Cooperating competitors
Why is it that, in
Because the motorcycle vendors have a cooperative interest in getting you to find one of them greater than any one of them has a competitive interest in trying to pre-empt competition.
Why does the NFL have a salary cap?
Because the teams have a cooperative interest in preserving their financial health greater than their individual interest in overpaying any particular player.
Why do NFL players agree to a salary cap?
Because each player has a cooperative interest in a competitive (and therefore entertaining) league greater than their individual interest in busting the cap with individual free agency.
Why should the NBA take Bill James’s recommendations that it:
Lengthen the shot clock. Shorten the games. Move in the 3-point line. Shorten the playoffs.
Who, you may ask, is Bill James, what does he know about basketball [Hint: not bloody much — Ed.], and what does this have to do with affordable housing?
Patience, grasshopper.
You may not kill me until the last reel
He had something to do with this:
October 29, 2004: First World Series win in 86 years
And this:
October 29, 2007: Second World Series win in 3 years
I first discovered Bill James 27 years ago, when I bought the first Baseball Abstract published by a major book publisher. I love James because he thinks originally, is evidence-driven (he tests his theories against the numbers and discards the ones that don’t stand up), cares passionately, and writes clearly. [Hey, sounds like a certain blogger I know – Ed. Aw, shucks – Auth.].
My wife will tell you that I’m something of a sports savant, at least in terms of deconstructing and analyzing how the games are being played and what strategies can win. Time and again, I’ve read something in James with which I’ve immediately agreed, or that crystallized thoughts rattling around my head. And he’s a geek made good [Like somebody we know? – Ed.], who after 25 years of publishing for free everything he thought about baseball, was hired in 2003 by email by the Boston Red Sox with the explicit goal of helping the Sox deploy the team’s great resources, including its revenue base (second only to the Evil Empire):
We earn every nickel we take in
James himself would be the first to state that statistical analysis by itself does not win ballgames, but, as he might put it, it greatly improves your odds. As he put it in an article from last October’s Boston Globe:
In sports, mathematical analysis is old news as applied to baseball, basketball, and football. Statistical research of player performances has now been routinely applied to improve the results of individual teams. But it has not yet been applied to leagues. This unexplored area holds great promise for sports, and sports fans. Rather than beginning with the question “How does a team win?” - the query that has been the basis of all sports research to this point - what if we begin by asking “How does a league succeed?”
Here’s where affordable housing – or, for that matter, any specialized sector competing for public resources – should start playing much closer attention.
State LIHTC allocating agencies have a cooperative interest in maximizing LIHTC equity prices even as they have a competitive interest in using all their state’s LIHTC and taking away any LIHTC other states fail to use. In effect, the states are the ‘owners’ of a league called LIHTC, and any given sponsor or developer is a team playing in that league.
Just as teams compete within a league, leagues compete with other leagues. With the sports seasons overlapping, today I could have watched
We’ve spent a long time studying what is good for the Red Sox, the Patriots, the Celtics. The issue of what is good for leagues is virgin territory.
Sure, an’ why would ye be showin’ a Celtics mascot on St. Patrick’s Day, now?
And in an electronic world, the competition doesn’t stop at national borders, which is why the Red Sox will open in
or a Ronaldinho shirt.
Imagine a billion new Red Sox fans!
The general principle is that your rivals at one level of competition are your cooperators in competing one level up.
Just as the NFL players have a cooperative interest with the NFL owners in making their league more attractive than others, all affordable housing stakeholders have a shared interest in increasing affordable housing’s share of the Federal budget.
You’d think we’d know this. But we don’t.
James doesn’t know for sports leagues, but he knows the questions whose answers he’d like to know.
Do leagues thrive when the best teams are in the biggest cities? Or is it actually better for the league if the best teams are in smaller cities, like a
Do leagues grow rapidly in periods of innovation and development, or do leagues prosper more in periods of stability? Is it better for a league if the player provides his own equipment, or is it better for the league if the league controls the equipment?
Nobody really knows.
Affordable housing advocates and stakeholders ought to ask the parallel questions:
We’ve got questions, nobody’s got answers
Listing these five questions took me all of thirty seconds, and yet to the best of my knowledge there’s absolutely no study devoted to them, ever, anywhere. Why? People who spend their waking hours competing with their peers have difficulty rising above the zero-sum competition to the larger positive-sum cooperation available to them.
I see now how we can all cooperate!
Back to the NBA. Why, in Bill James’s view, is the NBA losing market share to the NFL and Major League Baseball?
Take the problem of what we could call NBA “sluggishness.” In the regular season, players simply don’t seem to be playing hard all the time. […]
The NBA’s problem is that the underlying mathematics of the league are screwed up. In every sport, there is an element of predetermination and an element of randomness in the outcomes. […] In the NBA, the element of predetermination is simply too high. Simply stated, the best team wins too often. If the best team always wins, then the sequence of events leading to victory is meaningless. Who fights for the rebound, who sacrifices his body to keep the ball from rolling out of bounds doesn’t matter. The greater team is going to come out on top anyway.
A fan can look at the standings in December, pick the teams that will make the playoffs, and might get them all. This has a horrific effect on the game. Everybody knows who’s going to win.
Why do the players seem to stand around on offense? Why is showboating tolerated? Because it doesn’t matter.
Why don’t teams play as teams? Because they can win without doing so (although teams like these may crumble when they run up against the Pistons or Spurs).
If you reduce the number of possessions in a game by giving teams more time to hold the ball, you make it more likely that the underdog can. If the NBA went back to shorter playoff series - for example from best-of-seven games to best-of-three - an upset in that series would become a much more realistic possibility. A three-game series would make the home-court advantage much more important, which, in turn, would make the regular season games much more important. The importance of each game is inversely related to the frequency with which the best team wins.
On the other foot, no league could thrive, either, if every team had the same chance to win. […] What is the “perfect balance” point, at which leagues tend most to thrive? I don’t know, because it hasn’t been studied.
It’s time to step back and look at the bigger picture.
Let’s go back to James’ recommendations for NBA basketball, to which I’ve added some specifics:
Lengthen the shot clock – say from 24 seconds to 35.
Shorten the games – say from 48 minutes to 40.
Move in the 3-point line – say from 23′ 9″ to 19′ 9″ or 20′ 9″.
Shorten the playoffs – say from best-of-seven to one-and-done.
If the NBA did that, it might create a tournament that drew in the entire country, and transfixed millions of Americans who are the most casual of basketball fans.
It would look like – March Madness.
Happy bracketology.
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