toreplace the teammate in foul trouble, not surprisingly, has an even smaller impact. Replacing the star player in foul trouble with a sub has the net effect of reducing the team’s points by about 0.17 for every minute the star is on the bench. This is a heavy price to pay. (We considered that a star player in foul trouble might compete conservatively, so maybe the difference between a sub and a star who plays conservatively with five fouls isn’t all that great. But no, it turns out that’s not true. If anything, star players have an even
higher
plus-minus than normal when they are in foul trouble.)
Leave a player with five fouls in the game and what happens? The average player with five fouls will pick up his sixth and foul out of the game only 21 percent of the time. A star is even less likely to pick up a sixth foul (only 16 percent of the time once he receives his fifth foul; remember “Whistle Swallowing”?). Thus, leaving a player in the game with five fouls hardly guarantees that he’ll foul out.
Bottom line: An NBA coach is much better off leaving a star player with five fouls in a game. By our numbers, coaches are routinely giving up about 0.5 points per game by sitting a star player in foul trouble (and that doesn’t include the minutes he might have sat on the bench with three fouls in the first half). That may not seem like much, but in a close game, in which these situations often occur, it could mean the difference between winning and losing. We estimate that leaving a player in with five fouls instead of benching him improves the chances of winning by about 12 percent. Over the course of a season, this can mean an extra couple of wins. Yes, a player may foul out of a game, but benching the player
ensures
that he’s out of the game. AsJeff Van Gundy, former coach of the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks and current television announcer, once put it on the air, “I think
coaches
sometimes foul their players out.”
So why don’t NBA coaches let their players—particularly their stars—keep playing when they have a lot of fouls? Again, loss aversion and incentives. If you lose the game by following convention and sitting your player down, you escape the blame. But if you play him and he happens to foul out and the team loses, youguarantee yourself a heaping ration of grief on sports talk radio, in columns, and over the blogosphere even though the numbers strongly argue in favor of leaving the player in the game. As with punting on fourth down, coaches are willing to give up significant gains to mitigate the small chance of personal losses. Presented with this evidence, one NBA coach maintained that he was still going to remove a player when he picked up his fifth foul late in the game. Why? “Because,” he said, “my kids go to school here!”
Another example ofloss aversion is seen inbaseball. Game after game, the same scene plays out with almost numbing familiarity: It’s the ninth inning, the manager for the winning team summons the liveliest arm in the bullpen, the PA system cranks up ominous music—Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” more often than not—and out trots Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ peerless relief pitcher, or his equivalent, to record the save. Why? Because conventional baseball wisdom dictates that managers use their best relief pitchers at the
end
of games to preserve victories. The presumption: This is the most important part of the game, with the greatest impact on the outcome. Not for nothing are these pitchers called closers.
But where is it written that a closer must close? What if the most important moment in the game, when the outcome is most likely to be affected, occurs earlier? Might it not make more sense to summon Rivera or Boston Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon when the game is tied in the sixth inning and there are runners on base? Wouldn’t they be more valuable at this juncture than they are when they usually report to work: the ninth inning when
higher
plus-minus than normal when they are in foul trouble.)
Leave a player with five fouls in the game and what happens? The average player with five fouls will pick up his sixth and foul out of the game only 21 percent of the time. A star is even less likely to pick up a sixth foul (only 16 percent of the time once he receives his fifth foul; remember “Whistle Swallowing”?). Thus, leaving a player in the game with five fouls hardly guarantees that he’ll foul out.
Bottom line: An NBA coach is much better off leaving a star player with five fouls in a game. By our numbers, coaches are routinely giving up about 0.5 points per game by sitting a star player in foul trouble (and that doesn’t include the minutes he might have sat on the bench with three fouls in the first half). That may not seem like much, but in a close game, in which these situations often occur, it could mean the difference between winning and losing. We estimate that leaving a player in with five fouls instead of benching him improves the chances of winning by about 12 percent. Over the course of a season, this can mean an extra couple of wins. Yes, a player may foul out of a game, but benching the player
ensures
that he’s out of the game. AsJeff Van Gundy, former coach of the Houston Rockets and New York Knicks and current television announcer, once put it on the air, “I think
coaches
sometimes foul their players out.”
So why don’t NBA coaches let their players—particularly their stars—keep playing when they have a lot of fouls? Again, loss aversion and incentives. If you lose the game by following convention and sitting your player down, you escape the blame. But if you play him and he happens to foul out and the team loses, youguarantee yourself a heaping ration of grief on sports talk radio, in columns, and over the blogosphere even though the numbers strongly argue in favor of leaving the player in the game. As with punting on fourth down, coaches are willing to give up significant gains to mitigate the small chance of personal losses. Presented with this evidence, one NBA coach maintained that he was still going to remove a player when he picked up his fifth foul late in the game. Why? “Because,” he said, “my kids go to school here!”
Another example ofloss aversion is seen inbaseball. Game after game, the same scene plays out with almost numbing familiarity: It’s the ninth inning, the manager for the winning team summons the liveliest arm in the bullpen, the PA system cranks up ominous music—Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” more often than not—and out trots Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ peerless relief pitcher, or his equivalent, to record the save. Why? Because conventional baseball wisdom dictates that managers use their best relief pitchers at the
end
of games to preserve victories. The presumption: This is the most important part of the game, with the greatest impact on the outcome. Not for nothing are these pitchers called closers.
But where is it written that a closer must close? What if the most important moment in the game, when the outcome is most likely to be affected, occurs earlier? Might it not make more sense to summon Rivera or Boston Red Sox closer Jonathan Papelbon when the game is tied in the sixth inning and there are runners on base? Wouldn’t they be more valuable at this juncture than they are when they usually report to work: the ninth inning when
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