Today, after enjoying watching the Lakers go up 3-0 on the Jazz, I decided to go to the gym. At UC Irvine, we have a nice track that borders a few basketball courts. While running around the track, I watched the players miss some pretty lousy shots.
Anyways, I began wondering how often you would make a basket if you literally shot randomly. I decided I had to know the answer so I went home and wrote a Monte Carlo code (in Python of course). (Now I know why I got such a high nerd score.)
Here is the code:
As you can see from the code I put a player on a random spot on the floor from which he/she shoots a random shot. I used this to get the details of the court size. The units are in feet except the angle of the shot which is in radians.
I assume that the average random shot a person would make would have the distance of a typical "free throw" shot as it passes the the "10 foot plane" the rim sits at with a standard deviation of half that distance. Furthermore, I don't take into account the advantage of the backboard or the infrequent shot off the wall into the rim. However, this is deficiency (hopefully) is compensated by the rim being square instead of round (and therefore having more surface area) plus not allowing ball to "bounce out".
I then ran this code 100 times to get an error estimate.
And here is the results: If you were to randomly shoot a ball in a basketball court a million times you should expect to make 681 +/- 26 (0.068%) out of the million in either basket and 342 +/- 19 (0.034%) in your own basket.
Therefore, if you are playing basketball and are not making ~ one out of every 1468 (unblocked) shots, (in either basket) there is something really wrong with you.
Given Kobe Bryant is one of the few polarizing players in the NBA, many of you will respond to my title the way democrats did when they were asked by Steven Colbert a similar question about former President George Bush. (Watch Below.)
Nevertheless, since he lives next door to UC Irvine, works out at our facilites on occasion and hosts Beat Kobe nights at our gym it is hard to attend UC Irvine and not be a Kobe/Lakers fan.
Now lets put some numbers behind this question by comparing him to the current greatest basketball player of all time: Michael Jordan.
Michael Jordan
6 NBA Championships.
5 MVP Awards.
3 All Star MVP Awards.
10 Scoring Titles.
2 Olympic Gold Medals.
Played Until Age 40. (With breaks in between.)
Kobe Bryant
4 out of 5 NBA Championships.
1 MVP Awards.
3 All Star MVP Awards.
2 Scoring Titles.
1 Olympic Gold Medal.
Is Currently 31 years old.
I think it is safe to say that Kobe deserves to be considered a great player, but will the day come when he is considered the greatest?
Personally I think it will be close either way. The odds are he will similarly last until age 40. Given this:
How the Lakers are playing right now, 9 years is plenty of time for him to rack up 6+ NBA championships.
5 MVPs will be hard to match. However, given he won 2 years ago, was the runner up last year and is in the MVP lead this year it could still be possible.
Kobe will beat Jordan here. (9 years to win one more All Star MVP?)
Jordan will probably still reign king with 10 scoring titles. (Although Kobe is close every year and has the second highest points in a game with 81 points.)
Kobe will get another gold withen 4 years and perhaps another in 8.
If Kobe can close the doors on the MVPs and pull ahead in total NBA Championships, which could feasibly happen, I think Kobe will have a case to be made for being the best basketball player ever.
LeBron James?
LeBron fans can email me once he so much as takes his team to an NBA finals, much less wins one. Until then, sorry. Truly great players find ways to win.
Ultimately, I believe the most important thing a player can do is make sure their team wins. Kobe has done that, and may do that in the end better than any other player has.
As most of you may have heard UNC won the NCAA Basketball championship yesterday. To some people this came as no surprise as they were favored to win. And considering how they played in the first two rounds it also comes as no surprise. So now here comes the critical question, did they win because they were good or because they were statistically preselected by the NCAA championship committee to win?
Previously I have written on conspiracy theories ranging from a US invasion of Canada to the sudden drop in oil prices last year. So now I present my latest conspiracy theory: UNC was selected to win the NCAA championship at the beginning of of March, if not sooner.
You are probably aware of the fact that computer scientists all over the US spend an inordinate amount of time and effort writing a program that will analyze each team and select who will win each game and thus who will ultimately win the championship. The reasons for this are simple, on the one hand it presents and interesting statistical problem in multi-dimensional parameter space that can be solved. On the other hand it is a good way to make money. If you can write a good program that can predict who will win, then you can bet on that team and make a lot of money. It's the same reason people study the statistics of gambling (in one sense this is studying the statistics of gambling). These people who bet on their team obviously don't want to loose money, so they make sure that their program works best.
Now consider that it isn't just college professors betting on online brackets, but now you are a corporation betting on advertising revenue (ESPN, CBS, NCAA, etc.) but now you are not just trying to predict the outcome of a random event, but rather you are trying to maximize your returns, and you have some influence over these seemingly "random events". So lets say you get your hands on one of these predictive programs that seems to work fairly well, but the bracket and tournament has not been decided yet. You have several teams to choose from, to put into 16 slots. You can also determine how these 16 teams will go into the slots.
So you input the data and you see that team A is good at offense OK at defense and good at free throws. Team B is OK at defense but good at offense and free throws. If these two teams played they would be evenly matched, but team A tends to foul more than team B, thus if they played, team B would be more likely to win. So you look at this multi-dimensional parameter space and while there are a number of variables, they all can be reduced to one variable, the score. This makes it immensely simple. So now you look at team C and see that they are good at offense OK at defense and OK at free throws. Now we see that if team A plays team C, the fact that team A tends to foul no longer matters because team C can't make free throws. Thus if you seed team A against team B, team B is guaranteed to win, but if you seed team A against team C it could go either way and come down to a buzzer shot.
As long as the people organizing the bracket have no personal interest in the matter (i.e. they don't or can't bet, and they don't hold personal feelings towards team B) then they just might do it randomly. But now let us introduce another parameter. The organizers know that if they have team A and team B play, team B will win. They know that if team C and team D play, team D will win. Which means team B will play team D in the next round. If you switch the original bracket, then you may have team C playing either team D or A in the final. Now here's the catch. If you have B and D play in the final you can get more sponsors and you get more money. So if all you care about is revenue from sponsorship then it would be easy to "fix" the bracket in order to maximize your revenue.
As a real example of maximizing revenue. Say you have a football (soccer) championship. Would you want the championship game to be played between Newell's Old Boys and Chaco Forever, or would you want the championship game to be played between Real Madrid and Manchester United? (note: Chaco Forever doesn't even have a Wikipedia page...oh wait! I found it, it was spelled wrong) So how much money could be made either way? If you could affect the outcome, and make a little money would you do it? Especially if it appears for all intents and purposes to be legitimate and random? (But really isn't).
So here is my conspiracy theory, whenever it became obvious that they could organize the bracket so that UNC could win, and that they would maximize their advertising revenue that way, the set the bracket and UNC was guaranteed a win. Looking at the point spread for the entire tournament, it has the appearance of being rigged. Just a thought.
Now for your viewing pleasure: This is the celebration that took place on Franklin Street after the game. This is the corner of Columbia and Franklin Streets, which is about a block from the Physics Department. We also have to drive down Columbia Street every time we go to church, to give you some reference.
A major brawl broke out between the Nuggets and Knicks at Madison Square Garden. All ten players on the court were ejected. Many players recieved further punishments with the harshest going to Carmelo Anthony: 15 game suspension. Both teams were fined $500,000.
