What Determines Who Succeeds in the NBA?

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2024

⏱️ 83 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Former Google data scientist and bestselling author of Everybody Lies Seth Stephens-Davidowitz turns his analytic skills to the NBA.

Shermer and Stephens-Davidowitz discuss: why some countries produce so many more NBA players than others • the greatest NBA players adjusted for height • why tall NBA players are worse athletes than short NBA players • How much do NBA coaches matter and what do they do? • In a population of 8 billion today compared to centuries past, where are all the Mozarts, Beethovens, Da Vincis, Newtons, Darwins, etc.?

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz is a contributing op-ed writer for the New York Times, a lecturer at The Wharton School, and a former Google data scientist. He received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. He is the author of Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are and Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show All right, so you start this book talking about your own wishes that you could have been an
0:29.2	NBA player.
0:30.2	And you're probably about my height, 5-6-57 something like that?
0:34.3	Yeah well I I lie on my height so you want the truth or the you want to date when I was
0:42.4	single what I put on dating sites or the the, the round up.
0:43.0	When I was single, what I put on dating sites
0:44.8	or the real number.
0:47.9	Okay, but my point is obviously you're not a, you know,
0:50.9	six-five.
0:51.9	I'm not a giant. Yeah, but but okay, so what are the variables that you could have had let's just use an example what would you have to have had to make up for the lack of height to still make it in the NBA?
1:02.0	There are lots of random things that contribute to
1:05.0	NBA success.
1:07.0	One of them is hand size, I didn't know, which I also, I do not think I have enormous hands but you know a lot of the greatest
1:16.0	NBA players of all time have had enormous hands even correcting for their
1:20.0	height so Kauai Leonard, famous,
1:22.8	legendarily big hands and Michael Jordan,
1:25.8	enormous enormous hands.
1:27.4	Obviously he was 6, so he was already
1:29.4	tall to begin with, but he has even controlling for being 6 six he has huge hands and it actually you
1:36.8	actually can see in the data that hand size has been undervalued in the draft
1:41.2	that players with big hands tend to over perform their
1:45.2	draft spot. I think teams don't realize just how important is. Every team kind of
	...

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