Out of Duke University. . . . A 6-foot-8-inch forward. . . .
He had more or less admitted to me that this part of his job left him cold. ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ he said,
as he struggled to explain how a man on the receiving end of the raging
love of 18,557 people in a darkened arena could feel nothing. “If you
had filet mignon every single night, you’d stop tasting it.”
To him the only pleasure in these sounds — the name of his beloved
alma mater, the roar of the crowd — was that they marked the end of the
worst part of his game day: the 11 minutes between the end of warm-ups
and the introductions. Eleven minutes of horsing around and making small
talk with players on the other team. All those players making
exaggerated gestures of affection toward one another before the game,
who don’t actually know one another, or even want to. “I hate being out
on the floor wasting that time,” he said. “I used to try to talk to
people, but then I figured out no one actually liked me very much.”
Instead of engaging in the pretense that these other professional
basketball players actually know and like him, he slips away into the
locker room.
Shane Battier!
And up Shane Battier popped, to the howl of the largest crowd ever to
watch a basketball game at the Toyota Center in Houston, and jumped
playfully into
Yao Ming
(the center “out of China”). Now, finally, came the best part of his
day, when he would be, oddly, most scrutinized and least understood.
Seldom are regular-season games in the
N.B.A. easy to get worked up for. Yesterday Battier couldn’t tell me whom the team played three days before. (“The
Knicks!”
he exclaimed a minute later. “We played the Knicks!”) Tonight, though
it was a midweek game in the middle of January, was different. Tonight
the
Rockets were playing the
Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard
Kobe Bryant,
the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier
and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m
certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the
Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after
story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.” Last time was March
16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd
game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game
drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his
47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24
points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe
when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for
the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely
guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players —
LeBron James,
Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if
not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally
are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly
he is up to.
Last season, in a bid to draw some attention to Battier’s defense,
the Rockets’ public-relations department would send a staff member to
the opponent’s locker room to ask leading questions of whichever
superstar Battier had just hamstrung: “Why did you have so much trouble
tonight?” “Did he do something to disrupt your game?” According to
Battier: “They usually say they had an off night. They think of me as
some chump.” He senses that some players actually look forward to being
guarded by him. “No one dreads being guarded by me,” he said. Morey
confirmed as much: “That’s actually true. But for two reasons: (a) They
don’t think anyone can guard them and (b) they really scoff at the
notion Shane Battier could guard them. They
all
think his reputation exceeds his ability.” Even as Battier was being
introduced in the arena, Ahmad Rashad was wrapping up his pregame report
on NBA TV and saying, “Shane Battier will try to stop Kobe Bryant.”
This caused the co-host
Gary Payton to laugh and reply, “Ain’t gonna happen,” and the other co-host,
Chris Webber, to add, “I think Kobe will score 50, and they’ll win by 19 going away.”
Early on, Hoop Scoop magazine named Shane
Battier the fourth-best seventh grader in the United States. When he
graduated from Detroit Country Day School in 1997, he received the
Naismith Award as the best high-school basketball player in the nation.
When he graduated from Duke in 2001, where he won a record-tying 131
college-basketball games, including that year’s
N.C.A.A.
championship, he received another Naismith Award as the best college
basketball player in the nation. He was drafted in the first round by
the woeful
Memphis Grizzlies,
not just a bad basketball team but the one with the worst winning
percentage in N.B.A. history — whereupon he was almost instantly
dismissed, even by his own franchise, as a lesser talent. The year after
Battier joined the Grizzlies, the team’s general manager was fired and
the N.B.A. legend Jerry West, a k a the Logo because his silhouette is
the official emblem of the N.B.A., took over the team. “From the minute
Jerry West got there he was trying to trade me,” Battier says. If West
didn’t have any takers, it was in part because Battier seemed limited:
most of the other players on the court, and some of the players on the
bench, too, were more obviously gifted than he is. “He’s, at best, a
marginal N.B.A. athlete,” Morey says.
The Grizzlies went from 23-59 in Battier’s rookie year to 50-32 in
his third year, when they made the N.B.A. playoffs, as they did in each
of his final three seasons with the team. Before the 2006-7 season,
Battier was traded to the Houston Rockets, who had just finished 34-48.
In his first season with the Rockets, they finished 52-30, and then,
last year, went 55-27 — including one stretch of 22 wins in a row. Only
the 1971-2 Los Angeles Lakers have won more games consecutively in the
N.B.A. And because of injuries, the Rockets played 11 of those 22 games
without their two acknowledged stars,
Tracy McGrady
and Yao Ming, on the court at the same time; the Rockets player who
spent the most time actually playing for the Rockets during the streak
was Shane Battier. This year Battier, recovering from off-season surgery
to remove bone spurs from an ankle, has played in just over half of the
Rockets’ games. That has only highlighted his importance. “This year,”
Morey says, “we have been a championship team with him and a bubble
playoff team without him.”
Here we have a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside
the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by
superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some
magical ability to win.
Solving the mystery is somewhere near the heart of Daryl Morey’s job.
In 2005, the Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, decided to hire
new management for his losing team and went looking specifically for
someone willing to rethink the game. “We now have all this data,”
Alexander told me. “And we have computers that can analyze that data.
And I wanted to use that data in a progressive way. When I hired Daryl,
it was because I wanted somebody that was doing more than just looking
at players in the normal way. I mean, I’m not even sure we’re playing
the game the right way.”
The virus that infected professional baseball in the 1990s, the use
of statistics to find new and better ways to value players and
strategies, has found its way into every major sport. Not just
basketball and football, but also soccer and
cricket
and rugby and, for all I know, snooker and darts — each one now
supports a subculture of smart people who view it not just as a game to
be played but as a problem to be solved. Outcomes that seem, after the
fact, all but inevitable — of course LeBron James hit that buzzer
beater, of course the
Pittsburgh Steelers won the
Super Bowl
— are instead treated as a set of probabilities, even after the fact.
The games are games of odds. Like professional card counters, the modern
thinkers want to play the odds as efficiently as they can; but of
course to play the odds efficiently they must first know the odds. Hence
the new statistics, and the quest to acquire new data, and the intense
interest in measuring the impact of every little thing a player does on
his team’s chances of winning. In its spirit of inquiry, this subculture
inside professional basketball is no different from the subculture
inside baseball or football or darts. The difference in basketball is
that it happens to be the sport that is most like life.
When Alexander, a Wall Street investor, bought the Rockets in 1993,
the notion that basketball was awaiting some statistical reformation
hadn’t occurred to anyone. At the time, Daryl Morey was at
Northwestern University,
trying to figure out how to get a job in professional sports and
thinking about applying to business schools. He was tall and had played
high-school basketball, but otherwise he gave off a quizzical, geeky
aura. “A lot of people who are into the new try to hide it,” he says.
“With me there was no point.” In the third grade he stumbled upon the
work of the baseball writer Bill James — the figure most responsible for
the current upheaval in professional sports — and decided that what he
really wanted to do with his life was put Jamesian principles into
practice. He nursed this ambition through a fairly conventional academic
career, which eventually took him to
M.I.T.’s
Sloan School of Management. There he opted for the entrepreneurial
track, not because he actually wanted to be an entrepreneur but because
he figured that the only way he would ever be allowed to run a
pro-sports franchise was to own one, and the only way he could imagine
having enough money to buy one was to create some huge business. “This
is the 1990s — there’s no Theo,” Morey says, referring to Theo Epstein,
the statistics-minded general manager of the
Boston Red Sox. “
Sandy Alderson is progressive, but nobody knows it.” Sandy Alderson, then the general manager of the
Oakland Athletics,
had also read Bill James and begun to usher in the new age of
statistical analysis in baseball. “So,” Morey continues, “I just assumed
that getting rich was the only way in.” Apart from using it to acquire a
pro-sports team, Morey had no exceptional interest in money.
He didn’t need great wealth, as it turned out. After graduating from
business school, he went to work for a consulting firm in Boston called
Parthenon, where he was tapped in 2001 to advise a group trying to buy
the Red Sox. The bid failed, but a related group went and bought the
Celtics
— and hired Morey to help reorganize the business. In addition to
figuring out where to set ticket prices, Morey helped to find a new
general manager and new people looking for better ways to value
basketball players. The Celtics improved. Leslie Alexander heard
whispers that Morey, who was 33, was out in front of those trying to
rethink the game, so he hired him to remake the Houston Rockets.
When Morey came to the Rockets, a huge chunk of the team’s allotted
payroll — the N.B.A. caps payrolls and taxes teams that exceed them —
was committed, for many years to come, to two superstars: Tracy McGrady
and Yao Ming. Morey had to find ways to improve the Rockets without
spending money. “We couldn’t afford another superstar,” he says, “so we
went looking for nonsuperstars that we thought were undervalued.” He
went looking, essentially, for underpaid players. “That’s the scarce
resource in the N.B.A.,” he says. “Not the superstar but the undervalued
player.” Sifting the population of midlevel N.B.A. players, he came up
with a list of 15, near the top of which was the Memphis Grizzlies’
forward Shane Battier. This perplexed even the man who hired Morey to
rethink basketball. “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and
obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to
see it.”
Alexander wasn’t alone. It was, and is, far easier to spot what
Battier doesn’t do than what he does. His conventional statistics are
unremarkable: he doesn’t score many points, snag many rebounds, block
many shots, steal many balls or dish out many assists. On top of that,
it is easy to see what he can never do: what points he scores tend to
come from jump shots taken immediately after receiving a pass. “That’s
the telltale sign of someone who can’t ramp up his offense,” Morey says.
“Because you can guard that shot with one player. And until you can’t
guard someone with one player, you really haven’t created an offensive
situation. Shane can’t create an offensive situation. He needs to be
open.” For fun, Morey shows me video of a few rare instances of Battier
scoring when he hasn’t exactly been open. Some large percentage of them
came when he was being guarded by an inferior defender — whereupon
Battier backed him down and tossed in a left jump-hook. “This is
probably, to be honest with you, his only offensive move,” Morey says.
“But look, see how he pump fakes.” Battier indeed pump faked, several
times, before he shot over a defender. “He does that because he’s
worried about his shot being blocked.” Battier’s weaknesses arise from
physical limitations. Or, as Morey puts it, “He can’t dribble, he’s slow
and hasn’t got much body control.”
Battier’s game is a weird combination of
obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the
court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents
get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds,
but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He
doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient
shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a
position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense,
although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he
significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he
somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably,
Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call
him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to
fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to
through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet
he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”
There are other things Morey has noticed too, but declines to discuss
as there is right now in pro basketball real value to new information,
and the Rockets feel they have some. What he will say, however, is that
the big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right
things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the
sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling
subtle interactions among the team’s elements. To get at this they need
something that basketball hasn’t historically supplied: meaningful
statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much
what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds,
assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped
perceptions of the game. (“Someone created the box score,” Morey says,
“and he should be shot.”) How many points a player scores, for example,
is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another
example: if you want to know a player’s value as a rebounder, you need
to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the
team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player’s zone.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of
the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually
tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest
of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to
sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual
sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the
player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no
way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead
of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit
every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be
the analogy.
Manny Ramirez
can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in
Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the
coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds
up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the
Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver
Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.
It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the
game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing
his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are
sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp
that he is making them.
Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious
example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an
assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court
for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a
trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational
dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal
assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,”
Morey says. Blocked shots — they look great, but unless you secure the
ball afterward, you haven’t helped your team all that much. Players love
the spectacle of a ball being swatted into the fifth row, and it
becomes a matter of personal indifference that the other team still gets
the ball back.
Dikembe Mutombo,
Houston’s 42-year-old backup center, famous for blocking shots, “has
always been the best in the league in the recovery of the ball after his
block,” says Morey, as he begins to make a case for Mutombo’s
unselfishness before he stops and laughs. “But even to Dikembe there’s a
selfish component. He made his name by doing the finger wag.” The
finger wag: Mutombo swats the ball, grabs it, holds it against his hip
and wags his finger at the opponent. Not in my house! “And if he doesn’t
catch the ball,” Morey says, “he can’t do the finger wag. And he loves
the finger wag.” His team of course would be better off if Mutombo
didn’t hold onto the ball long enough to do his finger wag. “We’ve had
to yell at him: start the break, start the break — then do your finger
wag!”
When I ask Morey if he can think of any basketball statistic that
can’t benefit a player at the expense of his team, he has to think hard.
“Offensive rebounding,” he says, then reverses himself. “But even that
can be counterproductive to the team if your job is to get back on
defense.” It turns out there is no statistic that a basketball player
accumulates that cannot be amassed selfishly. “We think about this
deeply whenever we’re talking about contractual incentives,” he says.
“We don’t want to incent a guy to do things that hurt the team” — and
the amazing thing about basketball is how easy this is to do. “They
all
maximize what they think they’re being paid for,” he says. He laughs.
“It’s a tough environment for a player now because you have a lot of
teams starting to think differently. They’ve got to rethink how they’re
getting paid.”
Having watched Battier play for the past two and a half years, Morey
has come to think of him as an exception: the most abnormally unselfish
basketball player he has ever seen. Or rather, the player who seems one
step ahead of the analysts, helping the team in all sorts of subtle,
hard-to-measure ways that appear to violate his own personal interests.
“Our last coach dragged him into a meeting and told him he needed to
shoot more,” Morey says. “I’m not sure that that ever happened.” Last
season when the Rockets played the
San Antonio Spurs
Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu
Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not
in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately
went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in
when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey
says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer
all the time.”
One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to
is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any
given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly
perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s
four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have
a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his
play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential
distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render
plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A
good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points
more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best
season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the
time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the
company of
Dwight Howard and
Kevin Garnett,
both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is
enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60
wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season:
Vince Carter,
Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.
As the game against the Lakers started, Morey
took his seat, on the aisle, nine rows behind the Rockets’ bench. The
odds, on this night, were not good. Houston was playing without its
injured superstar, McGrady (who was in the clubhouse watching TV), and
its injured best supporting actor,
Ron Artest
(cheering in street clothes from the bench). The Lakers were staffed by
household names. The only Rockets player on the floor with a
conspicuous shoe contract was the center Yao Ming — who opened the game
by tipping the ball backward. Shane Battier began his game by grabbing
it.
Before the Rockets traded for Battier, the front-office analysts
obviously studied his value. They knew all sorts of details about his
efficiency and his ability to reduce the efficiency of his opponents.
They knew, for example, that stars guarded by Battier suddenly lose
their shooting touch. What they didn’t know was why. Morey recognized
Battier’s effects, but he didn’t know how he achieved them. Two hundred
or so basketball games later, he’s the world’s expert on the subject —
which he was studying all over again tonight. He pointed out how,
instead of grabbing uncertainly for a rebound, for instance, Battier
would tip the ball more certainly to a teammate. Guarding a lesser
rebounder, Battier would, when the ball was in the air, leave his own
man and block out the other team’s best rebounder. “Watch him,” a
Houston front-office analyst told me before the game. “When the shot
goes up, he’ll go sit on Gasol’s knee.” (Pau Gasol often plays center
for the Lakers.) On defense, it was as if Battier had set out to
maximize the misery Bryant experiences shooting a basketball, without
having his presence recorded in any box score. He blocked the ball when
Bryant was taking it from his waist to his chin, for instance, rather
than when it was far higher and Bryant was in the act of shooting. “When
you watch him,” Morey says, “you see that his whole thing is to stay in
front of guys and try to block the player’s vision when he shoots. We
didn’t even notice what he was doing until he got here. I wish we could
say we did, but we didn’t.”
People often say that Kobe Bryant has no weaknesses to his game, but
that’s not really true. Before the game, Battier was given his special
package of information. “He’s the only player we give it to,” Morey
says. “We can give him this fire hose of data and let him sift. Most
players are like golfers. You don’t want them swinging while they’re
thinking.” The data essentially broke down the floor into many discrete
zones and calculated the odds of Bryant making shots from different
places on the court, under different degrees of defensive pressure, in
different relationships to other players — how well he scored off
screens, off pick-and-rolls, off catch-and-shoots and so on. Battier
learns a lot from studying the data on the superstars he is usually
assigned to guard. For instance, the numbers show him that
Allen Iverson
is one of the most efficient scorers in the N.B.A. when he goes to his
right; when he goes to his left he kills his team. The Golden State
Warriors forward Stephen Jackson is an even stranger case. “Steve
Jackson,” Battier says, “is statistically better going to his right, but
he
loves to go to his left — and goes to
his left almost twice as often.” The San Antonio Spurs’ Manu Ginóbili is
a statistical freak: he has no imbalance whatsoever in his game — there
is no one way to play him that is better than another. He is equally
efficient both off the dribble and off the pass, going left and right
and from any spot on the floor.
Bryant isn’t like that. He is better at pretty much everything than
everyone else, but there are places on the court, and starting points
for his shot, that render him less likely to help his team. When he
drives to the basket, he is exactly as likely to go to his left as to
his right, but when he goes to his left, he is less effective. When he
shoots directly after receiving a pass, he is more efficient than when
he shoots after dribbling. He’s deadly if he gets into the lane and also
if he gets to the baseline; between the two, less so. “The absolute
worst thing to do,” Battier says, “is to foul him.” It isn’t that Bryant
is an especially good free-throw shooter but that, as Morey puts it,
“the foul is the worst result of a defensive play.” One way the Rockets
can see which teams think about the game as they do is by identifying
those that “try dramatically not to foul.” The ideal outcome, from the
Rockets’ statistical point of view, is for Bryant to dribble left and
pull up for an 18-foot jump shot; force that to happen often enough and
you have to be satisfied with your night. “If he has 40 points on 40
shots, I can live with that,” Battier says. “My job is not to keep him
from scoring points but to make him as inefficient as possible.” The
court doesn’t have little squares all over it to tell him what
percentage Bryant is likely to shoot from any given spot, but it might
as well.
The reason the Rockets insist that Battier guard Bryant is his gift
for encouraging him into his zones of lowest efficiency. The effect of
doing this is astonishing: Bryant doesn’t merely help his team less when
Battier guards him than when someone else does. When Bryant is in the
game and Battier is on him, the Lakers’ offense is worse than if the
N.B.A.’s best player had taken the night off. “The Lakers’ offense
should obviously be better with Kobe in,” Morey says. “But if Shane is
on him, it isn’t.” A player whom Morey describes as “a marginal N.B.A.
athlete” not only guards one of the greatest — and smartest — offensive
threats ever to play the game. He renders him a detriment to his team.
And if you knew none of this, you would never guess any of it from
watching the game. Bryant was quicker than Battier, so the latter spent
much of his time chasing around after him, Keystone Cops-like. Bryant
shot early and often, but he looked pretty good from everywhere. On
defense, Battier talked to his teammates a lot more than anyone else on
the court, but from the stands it was hard to see any point to this. And
yet, he swears, there’s a reason to almost all of it: when he decides
where to be on the court and what angles to take, he is constantly
reminding himself of the odds on the stack of papers he read through an
hour earlier as his feet soaked in the whirlpool. “The numbers either
refute my thinking or support my thinking,” he says, “and when there’s
any question, I trust the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.” Even when the
numbers agree with his intuitions, they have an effect. “It’s a subtle
difference,” Morey says, “but it has big implications. If you have an
intuition of something but no hard evidence to back it up, you might
kind of
sort of go about putting that intuition into practice, because there’s still some uncertainty if it’s right or wrong.”
Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy
with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard
the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in
basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot
afford to let it distract him. Only once during the Lakers game did we
glimpse a clean, satisfying comparison of the efficient strategy and the
inefficient one — that is, an outcome that reflected the odds. Ten feet
from the hoop, Bryant got the ball with his back to the basket; with
Battier pressing against him, he fell back and missed a 12-foot shot off
the front of the rim. Moments earlier, with Battier reclining in the
deep soft chair that masquerades as an N.B.A. bench, his teammate Brent
Barry found himself in an analogous position. Bryant leaned into Barry,
hit a six-foot shot and drew a foul. But this was the exception;
normally you don’t get perfect comparisons. You couldn’t see the odds
shifting subtly away from the Lakers and toward the Rockets as Bryant
was forced from 6 feet out to 12 feet from the basket, or when he had
Battier’s hand in his eyes. All you saw were the statistics on the
board, and as the seconds ticked off to halftime, the game tied 54-54,
Bryant led all scorers with 16 points.
But he required 20 possessions to get them. And he had started
moaning to the referees. Bryant is one of the great jawboners in the
history of the N.B.A. A major-league baseball player once showed me a
slow-motion replay of the
Yankees’
third baseman Alex Rodriguez in the batter’s box. Glancing back to see
where the catcher has set up is not strictly against baseball’s rules,
but it violates the code. A hitter who does it is likely to find the
next pitch aimed in the general direction of his eyes. A-Rod, the best
hitter in baseball, mastered the art of glancing back by moving not his
head, but his eyes, at just the right time. It was like watching a
billionaire find some trivial and dubious deduction to take on his tax
returns. Why bother? I thought, and then realized: this is the instinct
that separates A-Rod from mere stars. Kobe Bryant has the same instinct.
Tonight Bryant complained that Battier was grabbing his jersey, Battier
was pushing when no one was looking, Battier was committing crimes
against humanity. Just before the half ended, Battier took a referee
aside and said: “You and I both know Kobe does this all the time. I’m
playing him honest. Don’t fall for his stuff.” Moments later, after
failing to get a call, Bryant hurled the ball, screamed at the ref and
was whistled for a technical foul.
Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted
by a tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has
picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in
the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on
the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it
honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to
score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer
sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers
Battier’s shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our
stats,” Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team
might not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”
Tonight, the ball landed in Battier’s hands milliseconds before the
half finished. He moved just slowly enough for the buzzer to sound,
heaved the ball the length of the floor and then sprinted to the locker
room — having not taken a single shot.
In 1996 a young writer for The Basketball
Times named Dan Wetzel thought it might be neat to move into the life of
a star high-school basketball player and watch up close as big-time
basketball colleges recruited him. He picked Shane Battier, and then
spent five months trailing him, with growing incredulity. “I’d covered
high-school basketball for eight years and talked to hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of kids — really every single prominent
high-school basketball player in the country,” Wetzel says. “There’s
this public perception that they’re all thugs. But they aren’t. A lot of
them are really good guys, and some of them are very, very bright.
Kobe’s very bright. LeBron’s very bright. But there’s absolutely never
been anything like Shane Battier.”
Wetzel watched this kid, inundated with offers of every kind, take
charge of an unprincipled process. Battier narrowed his choices to six
schools — Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, Michigan and
Michigan State
— and told everyone else, politely, to leave him be. He then set out to
minimize the degree to which the chosen schools could interfere with
his studies; he had a 3.96 G.P.A. and was poised to claim Detroit
Country Day School’s headmaster’s cup for best all-around student. He
granted each head coach a weekly 15-minute window in which to phone him.
These men happened to be among the most famous basketball coaches in
the world and the most persistent recruiters, but Battier granted no
exceptions. When the Kentucky coach
Rick Pitino,
who had just won a national championship, tried to call Battier outside
his assigned time, Battier simply removed Kentucky from his list. “What
17-year-old has the stones to do that?” Wetzel asks. “To just cut off
Rick Pitino because he calls outside his window?” Wetzel answers his own
question: “It wasn’t like, ‘This is a really interesting 17-year-old.’
It was like, ‘This isn’t real.’ ”
Battier, even as a teenager, was as shrewd as he was disciplined. The
minute he figured out where he was headed, he called a sensational
high-school power forward in Peekskill, N.Y., named
Elton Brand — and talked him into joining him at Duke. (Brand now plays for the
Philadelphia 76ers.) “I thought he’d be the first black president,” Wetzel says. “He was
Barack Obama before Barack Obama.”
Last July, as we sat in the library of the Detroit Country Day
School, watching, or trying to watch, his March 2008 performance against
Kobe Bryant, Battier was much happier instead talking about Obama, both
of whose books he had read. (“The first was better than the second,” he
said.) He said he hated watching himself play, then proved it by
refusing to watch himself play. My every attempt to draw his attention
to the action on the video monitor was met by some distraction.
I pointed to his footwork; he pointed to a gorgeous young woman in
the stands wearing a Battier jersey. (“You don’t see too many
good-looking girls with Battier jerseys on,” he said. “It’s usually 12
and under or 60 and over. That’s my demographic.”) I noted the uncanny
way in which he got his hand right in front of Bryant’s eyes before a
shot; he motioned to his old high school library (“I came in here every
day before classes”). He took my excessive interest in this one game as
proof of a certain lack of imagination, I’m pretty sure. “I’ve been
doing the same thing for seven years,” he said, “and this is the only
game anyone wants to talk about. It’s like, Oh, you can play defense?”
It grew clear that one reason he didn’t particularly care to watch
himself play, apart from the tedium of it, was that he plays the game so
self-consciously. Unable to count on the game to properly measure his
performance, he learned to do so himself. He had, in some sense, already
seen the video. When I finally compelled him to watch, he was knocking
the ball out of Bryant’s hands as Bryant raised it from his waist to his
chin. “If I get to be commissioner, that will count as a blocked shot,”
Battier said. “But it’s nothing. They don’t count it as a blocked shot.
I do that at least 30 times a season.”
In the statistically insignificant sample of professional athletes
I’ve come to know a bit, two patterns have emerged. The first is, they
tell you meaningful things only when you talk to them in places other
than where they have been trained to answer questions. It’s pointless,
for instance, to ask a basketball player about himself inside his locker
room. For a start, he is naked; for another, he’s surrounded by the
people he has learned to mistrust, his own teammates. The second pattern
is the fact that seemingly trivial events in their childhoods have had
huge influence on their careers. A cleanup hitter lives and dies by a
swing he perfected when he was 7; a quarterback has a hitch in his
throwing motion because he imitated his father. Here, in the Detroit
Country Day School library, a few yards from the gym, Battier was back
where he became a basketball player. And he was far less interested in
what happened between him and Kobe Bryant four months ago than what
happened when he was 12.
When he entered Detroit Country Day in seventh grade, he was already
conspicuous at 6-foot-4, and a year later he would be 6-foot-7. “Growing
up tall was something I got used to,” he said. “I was the kid about
whom they always said, ‘Check his birth certificate.’ ” He was also the
only kid in school with a black father and a white mother. Oddly enough,
the school had just graduated a famous black basketball player, Chris
Webber. Webber won three state championships and was named national
high-school player of the year. “Chris was a man-child,” says his high
school basketball coach, Kurt Keener. “Everyone wanted Shane to be the
next Chris Webber, but Shane wasn’t like that.” Battier had never heard
of Webber and didn’t understand why, when he took to the Amateur
Athletic Union circuit and played with black inner-city kids, he found
himself compared unfavorably with Webber: “I kept hearing ‘He’s too
soft’ or ‘He’s not an athlete.’ ” His high-school coach was aware of the
problems he had when he moved from white high-school games to the black
A.A.U. circuit. “I remember trying to add some flair to his game,”
Keener says, “but it was like teaching a classical dancer to do hip-hop.
I came to the conclusion he didn’t have the ego for it.”
Battier was half-white and half-black, but basketball, it seemed, was
either black or white. A small library of Ph.D. theses might usefully
be devoted to the reasons for this. For instance, is it a coincidence
that many of the things a player does in white basketball to prove his
character — take a charge, scramble for a loose ball — are more
pleasantly done on a polished wooden floor than they are on inner-city
asphalt? Is it easier to “play for the team” when that team is part of
some larger institution? At any rate, the inner-city kids with whom he
played on the A.A.U. circuit treated Battier like a suburban kid with a
white game, and the suburban kids he played with during the regular
season treated him like a visitor from the planet where they kept the
black people. “On
Martin Luther King
Day, everyone in class would look at me like I was supposed to know who
he was and why he was important,” Battier said. “When we had an
official school picture, every other kid was given a comb. I was the
only one given a pick.” He was awkward and shy, or as he put it: “I
didn’t present well. But I’m in the eighth grade! I’m just trying to fit
in!” And yet here he was shuttling between a black world that treated
him as white and a white world that treated him as black. ‘
‘Everything
I’ve done since then is because of what I went through with this,” he
said. “What I did is alienate myself from everybody. I’d eat lunch by
myself. I’d study by myself. And I sort of lost myself in the game.”
Losing himself in the game meant fitting into the game, and fitting
into the game meant meshing so well that he became hard to see. In high
school he was almost always the best player on the court, but even then
he didn’t embrace the starring role. “He had a tendency to defer,”
Keener says. “He had this incredible ability to make everyone around him
better. But I had to tell him to be more assertive. The one game we
lost his freshman year, it was because he deferred to the seniors.” Even
when he was clearly the best player and could have shot the ball at
will, he was more interested in his role in the larger unit. But it is a
mistake to see in his detachment from self an absence of ego, or
ambition, or even desire for attention. When Battier finished telling me
the story of this unpleasant period in his life, he said: “Chris Webber
won three state championships, the Mr. Basketball Award and the
Naismith Award. I won three state championships, Mr. Basketball and the
Naismith Awards. All the things they said I wasn’t able to do, when I
was in the eighth grade.”
“Who’s they?” I asked.
“Pretty much everyone,” he said.
“White people?”
“No,” he said. “The street.”
As the third quarter began, Battier’s face
appeared overhead, on the Jumbotron, where he hammed it up and exhorted
the crowd. Throughout the game he was up on the thing more than any
other player: plugging teeth-whitening formulas, praising local
jewelers, making public-service announcements, telling the fans to make
noise. When I mentioned to a Rockets’ staff member that Battier seemed
to have far more than his fair share of big-screen appearances, he said,
“Probably because he’s the only one who’ll do them.”
I spent the second half with Sam Hinkie, the vice president of
basketball operations and the head of basketball analytics in the
Rockets’ front office. The game went back and forth. Bryant kept missing
more shots than he made. Neither team got much of a lead. More
remarkable than the game were Hinkie’s reactions — and it soon became
clear that while he obviously wanted the Rockets to win, he was
responding to different events on the court than the typical Rockets (or
N.B.A.) fan was.
“I care a lot more about what ought to have happened than what
actually happens,” said Hinkie, who has an M.B.A. from Stanford. The
routine N.B.A. game, he explained, is decided by a tiny percentage of
the total points scored. A team scores on average about 100 points a
game, but two out of three N.B.A. games are decided by fewer than 6
points — two or three possessions. The effect of this, in his mind, was
to raise significantly the importance of every little thing that
happened. The Lakers’ Trevor Ariza, who makes 29 percent of his 3-point
shots, hit a crazy 3-pointer, and as the crowd moaned, Hinkie was almost
distraught. “That Ariza shot, that is really painful,” he said.
“Because it’s a near-random event. And it’s a 3-point swing.” When
Bryant drove to the basket, instead of being forced to take a jump shot,
he said: “That’s three-eighths of a point. These things accumulate.”
In this probabilistic spirit we watched the battle between Battier
and Bryant. From Hinkie’s standpoint, it was going extremely well: “With
most guys, Shane can kick them from their good zone to bad zone, but
with Kobe you’re just picking your poison. It’s the epitome of, Which
way do you want to die?” Only the Rockets weren’t dying. Battier had
once again turned Bryant into a less-efficient machine of death. Even
when the shots dropped, they came from the places on the court where the
Rockets’ front office didn’t mind seeing them drop. “That’s all you can
do,” Hinkie said, after Bryant sank an 18-footer. “Get him to an
inefficient spot and contest.” And then all of a sudden it was 97-95,
Lakers, with a bit more than three minutes to play, and someone called
timeout. “We’re in it,” Hinkie said, happily. “And some of what happens
from here on will be randomness.”
The team with the N.B.A.’s best record was being taken to the wire by
Yao Ming and a collection of widely unesteemed players. Moments later, I
looked up at the scoreboard:
Bryant: 30.
Battier: 0.
Hinkie followed my gaze and smiled. “I know that doesn’t look good,”
he said, referring to the players’ respective point totals. But if
Battier wasn’t in there, he went on to say: “we lose by 12. No matter
what happens now, none of our coaches will say, ‘If only we could have
gotten a little more out of Battier.’ ”
One statistical rule of thumb in basketball is
that a team leading by more points than there are minutes left near the
end of the game has an 80 percent chance of winning. If your team is
down by more than 6 points halfway through the final quarter, and you’re
anxious to beat the traffic, you can leave knowing that there is
slightly less than a 20 percent chance you’ll miss a victory; on the
other hand, if you miss a victory, it will have been an improbable and
therefore sensational one. At no point on this night has either team had
enough of a lead to set fans, or even Rockets management, to
calculating their confidence intervals — but then, with 2:27 to play,
the Lakers went up by 4: 99-95. Then they got the ball back. The ball
went to Bryant, and Battier shaded him left — into Yao Ming. Bryant
dribbled and took the best shot he could, from Battier’s perspective: a
long 2-point jump shot, off the dribble, while moving left. He missed,
the Rockets ran back the other way, Rafer Alston drove the lane and hit a
floater: 99-97, and 1:13 on the clock. The Lakers missed another shot.
Alston grabbed the rebound and called timeout with 59 seconds left.
Whatever the Rockets planned went instantly wrong, when the inbound
pass, as soon as it was caught by the Rockets’ Carl Landry, was swatted
away by the Lakers. The ball was loose, bodies flew everywhere.
55 . . . 54 . . . 53 . . .
On the side of the court opposite the melee, Battier froze. The
moment he saw that the loose ball was likely to be secured by a teammate
— but before it was secured — he sprinted to the corner.
50 . . . 49 . . . 48 . . .
The 3-point shot from the corner is the single most efficient shot in
the N.B.A. One way the Rockets can tell if their opponents have taken
to analyzing basketball in similar ways as they do is their attitude to
the corner 3: the smart teams take a lot of them and seek to prevent
their opponents from taking them. In basketball there is only so much
you can plan, however, especially at a street-ball moment like this. As
it happened, Houston’s Rafer Alston was among the most legendary
street-ball players of all time — known as Skip 2 My Lou, a nickname he
received after a single spectacular move at Rucker Park, in Harlem.
“Shane wouldn’t last in street ball because in street ball no one wants
to see” his game, Alston told me earlier. “You better give us something
to ooh and ahh about. No one cares about someone who took a charge.”
The Rockets’ offense had broken down, and there was no usual place
for Alston, still back near the half-court line, to go with the ball.
The Lakers’ defense had also broken down; no player was where he was
meant to be. The only person exactly where he should have been — wide
open, standing at the most efficient spot on the floor from which to
shoot — was Shane Battier. When Daryl Morey spoke of basketball
intelligence, a phrase slipped out: “the I.Q. of where to be.” Fitting
in on a basketball court, in the way Battier fits in, requires the I.Q.
of where to be. Bang: Alston hit Battier with a long pass. Bang: Battier
shot the 3, guiltlessly. Nothing but net.
Rockets 100, Lakers 99.
43 . . . 42 . . . 41 . . .
At this moment, the Rockets’ front office would later calculate, the
team’s chances of winning rose from 19.2 percent to 72.6 percent. One
day some smart person will study the correlation between shifts in
probabilities and levels of noise, but for now the crowd was ignorantly
berserk: it sounded indeed like the largest crowd in the history of
Houston’s Toyota Center. Bryant got the ball at half-court and dribbled
idly, searching for his opening. This was his moment, the one great
players are said to live for, when everyone knows he’s going to take the
shot, and he takes it anyway. On the other end of the floor it wasn’t
the shooter who mattered but the shot. Now the shot was nothing, the
shooter everything.
33 . . . 32 . . . 31 . . .
Bryant — 12 for 31 on the night — took off and drove to the right,
his strength, in the middle of the lane. Battier cut him off. Bryant
tossed the ball back out to Derek Fisher, out of shooting range.
30 . . . 29 . . .
Like everyone else in the place, Battier assumed that the game was
still in Bryant’s hands. If he gave the ball up, it was only so that he
might get it back. Bryant popped out. He was now a good four feet beyond
the 3-point line, or nearly 30 feet from the basket.
28 . . .
Bryant caught the ball and, 27.4 feet from the basket, the Rockets’
front office would later determine, leapt. Instantly his view of that
basket was blocked by Battier’s hand. This was not an original
situation. Since the 2002-3 season, Bryant had taken 51 3-pointers at
the very end of close games from farther than 26.75 feet from the
basket. He had missed 86.3 percent of them. A little over a year ago the
Lakers lost to the
Cleveland Cavaliers after Bryant missed a 3 from 28.4 feet. Three nights from now the Lakers would lose to the
Orlando Magic
after Bryant missed a shot from 27.5 feet that would have tied the
game. It was a shot Battier could live with, even if it turned out to be
good.
Battier looked back to see the ball drop through the basket and hit
the floor. In that brief moment he was the picture of detachment, less a
party to a traffic accident than a curious passer-by. And then he
laughed. The process had gone just as he hoped. The outcome he never
could control.
Michael Lewis is the author of
“Moneyball” and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. His next book,
“Home Game,” a memoir about fatherhood, will be published in June.