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Talent and Success in Sports, Part 2

A Look at the Peculiar Case of Tanking

The natural expectation is that every team in every sport is doing the best it can to win every game. Despite that, there often comes a point in a season where fans conclude that the home team is going nowhere. This can be when mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, or even earlier, as inevitability sets in. At that point, the fan might be less than heartbroken by losses in the remaining games if that means improved positioning in the next draft. It’s a weird feeling for some, but others have no trouble rooting for the team to lose a few “meaningless” games.

Where this gets really dicey is when teams see the advantage of losing. The more top-heavy an upcoming draft is considered to be – with just one, two, or three special talents available – the more tempting it is to vie for position. Teams that appear disinterested in winning games on their schedule are said to be “tanking”.

While seen at times in all sports, this is a special problem in basketball. Why? With only five players on the court at a time, any one special talent has a chance to be more dominant than in sports fielding teams of nine (baseball) or twenty two (football) starters. (Hockey, with six starters, and constant line changes, is somewhere in between.) The team drafting a Tim Duncan or a LeBron James is likely to contend for championships yearly. Teams too good to draft high but not good enough to contend can get stuck in competitive Limbo. That is, they find themselves drafting good, but not great, players in the middle of drafts – over and over. For those who know they can’t win anything significant, there can be incentive to lose.

The Expression

I can’t prove it, but I suspect the term “tanking” was borrowed by the sports world from slang used in finance. Going back years, I remember hearing stock pundits talking about the market being “in the tank” during bear markets. Poor performance was the defining characteristic; the term’s use as a transitive verb in sports unfortunately reflects the deliberate action involved.

Two Ways to Tank

There are two ways to tank, and the difference matters, at least to me. The first method is simply to lose games deliberately when it is considered beneficial long-term. That is to say, coaches and/or players are either trying to lose or at least not trying hard to win.

Tanking method #2 is much subtler. Here the coaches coach, and the players play, to win. Management’s personnel decisions for that season, however, have been geared to losing now and winning later. For a current example, see the Miami Dolphins. Most famously, Sam Hinke raised this method to an art form while GM of the 76ers. Among the techniques for stockpiling “assets”: drafting players at bargain spots because of injury or foreign players with commitments to play elsewhere in coming years; trading solid, pretty good veterans for draft picks; endlessly searching for diamonds in the rough; and relentlessly seeking to maximize value.

Hinke made no bones about what he was doing; the entreaty to “Trust the Process!” became a rallying cry. It also drew harsh criticism from NBA fans, commentators, and squirming league executives. Controversy even raged among the team’s fans.

Some Thoughts on Purposeful Losing – Tanking Games

Tanking method #1 is, to me, despicable and indefensible. Even as Hinke’s Process (method #2) drew condemnation, teams with all-stars on the roster should have been excoriated for having records nearly as bad as, and occasionally even worse than, the 76ers over these years.

The NBA’s concern about this is very real. At the approach of any season only a half-dozen or so teams have any real likelihood of contending for a title – some years only two or three. In a league where the Have-nots greatly outnumber the Haves, most games (any other than Have vs. Have) become meaningless without genuine competition. Throwing games for future competitive advantage may not be quite as bad as for Black Sox-style payoffs. It’s still consumer fraud, however, and tickets aren’t cheap.

Some Thoughts on Talent Deprivation – Tanking a Roster

Tanking method #2 is more complicated. (It should not be confused, by the way, with ruining rosters through sheer ineptitude. See Chip Kelly’s brief reign running the whole show for the Philadelphia Eagles, for example.) As a general approach to running a team, I’m not a fan. There are some nuances worth considering here, though.

Sam Hinke’s foregoing of current assets for superior future ones was “successful” in making the 76ers’ record truly lousy for years:

2013-14: 19-63    2014-15: 18-64    2015-16: 10-72      

So the team was 47-199 in the three years. It isn’t easy to win 19% of your games for that long in the NBA. It takes drafting injured players and considering many maladies season-ending; drafting foreign players and “stashing” them overseas; and dealing veterans for draft picks.

Taking one transaction at a time, however, Hinke did make some excellent moves. Who’s to say there’s only one way to rebuild a team?  A floundering team doesn’t owe it to anyone to keep journeymen who might otherwise yield a good or great draft pick from a contending team having a specific need. Taking it a step further, there is no need to acquire a solid older player who will make a team only marginally better and not be around when the team contends.

This really is not method #1. To a man, the 76ers almost always played hard for Brett Brown those years, even in games where they had to know they had no chance. Brown tried everything he could imagine to keep his team competitive and wring every bit of ability out of his rapidly changing roster. He could not have been feigning his anguish over all the losing.

Going on memory, a typical game throughout this period saw the 76ers take a lead, however briefly, at some point in the first half. The better team would have to get serious at halftime, play hard, and step up their defense in order to take over the game in the second half. For a while, I watched more of these games than I probably should have. In addition to simply loving the sport, I admired the grit and hoped to see the blossoming of some unheralded talent.

Denouement

As the 2016 76ers closed in on their historic (second worst ever) 10-72, some were beginning to wonder whether the winning part of the Process would be deferred forever. More importantly, influential heads were getting ready to explode. Undoubtedly encouraged by the NBA, the team hired Jerry Colangelo to be a senior advisor above Hinke in the organizational structure. Hinke resigned soon thereafter with a 13-page manifesto.

In the three seasons since, the 76ers have been 28-54, 52-30, and 51-31. They are considered serious contenders for the upcoming season. If health holds up and Brett Brown can coach loaded teams as well as he coached bereft ones, nobody will want to play them in May. Debates among Philly hoops-heads rage to this day on whether Sam Hinke was a genius or a charlatan.

Summing Up

How does a Houston Rockets team that takes Ralph Sampson with the first pick in the 1983 NBA Draft manage to be in position to take Hakeem Olajuwon with the first pick in the very next year’s draft? It’s no coincidence that the league responded with its first lottery system the following year. They’ve been seeking an effective solution ever since.

Perhaps the entire first round of some drafts should be subject to lottery, with less weighting toward badly-performing teams. But then, the problem is no one but Golden State Warrior fans want to see the Warriors draft a Zion Williamson. Theoretically, we all want to see the worst teams have a chance to better themselves, as long as they act with integrity.

Discussion about “upholding the integrity of the game” is not meaningless blather. Why? As much as we enjoy sports, there is little intrinsic value in advancing a ball into something, through something, or beyond a certain point in space. The value comes from the speed, strength and skill necessary to accomplish the feats we enjoy watching.

Something I got from my father is the joy of watching someone very good do something very well, almost no matter what it is. Team sports provide the cauldron of competition in which skill, athleticism, effort and determination are taken to the highest levels. The more incapable I am of doing something, the more exhilarating I find it to watch. As a result, I’m not sure what I admire and enjoy more: baseball and basketball, because I know how hard they are to play well, or hockey, because I can’t conceive of skating well enough to play it at all.

I do know that disinterest in playing as well as one can reduces the exercise to foolishness. Hard, honest competition is the goose laying the golden eggs in the lucrative world of sports.

Assume the only games worth watching in the NBA are those between two Have teams, with all other games involving at least one of the Have-not teams active in the race to the bottom. If there are 12 out of the 30 teams (40%) with any chance of contending for a title, that means 16% of the games will be watchable. If only 6 teams really have a chance (a possibility some years) and everyone knows it, 94% of the games will be unwatchable.

We’re not there yet, but reserve point guards cannot make millions if that assumption prevails. If pride, integrity, and love of the game are not enough to motivate coaches, players and management to try like mad to win, perhaps economic self-interest will do the trick. Ultimately, we fans will vote with our wallets.

Finally, there’s this: the more teams tank, the less likely it is that any given team benefit from tanking.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong

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Talent and Success in Sports, Part 1

As sports fans, we love to argue about our head coaches and managers. They don’t hit-and-run enough. They should use more zone defense or pick-and-rolls. The Wide-9 defense – are you kidding me? What’s with these line changes and defensive pairings?

It’s endless and it’s great fun. Coaching really does matter, of course, in varying degrees depending on the sport and various circumstances. While we fret about who is, or should be, coaching our teams, however, we should pay more attention to those serving as general manager (“GM”). They matter even more in the long run.

It’s all about the talent. Specifically, what matters most are talent evaluation, talent acquisition and retention, and talent development – perhaps in that order. The strategy employed in games is usually further down the list.

Talent Evaluation

The basic point is straight-forward: If your scouts and general manager don’t recognize talent at all positions, your team is doomed. This year’s Phillies signed the best free agent, acquired the best catcher and traded for a good shortstop, but their misevaluation of pitching will cost them the playoffs. That’s not to say it’s easy to tell which talent is going to translate to wins at a sport’s highest level. In all sports, teams are befuddled by athletes with ideal size, strength, speed, agility, jumping ability and other measurables who, as it turns out, can’t play.

Football seems to produce “combine stars” who can’t block, tackle, cover, or elude players with inferior times in the 40 yard dash, for example. Projection of success is also quite difficult in baseball, for a special reason. The game requires eye-to-hand coordination and other skills at an unusually rarefied level. Some mashers of the fastball never learn how to hit major-league breaking balls. Pitchers with great arms who can’t throw a quality strike when they must are going to drive managers, teammates, fans, and (ultimately) themselves, crazy.

All sports seem to have a less-tangible “It” factor – as in “She, or he, has It”. For some reason, I think of it as having the “eye of the tiger”, a natural need to get to the goal and finish. This must be factored in with the more measurable stuff.

Teams acquire the most sought-after amateur talent available each year through a draft. The order in which players are selected is generally in the reverse order of the teams’ success in the previous year. It feels exciting to have the first pick in a draft. If your favorite team has very high picks year after year, though, something is wrong with the talent evaluators. The exception is if those great picks are acquired through deft trades.

One other point is that talent cannot be evaluated in a vacuum for a team sport. Chemistry and compatibility of the pieces complicate things. As to the former, adding a sullen superstar to a roster of wacky extroverts might not be a great idea. Similarly, a large, skilled but immobile center will not complement a basketball team full of fast-breaking greyhounds. Or, maybe he or she will, for those times you have to run a half-court offense. Finally, if you’re going to keep your coach and he refuses to run the football, you better get talented receivers and offensive lineman who specialize in pass protection. (Jon Runyan and Tra Thomas would be in Canton if Andy Reid had run a reasonably balanced offense. Reid’s one Super Bowl appearance with the Eagles featured receiver Terrell Owens.)

Talent Acquisition and Retention

The single most important thing any team does is acquire and keep talent. This is done through the draft, free agency, trades, and contract extensions. Each sport is quite different in the rules that matter: draft lotteries, salary caps, trade deadlines, free agency, no-trade clauses, and guaranteed contracts. The more sports you follow the harder it is to keep straight.

Before diving in, it’s worth saying that luck plays a role in all this: winning a lottery; having first pick in a year with a generational talent or two; benefiting from other teams’ mistakes; and being spared major injuries.

Drafts

Serious sports fans often love drafts, particularly those of basketball and football, where the (mostly) college players are better known than the youngsters available in baseball and hockey. Fans develop strong, even passionate, opinions about players available in a given draft, sometimes including players they’ve never closely watched. It’s remarkable.

A favorite recent example involves the consensus best player in the 2017 NBA draft. Before the 2016-17 college basketball season began, the common wisdom was that the draft was fairly deep with no superstars but a lot of very good wing players (guards and small forwards). While some thought a few would be a bit better than the rest, the general idea was that one could pick about a dozen of them out of a hat. Little had changed by the end of March madness.

Shortly after North Carolina was crowned champions, however, I began to hear smatterings of opinions that Markelle Fultz of the University of Washington was the best all-around player in the draft class. This opinion gathered steam as the lottery to determine the exact order of selection approached. The lottery on May 16 resulted in the first three picks going, in order, to the Celtics, Lakers, and 76ers. From that moment, sports talk radio in Philly was dominated with callers and hosts urging the 76ers to trade with the Celtics for the first pick to take Fultz. Such calls quickly became frenzied with demands that the 76ers do whatever it took to secure his rights.

Here’s the thing: this transition from an egalitarian draft to Fultz being obviously and by far the best available occurred at a time when no one had made a shot or grabbed a rebound in weeks. It was based on nothing but mob-think. Further, a fair number of those expressing such strong opinions had either seldom or never seen Fultz play. (When carried at all, West Coast games started at 11 pm in the East, and were more likely to feature Lonzo Ball’s UCLA than Fultz’s UW.)

Anyway, the 76ers gave the Celts a valuable future first round pick to swap 2017 picks, and selected Fultz in June. And the rest is bizarre history. If you don’t know how little and under what circumstances Fultz played for Philly before being traded, it’s worth a quick search. Anyone who can sensibly explain what ailment prevented him from contributing will have your email to KenBossong@gmail.com featured in a future ”Post Scripts” post.

The Celtics happily took the guy they wanted all along, Jayson Tatum, who appears on his way to stardom. The Lakers took their man, Ball, at #2 and he’s been fine, but not quite as good as Kyle Kuzma, whom they got, via trade, with the 27th pick.

Inexact Science

Since drafting is such an inexact undertaking, most fans have their own favorite stories of draft triumphs and gaffes by their teams. How inexact it is varies greatly by sport. While kids certainly can outperform their draft status, hockey teams seem to have a relatively good grasp on young players’ potential. In particular, I have noticed that when hockey pundits anoint someone the next great player, they are seldom wrong. Gretzky, Lemieux, Lindros, Ovechkin, Crosby, McDavid, Eichel and so forth do seem to turn out to be special.

In football, there was considerable debate among true experts as to whether Ryan Leaf or Peyton Manning was the best quarterback in the 1998 NFL draft. It’s reasonable, though, to cut GMs some slack in football where there are 22 starters and special teams to get on the field – and vastly different physical attributes and skills to evaluate.

Then there is baseball with a draft that seems nearly a complete crapshoot. Available are players from high school, college, and all over the world. They play nine different positions, both offense and defense (except for the American League’s designated hitter). There are the “five tools” to consider: hitting, hitting for power, running, catching and throwing. All but the very few are years away from contributing at the Major League level. Yet, as daunting as it is, some teams keep winning and finding new stars over the years despite low draft position. Others pick high every year. Scouting matters.

As already suggested, basketball has its share of draft oddities despite how much is known about the players. Michael Jordan famously was the third pick in the 1984 draft. While nobody blames the Rockets for using the first pick on Hakeem Olajuwon (he’s in the Hall of Fame, where he belongs), the Trail Blazers have never quite lived down the selection of Sam Bowie at #2, especially since he had already hurt his leg badly and repeatedly. Fans of every NBA team have draft picks to rant about, but some more than others. [That sound you hear is long-time 76er fans weeping.]

Trades

Milt Pappas was a perfectly fine pitcher minding his own business with the Baltimore Orioles. In fact, he would make an All Star team three times in his career. If you look him up, though, that is not what you are likely to read first. No, Pappas was the unfortunate infamously traded in 1965 for the great Frank Robinson. All Robinson did in the year after the trade was win the triple crown, MVP, and MVP of the World Series. On his way to Cooperstown, he also became, for years, the answer to a fan-favorite question. “Everyone knows the all-time home run leaders are Aaron, Ruth, and Mays; who’s fourth?”

Ray Sadecki wasn’t quite as good as Pappas and Orlando Cepeda (while great) was not Robinson. Their trade for each other was remarkably similar in lopsidedness, though. It’s no fun being traded for a future Hall-of-Famer.

Ask Rick Wise. His trade by the Phillies to the Cards in 1972 for Steve Carlton was considered reasonably even by many when made. Each had just been an All Star and Wise had pitched a no-hitter in which he had hit two home runs. The sentiment faded as the season unfolded. Carlton went 27-10 with a 1.97 ERA and 310 strikeouts for one of the worst teams in history. (Including Carlton’s record, the Phils were 59-103.) That Wise had a better 1973 than Carlton isn’t even recalled, given the rest of Carlton’s superb career.

Lest anyone think I am bragging about the Phils’ trading prowess, I must mention two horrendously foolish trades, each with the Cubs – one before Wise/Carlton and one after. In 1966, they traded their best pitching prospect Ferguson Jenkins and decent outfield prospect Adolfo Phillips for nearly-done pitchers Bob Buehl (37) and Larry Jackson (35). Jenkins may not be the flashiest pitcher in the Hall of Fame, but he belongs. Then there was 1982, when they were so inexplicably intent on swapping shortstops – the better but older Larry Bowa for Ivan DeJesus – that they threw in prospect Ryne Sandberg to sweeten the deal. It sweetened the deal for the Cubs, alright. Sandberg’s bust in the Hall is not far from Jenkins’.

Sometimes, wacko trades have backstories. No one would trade Wilt Chamberlain (who should be the subject of his own Other Aspects post someday) for Archie Clark Jerry Chambers and Darryl Imhoff, but the 76ers did. For a number of reasons, Wilt had both the clout (threat of jumping to the ABA) and the motivation (disavowal by owner Irv Kosloff of his deceased co-owner Ike Richman’s verbal promise to cut Wilt in on ownership eventually) to orchestrate a trade to the Lakers. Philly took what they could get. A good account is available at https://www.theringer.com/2018/7/9/17547692/wilt-chamberlain-lakers-trade-50-year-anniversary-lebron-james.

How Kobe Bryant became a Laker many years later, after being drafted 13th (!) is another matter of intrigue worth exploring if inclined.

Actually, Wise/Carlton has a backstory as well. Each pitcher felt he was underpaid. So the teams traded them for each other in a fit of pique and then willingly paid each of them what they would have accepted in the first place.

Talent Retention

Once you get ‘em, can you keep ‘em? As already suggested, the GM’s job is not easy. Particularly tricky is what to do when a good or great player approaches free agency near the peak of a career. Baseball and basketball feature a lot of guaranteed contracts. [Sidebar: football, the most dangerous sport, does not – except for star quarterbacks.] How much to pay is no more worrisome than how long to pay it.

The fans screaming for the player to be paid whatever it takes will be the same ones calling the GM an idiot when the long-term guaranteed contract is followed by years of steady decline in health, skill and effectiveness. If salary cap woes are hurting the team, it’s even worse.

The same kinds of considerations are in play when considering whether to sign a veteran free agent.

Talent Development

This is where coaching shows itself, assuming talent capable of being developed has been acquired.

Talent evaluation hasn’t been the current Phillies’ only problem regarding pitching. My view of this season before it started was this: After Nola and Arietta, there were three openings in the starting rotation. There were four promising young arms with good stuff to vie for the slots: Zach Eflin, Jerad Eickhoff, Nick Pivetta, and Vince Velasquez. If two of them stepped up to be solidly professional starting pitchers, the Phils would be in the playoffs and a team nobody would be anxious to play. If three delivered, they would have a chance to contend for the World Series.

Of course, the Phillies should have signed Dallas Keuchel, especially after the cost went down in June. But the young prospects were 0 for 4. All regressed. How is that even possible? For what it’s worth, Eflin has done a bit better since ignoring what coaches told him and I still hold out some hope for Velazquez.

All of which got me thinking: When was the last time the development of any Phillies’ prospect was a pleasant surprise? Or even a highly touted kid developed in the normal course? Scott Kingery still has a chance, hanging in there despite being rushed to the majors to play every position but his own, second base. (Yes, my whole thesis is that GMs matter even more than managers or head coaches, but don’t get me started on Gabe Kapler.)

One Last Factor

There is a level above GM: the owner. Bad owners can kill an organization. As an Eagles fan, I’m grateful for Dan Snyder’s ridiculous stewardship of the Washington Redskins. For years, the only way to get a ticket to a Redskins game was to inherit season tickets. A very close friend gave up his years ago, and tells me he is solicited regularly by the team to sign up for seats on the 40 yard line. The reasons why nobody goes anymore are too numerous to mention. Arrogance and ignorance are a bad combination.

Up Next

Next post will be Part 2 of Talent and Success in Sports: a look at the peculiar case of Tanking. In the meantime, feel free to contact me at KenBossong@gmail.com with a “favorite” stupid draft pick or trade, for mention in a future “Post Scripts”.

Ken Bossong

© 2019 Kenneth J. Bossong