On Certainty

I knew the stock market was going to crash in 2007. All the threads of knowledge were floating in burgeoning blogosphere: the housing bubble, the overinflated market, the massively overleveraged investment banks, idiots daytrading, and all of Alan Greenspan’s “Irrational Exuberance.” Of course, I failed to act on my gut, and like many Americans, lost half of my retirement savings. But I was young. Determined not to repeat the same mistake, I pulled all of my 401K out of the market at the beginning of this year (not quickly enough to avoid some pain), and so far things have been relatively flat, but that doesn’t stop hundreds of prognosticators from continuing to forecast doom.

Closer to the Cuyahoga instead of the Harlem, the soothsayers have been mostly crying misery for the Cavaliers. ESPN’s panel of of “experts” picked the Warriors by a margin of 22-6. The recent odds in Vegas bottom out with Cleveland as a 2:1 underdog. And more than a couple of our readers and staff members are viewing this series with dread. We’re a funny species when it comes to probabilities and certainties and how confidence in them shapes our behavior.

Sports leagues, pro and amateur, are designed to produce relatively competitive match-ups. And even though 2:1 seems slightly doomy, it’s still a relatively even probability. I mean, we don’t pit the Cavaliers against a team of seventh graders. It wouldn’t even be fun. Leagues must match up opponents whose abilities are at least of the same order of magnitude. So when it comes to the Cavs’ chances this Finals, I’ll take the tactic of Tony Kornheiser when describing the odds of of any sporting event’s outcome. “It’s 50/50. It’ll either happen or it won’t.”

That’s a far cry from many I know who are convinced the Cavs have no shot, and that the Warriors are the most unstoppable sports force since the Jordan Bulls or the 16-0 Patriots of ’07. Of course, we all know what happened to that Pats team. And yes, I’m fully aware that the seven game nature of the NBA playoffs makes single game results less significant than they are in the NFL or NCAA tournament. But anyone who has a lock on predicting the future is absolutely wasting their time picking NBA games. Plus, certainty takes all the fun out of sports, and I’m distrustful of anyone who believes strongly in anything.

Colin McGowan wrote a column related this topic a few years ago. A lot of his article, like this one, was inspired by arguing with Tom Pestak. Colin spent some time complaining about the hubris of analytics and people who shout about their intelligence from the rooftops.

Having the best predictive models and being right about things more often than not is is important; it gives you a competitive advantage. But outside of that context, you’re a carnival weight-guesser or a weatherman. Yet still, some analytics writers carry themselves like they hold a secret truth in their back pocket that they occasionally deign to share portions of with the public. They’re the Gnostics of the NBA landscape.

And I’ve heard a lot of these guys shouting “Warriors!” from their roofs. None of them have the truth in their back pocket. Because these guys are just guessing. Educatedly so, but they’re guessing. And we’ve seen it time and again, from Galileo to Heisenberg to Nate Silver. Every time we think we have we have a model for how we think systems are supposed to behave, someone comes along and proves that our model is wrong. I mean if you asked analytics guru, Nate Silver, a year and a half ago if Donald Trump had a shot at winning the Republican nomination for the presidency, he’d have laughed until you skulked away in embarrassment. The Donald has since destroyed most analysts election models.

We saw this phenomenon in the NBA. Silver and Co. claimed they “proved” that intentionally fouling bad free-throw shooters was a bad tactic, and then teams (like the Cavs) started using it to take teams completely out of their offense and win games. Part of why it worked was that there is no statistical model for how a fouled players’ teammates are going to be taken out of their game by not knowing whether their teammate was going to the line or not. In addition, they were looking at the effect on average offenses, not offenses that are averaging obscenely high points per possession. My point is: be a skeptic. No one knows who’s going to win. As Socrates said, “True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing.” (Bill and Ted taught me that).

While it’s fun to make predictions, I’m not taking anyone’s seriously. No team has ever ripped through a regular season like the Dubs and only a couple teams have barnstormed through the postseason like the Cavs who are posting an obscene 13.4 average point differential. These two teams are destroying models and redefining the way basketball is played. The Warriors introduced their “Death lineup” and Cleveland has countered with Channing Frye destroying teams with three point shooting from the center spot. There are no datasets that can predict how these two teams will react to each other on the court, because these two incarnations haven’t yet.

But there are those who will still cry doom, giving Cleveland no chance to beat the Warriors in seven. I reiterate that anything can happen: injuries, funny bounces, a player coming from out of nowhere to contribute transcendent moments, suspensions, Curry subtweets, the weird influences of emotion on ability… The future is not written. But it’s funny, sometimes the less likely an event is to happen (or not happen), the more people cling unflinchingly to the belief that it will happen (or not). People want to see their worldview confirmed, despite the odds. And sometimes, people don’t want to hope in something has a high probability of happening, because it would be too painful to hope and then live with the heartbreak. Just as there are a lot of gnostics who give the Cavs no hope, there are a lot of Cleveland fans in these last subsets: fearing the Warriors too much to believe in the Cavs.

And a belief in the Cavs at this point, isn’t even an irrational expectation. I still haven’t put my money back in the stock market, but Cleveland has much better chances we have of experiencing another black swan. Of this I am certain. So yeah, Tom. The Cavs are gonna win this thing. I can’t wait to watch, whether I’m right or not.