So . . . tonight is game seven of the NBA finals between the Lakers and Celtics. Tonight a champion will be crowned. Tonight we will learn who was the best team of this season. Well . . . maybe. By the way, this is a long-ish post about a topic that I will probably come back to several times.
Is the team that wins the championship the best? This is how it is usually conceptualized. On ESPN's NBA blog they said that the winner of tonight's game will have proven that they are the best team in the world. I disagree. I think they will have proven that they have won the championship, but that is not necessarily the same as being the best.
Let's confine today's discussion to the definition of best as "the team that has the highest probability of winning its contests." There are other ways of defining 'best,' (e.g. most valuable financially, greatest raw number of wins/winning percentage, best positioned for the future, etc.) but we'll leave these aside. When we say that a team is the 'best' we usually mean that they are more likely to win than any potential opponent. This may happen to be the same team that is best under a different definition, and may be the same team as the champion, but I don't think this is always the case.
From a scientific point of view, the playoffs are inferior to the regular season in determining the best primarily because of sample size: in the NBA playoffs, for example, you have somewhere between 16 and 28 playoff games for the two teams in the finals; the regular season is 82 games long. Furthermore, the regular season provides a wider spectrum of opponents and every team plays the same other teams (though not necessarily the same number of times).
Consider a poker tournament, such as the World Series of Poker, that includes thousands of the 'best' poker players in the world. Is the winner of that tournament the best player in the world? I think most people would say no, because there is an element of luck in poker. Luck especially comes into play in an elimination tournament, where one bad hand can end your quest for the championship. A better way of determining who is the best poker player would be to look at performance over a longer time horizon, where luck would have evened out.
But sports aren't about luck, are they? Of course they are. An untimely injury, a bad shooting night, or wind that blows a potential home run into foul territory all can change the outcome of a game or a playoff series. The longer regular season allows for these 'lucky' elements to even out more so than the playoffs.
There exist situations, however, where it is clear that the champion is the best. Consider Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, and Roger Federer - these are athletes that dominate the competition in their sports. We have decent sample sizes where they almost always win. They are clearly the best in their sport. The 1996 Chicago Bulls and the 2001 Los Angeles Lakers were like this as well - they dominated and their opponents posed little threat.
The NBA championship comes down to one game tonight. Can one game indicate who is best? Is Switzerland a better soccer team than Spain because they beat them yesterday? In 2007 the New England Patriots won every single game they played except one. No one even came close to them that season. But because the game they lost happened to be the Superbowl, they were not champions. I don't think this means they were not the best.
Really, what we have learned during the NBA playoffs is that the two teams remaining are both very good teams and fairly evenly matched. They have each won three games in the series thus far (and split their regular season games 1-1). Tonight's game does not tell us more than what we already know - that they're both good teams.
Our obsession with who is the winner is fairly safe in sports (though from a utility-maximizing perspective, rooting for a sports team is a losing proposition; because the championship carries so much weight, and only one of thirty or so teams wins each year, there is far more negative utility than positive, especially if you're a Knicks fan like me). In other domains, it has more serious consequences. In both of the U.S. elections where Bush Jr. 'won' (ahem, ahem) the vote was extremely close. Because he was declared the winner he (and his party) took this to mean that they had a mandate from the people. A more sensible way of looking at it would be to see that the American people were deeply divided, and that he was leader more because of luck than because the people demanded it (c'mon, don't you think Dubya is capable of nuanced thinking?).
It's important to have a winner; no one will be happy if you just single out a group of teams as being very good. It's also important to decide upon that winner through an unambiguous contest (no BCS shenanigans). But it's equally important to recognize that this winner arrived where it did through a combination of luck and being good enough. Lots of teams and competitors are good enough to succeed. The eventual winner needs that extra luck to end up on top.
Enjoy the game tonight, and may the best team win!
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