So . . . you read that right - not even fully back on posting schedule and I'm already combining my two passions, the ones that most of you aren't interested in: decision-making and basketball. I've had this one in my head for about a couple of months now, ever since Greg Oden of the Portland Trailblazers had yet another season-ending surgery (that makes for a total of 82 games in the four seasons since he was drafted first overall, with two seasons missed entirely). Drafting Oden was clearly the "wrong" decision for Portland. But was it the "worst" decision too? The answer after the jump.
If you remember back to my now-famous post on the difference between the right and best decisions (found here, and no, it's not actually famous), the "right" decision is the one that eventually turns out most favorably, but the "best" decision is the one that provided the probabilistically best outcome at the time of the decision. If you don't want to have to read the whole post again, the example I use involves an offered trade of one lottery ticket in exchange for three. It is clearly not the best decision to make (you reduce your odds of winning by two-thirds) but if the one ticket gained in the exchange is the eventual winner, then to make this lopsided trade is the right decision in hindsight. We tend to reward those who make the right decisions (even though many successes are due to luck), when instead we should reward those who make the best decisions (whom, over time, will more often make the right decisions).
Today I want to look at this paradox in the context of NBA draft selections. Every June the following year's rookie class is drafted by 30 NBA teams and to select early in the draft is considered a great boon to teams. If you have the number one pick overall, you don't want to mess up. In 2007, Portland had the #1 pick and the debate was down to two players, Greg Oden and Kevin Durant. As mentioned above, with the benefit of three-plus seasons of hindsight, Durant was clearly the right choice. But we can't fault Portland for selecting Oden if Oden was the best choice and his injuries and missed games are due to bad luck.
Sorry Portland, but it doesn't look like that is the case. He missed a big chunk of his only college season due to injury. According to ESPN's Bill Simmons, who seems to never tire of pointing this out, Oden's legs are not the same length, with one over an inch longer than the other. Oden is also quite tall (7 feet) and big (almost 300 lbs.), which are factors that also contribute to injury. Yao Ming is a walking example of the greater likelihood of injury for really big guys (physics aside: it has to do with weight-to-height ratio - the taller the person, the higher this ratio, and it's more likely that bones will break. One physicist has said that if there was ever a 100-foot tall man, his bones would shatter before he could take a single step). So Portland has to know that there was a significant chance that their star recruit would be frequently injured. The other factor indicating that Oden wasn't the best choice was the strength of the alternative - Durant had performed at an elite level in his college season.
What it comes down to is how much higher a healthy Oden't ceiling was compared with a healthy Durant, in contrast to the likelihood that either would get injured. If Oden was 20% more likely to get injured, his best would have to be 25% higher than Durant's to compensate. And the common wisdom is that Oden's best wasn't going to be earth-shattering, just possibly very good. All of which points to the selection of Oden as not being the best decision in addition to not being the right decision.
What surprised me on draft night that year was the lack of discussion of history and how it might inform the decision. 23 years earlier the Portland Trail Blazers had the #2 pick in the draft and were deciding between a potentially very good big man with injury concerns and a smaller player who had performed at an elite level in college. They chose the big man, Sam Bowie, and passed on the other player, Michael Jordan. I'm not saying that they're cursed or that Oden has injury issues because of history, but you might think that they should have been a little gun-shy when it comes to injury-prone centers.
I'm thinking I may include this Right Decision/Best Decision topic a little more often in the blog, to evaluate past decision and maybe shed some light on right or wrong decisions made in a variety of contexts beyond the eventual outcomes. And for those of you with absolutely no interest in outcomes or basketball (or basketball outcomes), you likely aren't reading this because you would have given up long ago. But I'll have something on other topics next time.
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