MIT’s Sloan conference gets competitive

The word for Day 2 of MIT's Sloan Sports Analytics Conference was competition.

For eight years, the conference has united professional sports teams, sports industry organizations and cutting-edge academics, all in the pursuit of appreciating and understanding sports and athletic performance with greater, more sophisticated clarity. Each attendee has expertise or interest in innovation, due to personal passions, professional obligation, or a combination of both.

Maybe sports are only a game, but at Sloan, as there is in any game, there are winners and losers. The lifeblood of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is the prestigious research paper competition, where academics make their cases for the next big thing in sports analysis.

Kirk Goldberry, a nationally noted visual analytics expert, visiting scholar at Harvard and three-time Sloan research paper finalist, described his research's victory as "the biggest moment of my professional career, to be honest."

"The recognition is secondary to the kind of exposure (the work) got. There are very few outlets to get this kind of exposure to the media, and this is obviously the premiere one in the sports domain."

The researchers were competing, but the games still happen on the courts, in the fields, and even in the hills. Discussions surrounding those competitions centered around fairness and competitive balance.

At the Doping & What it Means for Sport panel, disgraced former cyclist Tyler Hamilton discussed how much the unfair advantage he gained through cheating had burdened him. "I led a double life," he said. "I lied to my parents."

The Marblehead product added, "I was more worried about getting caught than winning. It took a huge toll on me."

U.S. Anti-Doping agent Travis Tygart delved into the mechanics of unfair advantages.

"Whether it's putting a small engine in a bike or taking the subway six stops in a marathon, it's unfair."

Tygart compared drugs to allowing baseball players to use aluminum bats.

"It is not going to be an even playing field," he said. "People's bodies respond differently. So it's not giving everyone an aluminum bat, it's giving someone one and the other a wood one."

New NBA commissioner Adam Silver was relieved that PEDs were not a chief concern of his league.

"I have no reason to believe that use of PEDS is widespread in he NBA, both because we test, and, No. 2, it's not part of the culture of the NBA," Silver said at the Malcolm Gladwell-moderated Commissioner's Perspective panel.

"I've been in the NBA for 22 years, I talk to players all the time, I talk to retired players all the time, and I don't hear about it."

Pressed on what made him so sure there was no NBA PED scandal lurking, Silver said, "It's hard for me to believe that, with roughly 450 players a year, a lot of players moving through the league, if there was (rampant drug use), people would be talking about it. There would be somebody. There are great journalists out there. Somebody would have found somebody that was willing to talk about it."

Cheating isn't the only realm of competitive imbalance, though. As Celtics fans are aware, NBA teams draft players via a weighted lottery system, one that, many argue, encourages teams to intentionally lose in the pursuit of talented college prospects.

Recently, and around the conference, there has been increased discussions about altering how the draft order is determined. One proposal, submitted by Celtics assistant GM Michael Zarren, made its way to the commissioner' desk.

"Mike came up with this proposal where over the course of 30 years, you move throughout (the first round) in terms of your draft pick," Silver said. "This goes to show why you really need to study these issues, because when Mike first brought it to me, I thought 'Wow, that solves our problems. Teams can plan for the future, they have absolutely no incentive to do anything but win the maximum number of games per season. They know where the draft pick is coming from.' "

Rival GMs raised concerns about the ramifications of such a system, but, importantly, as the commissioner noted, "I'm open to taking a fresh look at it."

Sharing ideas like a new model for the NBA draft lottery is what the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference is all about. Rishabh Desai, a first-year basketball operations analyst for the Sacramento Kings, discussed the kinds of information being shared by competing sides.

"(Sometimes) it's really broad, because no one wants to share their 'secret sauce,' or whatever they're doing," he said, "but it's just 'Hey, are you guys using this program?' compe"

For all the competitive edges that can be quantified, there are still many that elude even the most active imaginations. At the 10,000 Hours vs. The Sports Gene panel, "The Tipping Point" and "Outliers" author Malcolm Gladwell discussed the greatness of Wayne Gretzky, sharing an anecdote about The Great One being transfixed by a televised hockey game as a toddler who would burst into tears when the games would finish.

"Even at (a young age) there was something about the game of hockey that satisfied him and thrilled him on some deep emotional level, before he could execute any of the physical moves associated with it. The game fit his imagination. I don't know what that means; it must be something innate. But it's something quite different from what we normally associate with hockey skill. In other words, Wayne Gretzky has a series of physical attributes that make him as great hockey player, but he also has this weird thing about how the game fits his imagination. So it's almost as if we're talking about Wayne Gretzky the same way we would talk about a musical composer."

The winner of the 2014 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference research paper competition was "The Three Dimensions of Rebounding," which broke down crashing the boards into three dimensions — positioning, hustle and conversion. Presented by Rajiv Maheswaran and compiled alongside a team of researchers, the paper explored the reasons players like Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, Andre Drummond and Kevin Love are so efficient, despite vastly different skill sets and playing styles.

Unlike sports games, however, there were no real losers. Even the papers that did not take home the $20,000 prize had their ideas heard, and made their contributions to the budding athletic analytics field. These are the minds that will lead to the next generation of player evaluation, strategic efficiency, and organizational success.

These ideas will lead to real wins, in every sports field.

And as Hamilton put it, when asked about the motivations looking to cutting edge for a leg-up in competition, "The culture here in the United States is all about winning, whether it's in sports or business."

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