Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s review in the New Yorker about “The Wages of Wins,” a look at how the value of a basketball player can be determined with a complex statistical formula rather than gut-instincts scouting, I couldn’t help but to reminisce the good old days of the Hoching Basketball Association – a local basketball league in Edison, NJ that I founded with my friends in 2000 and ran until 2004.
Like the book’s complicated stat that determines the number of wins a player has contributed to his team, our league was very serious about the HBA Point system. The HBAP was a weighted average of various statistics which took into account a player’s contributions on offense as well as on defense. It even measured the efficiency in his ability to score (FG %). The HBAP was always a great indicator of who the impact players were in our league and our aggregate HBAP stats for teams never failed to correspond the HBAP leader with the best record.
Gladwell’s article made me think hard about how it is that people, across various professions, can be so overrated based on the tendency of others to focus and glorify certain figures over others. The greatness of a pastor based on the size of his congregation, the effectiveness of a managing director based on his P&L, the legitimacy of a president based on his — oh wait, this one has surpassed statistical rationale. But then there’s the concept of “clutch,” where you’re not really that great all the time but you somehow give off the sense of “stepping it up” when “things count the most.” A Reggie Jackson in October, a Michael Jordan in the playoffs, a Joe Montana in the fourth quarter — sure they all had great career stats, but it was because of their clutch performances that we still revere them. Does the analogy carry through to life outside the sports arena? I’m sure we’d all like to think so from time to time, but how much of this is media-induced myth (our nonstop comparisons to the sports heroes) and how much of it is a self-awareness of our everyday mediocrity with occasional attempts to surpass the routine?
If only there was a statistic to measure the value – nay, the meaning – of life.