Every GM should read this DraftExpress article about 'busts' and 'steals'

[Global Celtic]

I'm really impressed by the amount of good material generated by this website. This article is really inovative and interesting.   http://www.draftexpress.com/article/Breaking-Bad-The-Thin-Line-Between-Busts-and-Steals-4466/

[D.o.s.]

Draft Express does good work -- they should really shell out for a redesign, though.

[footey]

Sounds like something written by Danny's brain doc.  Does he still use that guy to evaluate players?

[LooseCannon]

It would be a mistake to focus mainly on athleticism and size because you can't "teach" those things while ignoring the mental aspect because you believe all players are coach-able.

[nickagneta]

Hate to break this news to the OP, but processionals in the NBA have been employing psychiatrists and psychologists for the evaluation of draft picks since probably the cocaine era 70's. The analysis by DX seems right on and gives some nameclature to the various percentages given to each specific group.

I am not someone who has been in the sports world but having been someone in a hiring capacity at a workplace, I get what they are referring to and often have looked for certain personality traits and stayed away from others when coming to a decision to hire a person. The success of many positions in business can be directly linked to personality traits. The NBA has known about this for decades.

Heck, look back at our Celtic history. Why was Auerbach so great in so many ways? He could read the players personalities and treated each in a way that most positively impacted the team personality as a whole, which is whatAuerbach strove to manage, the team personality. Its no secret he treated Russell different than any other player. That personality trait that he and Jordan and Bird and Kobe has almost demands that you treat that player special to mmaximize their capabilities. The tough blue collar guys were guys you drove into the ground and rewarded with time in role positions because that maximized their capabilities. Inward guys you had to draw out. Outward guys you had to reign in. Auerbach was teaching this stuff to Russell in the 50s and 60s and Heinsohn and Bird in the 70s and 80s.

Is it any wonder that someone asked if this came from Danny Ainge's desk. Because if Ainge is anything, its an Auerbachian disciple.

[D.o.s.]

Hate to break this news to the OP, but processionals in the NBA have been employing psychiatrists and psychologists for the evaluation of draft picks since probably the cocaine era 70's. The analysis by DX seems right on and gives some nameclature to the various percentages given to each specific group.

I am not someone who has been in the sports world but having been someone in a hiring capacity at a workplace, I get what they are referring to and often have looked for certain personality traits and stayed away from others when coming to a decision to hire a person. The success of many positions in business can be directly linked to personality traits. The NBA has known about this for decades.

Heck, look back at our Celtic history. Why was Auerbach so great in so many ways? He could read the players personalities and treated each in a way that most positively impacted the team personality as a whole, which is whatAuerbach strove to manage, the team personality. Its no secret he treated Russell different than any other player. That personality trait that he and Jordan and Bird and Kobe has almost demands that you treat that player special to mmaximize their capabilities. The tough blue collar guys were guys you drove into the ground and rewarded with time in role positions because that maximized their capabilities. Inward guys you had to draw out. Outward guys you had to reign in. Auerbach was teaching this stuff to Russell in the 50s and 60s and Heinsohn and Bird in the 70s and 80s.

Is it any wonder that someone asked if this came from Danny Ainge's desk. Because if Ainge is anything, its an Auerbachian disciple.

It's worth noting here that Auerbach traded for the draft pick that became Bill Russell despite never meeting him or seeing him play in person.

And that Russell only fell to the second pick because Auerbach was able to "trade" a week of the Ice Capades, an ice skating show, to the owner of the Rochester Royals.

http://wagesofwins.com/2010/06/15/trading-the-ice-capades-for-bill-russell/


So, uh, grains of salt, and such. I think Cuban basically nailed this when he said "a locker room can deal with one divergent personality. More than one and it becomes a problem" last year.

[nickagneta]

Hate to break this news to the OP, but processionals in the NBA have been employing psychiatrists and psychologists for the evaluation of draft picks since probably the cocaine era 70's. The analysis by DX seems right on and gives some nameclature to the various percentages given to each specific group.

I am not someone who has been in the sports world but having been someone in a hiring capacity at a workplace, I get what they are referring to and often have looked for certain personality traits and stayed away from others when coming to a decision to hire a person. The success of many positions in business can be directly linked to personality traits. The NBA has known about this for decades.

Heck, look back at our Celtic history. Why was Auerbach so great in so many ways? He could read the players personalities and treated each in a way that most positively impacted the team personality as a whole, which is whatAuerbach strove to manage, the team personality. Its no secret he treated Russell different than any other player. That personality trait that he and Jordan and Bird and Kobe has almost demands that you treat that player special to mmaximize their capabilities. The tough blue collar guys were guys you drove into the ground and rewarded with time in role positions because that maximized their capabilities. Inward guys you had to draw out. Outward guys you had to reign in. Auerbach was teaching this stuff to Russell in the 50s and 60s and Heinsohn and Bird in the 70s and 80s.

Is it any wonder that someone asked if this came from Danny Ainge's desk. Because if Ainge is anything, its an Auerbachian disciple.

It's worth noting here that Auerbach traded for the draft pick that became Bill Russell despite never meeting him or seeing him play in person.

And that Russell only fell to the second pick because Auerbach was able to "trade" a week of the Ice Capades, an ice skating show, to the owner of the Rochester Royals.

http://wagesofwins.com/2010/06/15/trading-the-ice-capades-for-bill-russell/


So, uh, grains of salt, and such. I think Cuban basically nailed this when he said "a locker room can deal with one divergent personality. More than one and it becomes a problem" last year.

Yeah I was talking more about Auerbach's use of personality in coaching than recruiting. Back in his days the draft was a completely different animal. Didn't mean to make it seemed that Auerbach used advanced personality profiling in the draft recruiting process.

[D.o.s.]

I think the real moral of the story is that we should trade James Dolan a permanent slot opening for an extended Allmans Residency at the Tweeter/Great Woods in exchange for Iman Shumpert.

[fairweatherfan]

Is it any wonder that someone asked if this came from Danny Ainge's desk. Because if Ainge is anything, its an Auerbachian disciple.

Yeah, but Danny's "brain types" (aka the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is pretty much a joke in academic psychology circles.  It's about one notch better than a "Which Game of Thrones House are you?" Buzzfeed quiz at actually telling you something worth knowing about personality. 

Hopefully Danny's moved on to better metrics because I cringed every time I had to read about how much he liked it.

[D.o.s.]

Is it any wonder that someone asked if this came from Danny Ainge's desk. Because if Ainge is anything, its an Auerbachian disciple.

Yeah, but Danny's "brain types" (aka the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) is pretty much a joke in academic psychology circles.  It's about one notch better than a "Which Game of Thrones House are you?" Buzzfeed quiz at actually telling you something worth knowing about personality. 

Hopefully Danny's moved on to better metrics because I cringed every time I had to read about how much he liked it.

There's a really nice joke to be made about things Ainge ostensibly believes in that aren't taken very seriously by many other people.

[BballTim]

  I might be alone in this, but I think articles like that are worthless. Even if you ignore the fact that they're classifying many players that they've never met by personality type, the whole exercise is extremely subjective. If you're coming up with personality traits that good players share and other traits that bad players share you'll end up fitting your data to your conclusions. Once you pick out a trait that some of the good players share you'll start deciding that more and more of them are like that, at least to a certain extent.

[fairweatherfan]

  I might be alone in this, but I think articles like that are worthless. Even if you ignore the fact that they're classifying many players that they've never met by personality type, the whole exercise is extremely subjective. If you're coming up with personality traits that good players share and other traits that bad players share you'll end up fitting your data to your conclusions. Once you pick out a trait that some of the good players share you'll start deciding that more and more of them are like that, at least to a certain extent.

It's not explained well in the article, but they're getting their data from questionnaires given to players as part of the pre-draft process.  They're standardized measures, which means they're very rigidly scored.  It's also hard to know in advance who's going to over and underperform their draft spot.  So fitting the data seems unlikely.

I think a bigger problem is going with a 13-factor model.  A lot of those categories overlap pretty strongly.  And I'm guessing comparing raw scores instead of percentiles would look a lot less impressive.  I'm skeptical it explains much.  But the purpose of the model is to predict future performance, so if it works, they'll make a ton of money, and if it doesn't it'll disappear.  Self-correcting.

EDIT: Forgot the link: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/30517/putting-draft-prospects-to-the-psych-test