Defense and the concept of diminishing returns

In basketball, though it isn’t discussed particularly often (or wasn’t until talents were taken to south beach) there are diminishing returns on offense skill. There are a limited number of minutes and shots per team, and while more good offensive players will tend to increase the general efficiency of their teammates, there is a theoretical limit to how much each additional offensive upgrade will make the team better.[1]

The same is true in hockey and football, though probably to a lesser extent in the hockey than in basketball. In baseball, nine players have to hit (whereas in the extreme basketball case, a Wilt/AI/Kobe/Carmelo can shoot the ball 90% of time while his team watches for a quarter or more), so, while you will see some diminishing returns if you hit an amazing hitter ninth in the order, the fact that the ninth player is generating fewer outs will actually improve the total offensive output (a team with nine .400 OBP guys will get 2-3 more baserunners and trips to the plate per game than a team with nine .300 OBP hitters, which gives them a better chance to score more runs).[2] In hockey, I would assume it would take much longer to see diminishing returns since so there are so many more players involved. If you have three A+ centers, while the other team has only one, you will have a distinct advantage because every team has to play at least three centers in every game.

A quick thought: parallels between esports and physical ones

I’ve watched a lot of esports in the last week or so, mostly focusing on the Gamescom League of Legends tournament (in which CLG beat out TSM in the finals match). Like any sport, the matches are streamed live with commentary, and (unlike most sports) the full replays can be found online after the fact.[1] The matches that I’ve watched—especially in comparison the baseball that dominates my current sports-watching time—left me with some interesting conclusions, mostly about technology.

First, camera angles, instant replay/slow-motion, and HD are really the greatest things ever. You cannot stress enough how much of a difference there is between an HD hockey game and one that is poorly broadcast. In the same vein, I’ve generally been opting for non-HD streaming (due to a mediocre internet connection) which generally works fine. Problems generally arise, however, in situations when there’s a lot of “clutter”—think about a pile of bodies in the corner in hockey—in which details, especially with the fast pace of the game, become nearly impossible for me (or, frequently, the announcers) to make out. HD would probably help for those moments, and slow-motion replays of team fights would be incredible.

As you camera angles, watching League is somewhat like watching a football game where you have one overhead camera that moves; it doesn’t matter how good the cameraperson is (and I found that the ones at Gamescom were generally very good), you’re going to end up missing a fair amount of the action regardless. I suppose a better analogy would be a soccer game in which there were three balls for the first half of the game: as long as you can only focus on one ball, you’re going to miss some incredible action in other parts of the field. Again, an instant replay feature would be great, especially if there was a slow-motion aspect, though doing that in a game like League—which doesn’t pause until it ends—would be difficult.

Second, announcers can add to the game or they can be distracting and misleading. I would say that this is a major problem in baseball—though that is just an opinion—and stems mostly from the fact that there is so much time between pitches, and so many strikeouts, and so many walks, that play-by-play has really been replaced by color commenting, which is generally much less interesting. At Gamescom, the announcers were interesting and injected information about strategy while the game was going on, like a good pair of hockey play-by-play callers. Watching with the sound off would taken away from the experience.

Third, and I think this is true across the board in sports, watching League is simply not going to be interesting without a background knowledge of what is going on. The finals match at Gamescom included some truly excellent uses of flash, a nice turret dive or two, a couple very good ganks, interesting banning strategy, and exemplary last-hitting and dragon coordination. Of course, if you don’t know what any of that means, you’re going to find the game much less interesting, in part because you won’t appreciate the level of difficulty involved (for this reason, I found watching a Rumble much less interesting than watching a Nidalee or Cho’Gath. I have never played Rumble, have no idea what his abilities do, and wasn’t really entranced by his positioning strategies). This is why I don’t particularly enjoy football: I simply don’t understand pro offensive packages or defensive strategies, and so while I can enjoy a nice pass or a particularly inspiring run, most of the game is much less interesting.[2]

And finally, tournament League, like most other professional sports, appears to be played and watched primarily by men. I think there’s a point here, but I don’t really know what it is.

---

[1] Actually, like many sports, tournament-style League has a five or ten or twenty second delay, depending on who you talk to. This is to prevent “ghosting”—basically, you don’t want a guy in the audience to shout “lookout, he’s behind the door” and actually prevent the person from going through the door.

[2] I’m also the only person I know who gets excited about good defensive positioning on hockey plays. 

Concussions and NHL Discipline

I think there are two different types of unwritten rules in sports. There are the rules that players follow, which I assume begins with something like: “don’t throw your teammate under a bus.” Then there are the rules that we, as watchers and commentators, have, which start with something along the lines of “players should play hard” and “players should care about rivalries” and includes “players should be approachable and likeable but also tough and, when appropriate, cruel.”

As is often pointed out, the rules we want players to follow aren’t always the unwritten rules that they do follow (cut to a patented Bill Simmons joke about Johnny Damon nodding in the corner). But I think there’s one that both players and fans tend to agree on: players shouldn’t be blamed for one injury. There’s a line, of course: players who refuse to play through any pain, players who don’t seem to care so long as they’re receiving their paycheck, players who just want a day off—these players are fair game, according to the unwritten rules, but we’re not allowed to lambaste someone for having a bone broken. We generally assume that they would have liked to avoid that outcome as much as anyone.

This is especially true with what you might call “robber” injuries. You know what I’m talking about—Orr’s knees, Koufax’s elbow, Bo’s hip. These are the most extreme examples, maybe, injuries that quite possibly stole GOAT-level players from us, but there are dozens of others of players who took a freak hit (Neely), who were overworked (Bird), or whose bodies just broke down early (Walton). We don’t blame these players for having to end it too soon; instead, we regret it, and curse the sports gods for their fickle nature, and start muttering to ourselves whenever a baseball player breaks a wrist, a basketball player blows an ACL, or a hockey player gets a concussion.[1]

Expanding baseball's playoffs

Today, Joe Posnanski (who you might suspect I have a lot of respect for, at least when it comes to baseball reporting, and you would be correct) wrote about what seems like an inevitable shift towards more teams in the playoffs. It’s a horn that’s been tooted a lot recently, mostly on ESPN, where Jason Stark and Steve Berthiaume in particular have taken to the idea as if it has no possible downsides. But it has died down recently, as reports surface that there will definitely not be an extra team this year and possibly won’t be next year either. So while the subject was perhaps the main one that I began this blog wanting to cover, it has slipped from my mind of late.[1]

In any case, Posnanski concluded that it probably isn’t as much of a boon as everyone makes it out to be, but that we’ll get used to it. I’d go farther on that first point—probably a lot farther—but Posnanski’s stance seems like the sole voice of reason so far, the one person who questions whether gunning the engine while approaching a curve is really the right course of action (ok… so that analogy was a stretch). In fairness, Jonah Keri at Grantland has expressed reservations in the past (I believe it was in a podcast with Simmons), and GM’s and players—at least according to what Stark reports—are not necessarily as on board than commentators seem to be.

Kindle, iPad, and the cloud

For anyone who has talked to me about it since I got my iPad, the part of it that I find most awesome is the Kindle app. To be honest, I basically got an iPad because I wanted a Kindle + other functions in case I used those too. And Kindle has delivered. They don't have the selection that I would like, and some of the books--especially poetry--are the type of shoddy post-copyright books that make me hate cheap publishers. Still, overall, a great experience, both on the iPad and on the computer (where my notes from the iPad show up automatically as long as I'm connected to the internet on both! Coolest thing ever!).

Which is why I was suspicious recently when Amazon announced the "cloud" reader. The cloud reader, which runs in Chrome and Safari instead of as an app, and which can be used offline, is clearly meant to replace the iPad app (and possibly the computer program as well). I've test-driven it a little, and it is clearly very well produced (i.e. Amazon has been wanting to get out of the iTunes app store for awhile). I'm as anti-iTunes as anyone, and really would hate that I cannot get third party applications if I used my iPad for anything but as an e-reader, so I generally support Amazon finding a go-round of Apple's annoying lack of flash and arm-and-a-leg cuts off the top through the app store. But so far, the cloud reader just doesn't have the features of the dedicated program: in Chrome, highlighting and copying text with the mouse does not work, which makes note-taking tedious at best (the bookmark system has never worked well without dedicated/set pages); nor do the pages "flip" or even scroll. Instead, one block of text replaces another, which is, at least to me, quite disconcerting.

Hopefully all these things will be resolved, especially if Amazon intends to discontinue service for the pc/mac Kindle application. I'm happy to fight the war against closed computing systems too, so long as the open ones are high-quality. One could also hope that they'll come around on at least a set page option, because, well, the more options the better.

Video games and free to play

Free to play video games haven’t been around for a long time; the genre began with “indie” massively multiplayer games. Typically browser-based, cartoonish, and lacking in serious graphical “punch,” these games would allow anyone to join and play; but if you wanted to get the coolest items, face the most intense bad guys, or just advance more quickly, you had to spend cash. I have absolutely no idea how well these games did for their creators. I’d guess the better ones did decently, but no major developers (read: the kind with stockholders) jumped onto the idea—there were online games that were free to play, but most of these you still had to purchase a physical disk for, and none of them had in-game systems that funneled cash to developers.

In retrospect, free to play looks like the type of innovation that would lead to massive success. Executives couldn’t see how the model would work, and, to be fair, there needs to be a very careful balancing act between making micro-purchases “worthwhile” to consumers and not alienating those players who don’t want to spend the money. However, making a game free to download, install, and play solves the major problem of the computer gaming in the last decade, piracy, and vastly expands the potential audience for a game.[1]

The question has always been whether that expanded base was going to generate enough money to justify not having every person pay $30-50 upfront. So far, the answer has been a resounding yes—so long, of course, as the game in question is a quality product. The most prominent free to play game, League of Legends, probably the best current DotA successor, recently announced that it was going to hold a tournament with a final cash prize of one million dollars. Two months ago, Valve (who are, incidentally, currently developing DotA 2) made their incredibly successful Team Fortress 2 free to download and play.

Both of these games are only playable online. And so far, both have combined massive player bases with affordable and attractive purchasables, which seems to be a formula for success. The question is whether other games can mimic this success. Could a monolith like WoW, with its focus on status symbols that have been gained through hours days weeks of tireless farming succeed if those symbols could be purchased? The model will never work for single-player games, but could we perhaps see more “episodic” games appear, in which players pay small entry fees to play short or small games that have frequent content updates?

Another question is how such games will succeed once the market it more crowded. Currently, LoL and TF2 offer the best (and cheapest) their genre has to offer. But LoL’s most well-known competitor, Heroes of Newerth, recently went free to play, and while Valve will not discuss their pricing plans for DotA 2, a free to play system would make sense, given their already established ability to distribute and promote through Steam. When compared to a games with traditional pricing structures like WoW or Call of Duty, we really don’t have any idea how LoL’s players translate into money for Riot (though I’m sure Riot has this information); likely only a small percentage of players make purchases—and it is unclear whether those players will switch (depriving Riot of their fund source) if a game of similar type and quality were released. What I’m questioning here is whether, without the initial buy-in required in a traditional purchasing structure, games will be able to pay for their development in a market in which players have options. Frankly, as of yet, we just don’t know.

---

[1] It is telling, I think, that the most monolithic of game producers—EA Games, and their divisions, including EA Sports—are the ones who have fought the losing battle with piracy the hardest. As early as five years ago, EA Sports used piracy as an excuse for not putting effort into porting their products from the consoles to the PC (I bet any psychologist or marketing exec could tell you that this is not the right strategy). In contrast, companies that either satisfy their fan bases (see Bethesda, BioWare) or have serious disadvantages to piracy built in to the game structure (Blizzard and the inability to play multiplayer-oriented games offline) have seemed to be much more successful at combating a problem. 

Random thought: Free Steve Nash

Watching Steve Nash--the symbol of all that is good and holy in a basketball offense--play with Vince Carter on the Suns was possibly the worst part of last year's wonderful basketball season. (Other contenders: Z-Bo not making the finals, and thus not forcing announcers of nationally televised games to uncomfortably discuss the fact that he needed to appear in a court that month, not just on one; the 24-stretch where every mention of basketball on a sports show required showing Rondo's injury; the realization that Tim Duncan can no longer single-handedly defend two good big men by himself; Steve Nash not making the playoffs.)

The one thing we can hope for is that the least alike pairing in the NBA (Nash works hard, passes first, rises to the moment, and once played with one eye swollen shut; Carter doesn't, doesn't, doesn't, and falls down if you blow on him) will be split up once Suns ownership realizes that this team isn't going anywhere. Ideally, they would trade Nash to a contender, but I would settle for somehow getting rid of Vince Carter, so that I was at least able to root for an underdog team with likable players and a good work ethic.