Will the Milwaukee Bucks win the NBA Draft? Lessons from their prediciment win or lose.

Learning from Losing: the Milwaukee Bucks case study

The Milwaukee Bucks lost a lot of games last year. The team won 15 games and lost an incredible 67—that’s a .183 winning percentage. It was the worst mark by far in a league that had a handful of teams seemingly trying not to win. As a result, the team will have the best shot at winning the National Basketball Association’s draft lottery tonight. Because of it’s woeful record, the Bucks will have a one-in-four shot at landing the top pick—and with it the right to select its choice of Andrew Wiggians, Joel Embiid, Jabari Parker, Julius Randle, or any other prospect it likes.

So, perhaps things are looking up for the nearly moribund franchise. Basketball savant and Grantland writer Zach Lowe points to another development that’s nearly as big a deal as the number one overall draft pick would be. He writes, about the Bucks in a piece on National Basketball Association front office intrigue, “The team’s medical staff has partnered with an outside consultant to develop a software program that tracks individual biological data for each player — which muscles are strong, which are weak, and what those findings mean for related muscles and joints. They’ve used the information to craft individual offseason workout plans for every player on the roster — a first for the team, according to John Hammond and David Morway, the team’s GM and assistant GM, respectively.”

This is a phenomenal insight into the way having deficiencies can hurt you. It’s easier to grasp intuitively when thinking about an athlete—if his or her body has a glaring weakness, it stands to reason that his or her weakness can easily cause problems in other strong areas when moving. It’s perhaps less obvious that having intellectual areas of weakness can do the same.

Play the game you know you’re going to win

Charlie Munger’s partner Warren Buffett recently talked about “The best really know when they are playing the game that they're going to win.”

Buffet and Munger are well known to love Ted Williams's approach to hitting. He took a very scientific approach to the task—his book on the subject was even called “The Science of Hitting.” Just about the single most important variable to predicting batting success for Williams was pitch selection. Get a good pitch to hit was rule 1. Munger and Buffet approach their craft the same way—only with an additional advantage. Williams had to swing before accruing three good pitches. Buffet and Munger could theoretically wait indefinitely. 

Ted Williams's 'heat zone' batting chart from 'The Science of Hitting'.

Williams even went so far as to chart his expected success rate at swinging at pitches in every possible location. Notice he didn’t bother charting his success rate outside of the strike zone. He didn’t plan on swinging at any balls not represented by the 77 that comprise the strikezone in the graphic above. And, if one account is to be believed, he didn’t need to. So good was Williams eye, so impeccable his plate discipline, an umpire was once reported to tell a young pitcher who complained about a called ball he thought had found the strike zone, “When you throw a strike, Mr. Williams will let you know.”

A display of Ted Williams's 'heat zone' in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Buffett’s and Munger’s track records are so good, that they often get the kind of respect that the umpire apocryphally afforded Williams. But Buffett and Munger, just as much as Williams, needed to constantly display that discipline. Start swinging at bad pitches and making bad calls on stocks, and they’d get exposed pretty quickly.

Even the great ones fail sometimes

While Buffett does acknowledge that he and Munger have been quite good at staying within their circles of competence, he admits that he’s not perfect in this regard. “Charlie and I are reasonably good at knowing the perimeter of our circle of competence. I would say in my own case, I've gone out of it more often in retail than any other arena. It's easy to think you understand retail, and then subsequently find you didn't, as in the department store in Baltimore. You can say I was outside my circle when I bought Berkshire, though; I originally bought it to resell. But when I decided to buy control, that was a dumb decision -- but that worked out.”

Buffett made Mrs B, who ran Nebraske Furniture Mart, famous for having Williams-like discipline. Calling her “the ultimate” in operating within her circle of competence, Buffett pointed to what would be a curious decision for most.

Rather than take stock for Buffet’s purchase of her operation, Mrs. B wanted cash. Now, Berkshire Hathaway recently repelled a shareholder push to get the company to offer a dividend. For most, Buffett’s and Munger’s thinking goes, this is a terrible idea, because they’re so good at allocating capital, reinvesting is likely to result in vastly more profit for shareholders than getting cash. But Buffet recognizes that, for Mrs. B at least, taking cash was the better play. “She told me she wanted cash, not stock. It might seem like a bad decision, but it wasn't. She didn't know stocks. She knew cash, property, and retail, so it was a good decision.”

Of course, in the NBA, players are limited in the physical activities they can exclude in the course of their performance. Sometimes, life is like that, too. That’s where Greg Glassman’s notion of general physical preparedness comes in.

Glassman argues that 'general physical preparedness', or GPP, has been highly undervalued. "GPP has been given short shrift. There is more…especially where the margins of victory are super, super tight. I can make more ranking change in there with GPP than with sport specific training.

“Fixing chinks in your armor will manifest in improved sporting performance even when the chink was seemingly irrelevant to the activity.” Glassman provides a nice example from the real world—competitive skiing. “We got a hold of the guys at USA skiing and found out that they couldn’t do shit for pullups and the women had none. The guys sucked and the women were abysmal. And I said, ‘We’ve got to fix it.” Jonna Mendez is America’s best skier and she can’t do pull ups.” So she trained with Glassman for a summer, and by summer’s end she had 20 pull ups.  And she comes back and would tell you that pullups make a huge difference in skiing.”

Flourishing in complex environments

Glassman makes a point about fitness that translates to nearly any complex environment. “I am of the view that the demands physiologically, metabolically, hormonally, of sport are so complex that they’re not perfectly knowable," he said. His solution to dealing with this complexity is culled directly from Munger's 'latticework of mental models' playbook: "I want to throw out a broad net. I want to increase work capacity across broad time and modal domains.” What Glassman wants in the physical realm, Munger wants in the mental. 

While NBA players need to be generally physically prepared, because they can’t pick and choose their spots the way Williams could and even less the way Munger and Buffett can, the kind of identification of weakness and customized training program that Lowe cites the Bucks as having recently adopted can help. The Bucks had better hope it does, Lowe's piece points to the difficulty the team had in dealing with injuries to players such as Ersan Ilyasova, Larry Sanders, and Brandon Knight. Problems with injuries, it seems, are endemic to the organization. Consider this 2013 piece in Business Insider piece that pegged the Bucks as having paid more money to injured players than any other team in the league that season. 

Just as the Bucks are looking to improve their health through general physical preparedness, advanced metrics and other analytical approaches can help organizations determine how to put players in advantageous positions on the court.

The trick, as Buffett would say, is knowing when you’re playing to your strengths and when you’re not. Munger is famous for answering the question, “How do you beat Bobby Fischer at chess?” by saying, “Play him at anything but chess.”

Munger is on the record as thinking that one’s IQ is far less important than having a well-stocked toolkit of mental models, staying within one’s circle of competence, and only playing when one enjoys a competitive advantage. He once said, “"A money manager with an IQ of 160 and thinks it's 180 will kill you. Going with a money manager with an IQ of 130 who thinks its 125 could serve you well."

Ted Williams knew hitting was like swinging an axe. A nice example of applying a mental model from one activity to another.

Even the guy with the highest IQ will do better when he plays where he has an advantage

LeBron James is a physical genius. In basketball terms, a 180 IQ is far from a fair assessment. He’s a 200+. But even he has benefited greatly from the kind of discipline Munger and Buffett advocate. Interestingly, he’s done so largely as a result of analytics. Similar to the way the Milwaukee Bucks are looking at individual muscles within the physical systems of its players, the Miami Heat have scoured what its players do within its system on the court.

Consider how LeBron’s game has evolved to take advantage of his historic talents. Grantland's Kirk Goldsberry charts the evolution of the world’s greatest basketball player from Cleveland to Miami. 

Here's what Lebron James's shot chart looked like his last year in Cleveland:

James's shots tended to be closer to the basket in Miami than in Cleveland.

Lebron's shots continued to be of the higher percentage variety his second year; he took almost no three-point shots in 2011-2012. Goldsberry notes that he took barely any shots outside of 16 feet. James's efficiency helped Miami win the NBA championship that year--Lebron's first.

Amazingly, Lebron continues to evolve. Here’s what his shot chart looked like in 2013:

 

Despite the MVP award recently being bestowed on Kevin Durant, Goldsberry’s assessment that Lebron is basketball’s most valuable and its most versatile player stands. According to Goldsberry, Lebron “is acutely aware of his own game and his team’s strategy. He continues to find new ways to integrate his own evolving talents with those of his teammates, and he makes everyone better in the process. While it’s simple to label James a physical freak with outrageous basketball talents, that sells his progress, work ethic, and intelligence short. LeBron James is a basketball nerd who just happens to possess once-in-a-generation talent.” 

You don't need Charlie Munger to tell you that's a pretty good combination.

Will the Bucks Win?

Will the Milwaukee Bucks become winners? Lowe is skeptical, calling the Bucks open general manager job "probably the least appealing" of the six currently open NBA positions of its kind. But, there is some room for optimism. Lowe points out that the NBA’s new collective bargaining agreement aimed at creating “a system in which every team would be flexible enough to turn things around in one summer, NFL-style.” While he thinks that kind of parity is a “pipe-dream,” he remarks that the league “is undeniably leaner now than it was before.”

Lowe also recognizes a few attractive assets the Bucks possess, including "two intriguing young players in Giannis Antetokounmpo and John Henson"  and the a salary cap sheet that "basically resets after the 2015-16 season."

 

It could certainly be worse. Given the team's move to get in line with its peers and assess the general physical preparedness of its players, we can at least hope for a healthier season. Despite Lowe's pessimism, here's saying the team is finally headed in the right direction. And, in a year when it won just 18 percent of its games, the team's 25 percent chance of winning the draft means Bucks fans just might walk away from 2014 with a win. And a smile. Finally.