March 4, 2008
They got paid, though, and at the end of the day, being an NBA player is a job.
mrparker
March 4, 2008
I can’t disagree with the points of any commentors so far.
The biggest point that I take away from this article is that the payers are robbing the rest of us of high quality basketball by giving the bulk of the money to wrong players.
You could argue that anyone with a -wp48 does not belong in the association. Yet some of these players are getting paid significant dollars. If the league got rid of those players how much more exciting would the NBA be to watch?
andrew
March 4, 2008
You may be right that the quality of play could go up, but there will always be negative WP guys since everyone is compared to the average.
Brett
March 4, 2008
How about the anti-WoW Club? People who value players soley on scoring. Every time Stephen A Smith opens his mouth I think about sending him a copy of the book.
I guess it would be a pretty big club.
Tim
March 4, 2008
I think the WoW argument is a little more subtle than the tension between scoring and winning. After all, lots of coaches and fans and, at times, players talk about doing the “little things” or the “dirty work” or winning the “right way.” What most of them fail to recognize is that it is possible to measure team oriented play. It’s not as hidden as people think. It’s just that most basketball stories lead off with the top scorer for the night, and bury the all around statistics far down in the story, if they mention them at all. If just shooting percentage were as important as batting percentage in baseball, that would change the perception of the game dramatically. So everyone recognizes the tension between scoring and winning, but not everyone recognizes that we can measure whether players are doing everything it takes to win, and not just to score.
Daniel
March 4, 2008
NBA players get paid not what they’re worth, but rather what somebody decides to pay them (which is what they’re worth to a single organization, but not objectively). Maybe the issue with the correlation between higher scoring and higher pay is simply the trickle-down of bad management. Someone like -cough-(Isaiah Thomas)-cough- has imported high scoring free agents in Steve Francis, Stephon Marbury, Zach Randolph, Eddy Curry, Quentin Richardson, and Jamal Crawford. None of them do anything else well, but since Isaiah valued their scoring so highly, the Knicks have an overinflated payroll full of players who want to score and do little else.
DLew
March 4, 2008
I don’t always see eye-to-eye with WP, but using different methodology one comes to the same conclusion: Scoring is overvalued in the NBA. To me, the obvious next question is why? I’ve done a bit of thinking on the matter and I’m going to share my thoughts.
Let’s start simple. Scoring is not such a bad player measurement tool in some respects. For instance, I imagine that the correlation between total points scored and wins produced is not zero. In fact it’s probably above .5. Why? Mostly because scoring a lot of points indicates that you played a lot, and you have to play to produce wins. Secondarily, in general good players score points. There are a myriad of exceptions to this rule, and this blog has discussed many of them. Nonetheless it is hard to deny that most of the time good players are good at scoring (or just shot attempting, which leads to scoring), in addition to their other skills which make them productive. So, in some sense scoring is an indicator for other things which are important in basketball.
Now, of course at the NBA level it would be foolish to use scoring to indicator when you could directly observe the other important statistics. However, this is not true at every level. In youth basketball and a lot of high school basketball (and the early history of basketball) the only things that are tracked for an individual are points and fouls (no shot attempts, no rebounds, etc). If you watch the game you can see that there are good players who do not show up in these two categories, but you’ll generally note that the best youth and high school players, the ones who are most helping their teams win, are also the ones scoring the most points (even Ben Wallace and Dennis Rodman types score a lot in high school).
The next logical step for an observer of basketball is to apply what they learned, that usually the guy who scored the most points was the best player, to games that they did not attend. So, when you read in the paper that Player X from rival Team Y scored 35 points you conclude that player X is likely their best player. This may or may not be true, but is almost certainly better than your prior which was that all players on Team Y are equally good (because you know nothing about them).
So, now you have this convenient little heuristic, that good players score a lot. It works pretty well most of the time. It seems that most people, including many NBA decision makers rely heavily on this heuristic, even though better information is available. Still it is worth noting that this obsession with scoring probably didn’t materialize out of thin air and once served a semi-useful purpose.
Daniel
March 4, 2008
WHY EVERYONE SHOULD PICK THE SPURS FOR THE CHAMPIONSHIP:
The Spurs have 6 players now who will play heavy minutes in the playoffs who have or are currently offering approximately .2 WP48 or better in Parker (last season), Duncan, Thomas, Ginobili, Oberto, and Barry, with three of them over .3 WP48. Here’s how the other Western Conference teams with players over .2 WP48 stack up: the Jazz have 4, the Mavs have 4, the Lakers have 3.5 (counting the Pau Gasol of Christmas Past and Trevor Ariza potentially playing 20 minutes/game in the playoffs), the Suns have 2.5 (depending on Shaq), the Hornets have 2, the Rockets have 2, the Warriors have 2, and the Nuggets have 1. This means that the Spurs basically have twice as many very good players as all but two West teams and effectively 3 superstars in the bunch (over .3WP48 ).
When rotations shorten in the playoffs and minutes are reallocated, the Spurs only have Finley, Udoka, Vaughn, Robert Horry’s corpse and Bowen under .2 WP48. Every player outside their top 6 is known either for his man-to-man defense, his three-point shooting, or both– and though their is no metric that takes floor spacing into account, keeping defenders in the corners is huge in helping their two penetrating guards and great PF to be effective. Regardless of how you stack it, the 5 Spurs on the floor at any given time in the playoffs will average over .2 WP48, which is nearly as good as an all-star team. Their WORST potential lineup, which is probably Vaughn, Finley, Bowen, Horry, and Oberto still averages .06 WP48, and wouldn’t happen unless the Spurs are on either side of a blowout. Yes, the Spurs are this good.
Though you’ll probably pick the Celtics and Lakers in the playoffs, take into account the surprising depth of the Spurs and the reallocation of minutes into your equation.
Brad
March 4, 2008
Daniel, great post. Very interesting.
chuckie
March 4, 2008
does larry hughes count? see his comments from http://www.ohiomm.com/blogs/cavs/2008/03/02/cavs-vs-bulls/
Owen
March 5, 2008
DLew – It may be that there are reasons for a scoring bias to exist. But at this point it should be shocking how prevalent it remains in the GM ranks.
This could be a very interesting year for this particular discussion. The Nuggets put two players in the Western Conference All Star starting lineup, and have Marcus Camby, reigning DPOY, and are struggling to make the playoffs. If they don’t, that might be at least a small blow to what imho remains the conventional wisdom.
Westy
March 5, 2008
Good post, DLew.
I do always find it interesting that basically every NBA player was a star at their prior levels, for sure in high school. Trenton Hassell, for instance, scored like crazy as the star for Austin Peay. Now his offense is regarded as his game’s weak point.
Scoring machines at lower levels often must resort to different things to stay in the league. Success at that lower level may more largely be a result of their athletic abilities than skills. Once you’re to the NBA and everyone’s an elite athlete, only the top players can still dominate.
mrparker
March 5, 2008
Shouldn’t scoring be expected to decrease when level of competition increases?
Animal
March 5, 2008
Why is everyone wearing snake mittens today?
Animal
March 5, 2008
Would a higher tax on non-fuel efficient cars be a Pigovian tax?
Pete23
March 5, 2008
Bill Simmons thinks Landry is 10th best player from last year’s draft. He thinks Hollinger’s PER (ranking Landry #12 in the entire league is wrong).
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/080305&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab1pos1
Pete23
March 6, 2008
Dave, pigovian taxes are fine in theory. But do we really want some government bureaucrats to calculate the externalities and selectively impose taxes? They’ll just make up externalities that let them tax their campaign contributors less aggressively.
Brad
March 6, 2008
PEte23, please stop with your snake mittens.