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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:24 pm 
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Reposting this from a different thread since it's more of a general sports topic.

Context: FF and I disagree on the extent to which a GM's body of work in the draft is due to talent or luck/chance. I say there's more luck/chance than FF is willing to allow. FF says I'm dumber than a box of rocks. This Wharton prof, after looking at some pretty interesting NFL data, seems to also be dumber than a box of rocks:

https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton- ... -nfl-draft

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So now we're gonna give you an extended example of people analytics at work and follow that with some detailed issues involved in many analytics projects. So this example comes from my work with the national football league. As a result of some research I did a few years ago, I've been pulled in to work with some professional teams on their evaluation of players. And especially their evaluation of college players. One team in particular asked me, who is good at evaluating college players? Which team should they be paying attention to, which team should they be copying?...



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So, now what we want to know is, do teams tend to have relatively successful picks? Do they tend to have relatively unsuccessful? Or is it just randomly distributed around what would be expected? That's where we're going when we're trying to determine is there skill here? Or is there luck. So, here's an example of one of the most famous draft classes in national football league history. The Pittsburg Steelers, famous draft class of 1974, they drafted four hall of fame players, Jack Lambert, Lynn Swan, John Stallworth, Mike Webster. All these guys were hugely successful, not just for a year, but for a career. Now, if the draft, if the Center Field draft involves skill. This is a team. They drafted these players because they're especially good at their job. What would you expect to happen the next year in 1975? So, assume you've got the same scouts, you've got the same general manager. They select all these great players in '74. If that's the result of skill, what would you expect to happen in '75. Or, what would you expect to happen in 73? Let's look at 73. In 73, their 2nd round pick never played a game. Their 3rd and 4th round picks were average at best. And yet, that was just one year before they had this Hall of Fame class. What about 75? What about the next year? In 75 it was even worse. Not a single player drafted started. Out of 21 picks at this enormous draft, and not a single player drafted started. And picks in each of the top six rounds. They only played a total of 24 games for the team. So, what do we think about a process where you draft one of the best classes ever, probably the best class ever, in 74. And yet the 73 draft was completely average. And the 75 draft was actually tragically bad by any measure. What does that say about how much skill is involved in this? How much credit should we give them for that Hall of Fame class in 74? That's the idea, and that's a very general idea that's maybe the biggest lesson in the performance evaluation is. The question is, does it persist? Skill persists. Chance doesn't persist. And if the challenge is to parse skill from chance, the single most important test is persistence. Do you see it across periods? Do you see it over time? Do you see the positive performance measures persist? That's what we're gonna do here.


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We're gonna take all the years that we observed teams draft and we're gonna code them up in just the way we described. We're going to, evaluate does a player do better or worse than expectations. And for that year we're going to add up all of those deviations or the positive and the negative, do they add up to zero, whatever. We're going to evaluate every team and each year of the draft. And we're going to rank the league, one to 32 within a year on how they performed in a draft. And then we're gonna ask what happens to next year. So for all the teams that did best in a year, what happens to them in the next year's draft? And we're gonna do for the teams that rate 16th in a given year, what happens in the next years draft? That's gonna give us a test of persistence. If this is a skill based task, those teams that do well in the draft in a given year will do well the following year. Those teams that do poorly will do poorly. If it's completely chance, how a team performs in one year will have nothing to do with how they perform the next year. There'll be no correlation between the two. And if it's a mix of skill and chance, you'll see something in between. That the teams that do well one year will tend to do better the next year and the teams that do poorly will tend to do poorly but they'll regress to the mean. So that's the test. We'll find out what happens. This is what we find. I've shown all the teams, over all the years in our study here in gray. But then I've highlighted the bunch that were rated in number one, from the top in green. And then in the middle in blue, and the bottom in red. And what do we see? What do we see here about the relation between how a team does in one year and the following year? At a high level, we see essentially no relation. Consider, for example, the teams at the very top in green. These are teams that, in a given season, were the single top performing team in drafting players. What happens to them the next year? Well, one team was again the top-performing team. But, one team was also the worst-performing team. And you can see that there's a full spread, that from that number one position, they went to every other position from one to thirty-two, there was no predictive quality. About their first year performance in the next year. And conversely, the same at the bottom. You can look at the teams in red, which is 28th or so, and in one case, 28th was again 28th, almost perfect persistence. But, in the other cases, they drifted up, some were kinda middling the next year, and some were actually quite good in the following year. So, this tells us overall the correlation is slightly negative. Not different from zero but slightly negative. Essentially, zero, there's no correlation between how a team drafts at one year and how they draft the next year. And when there's no correlation, we can be sure, that means the differences that we observe are not the product of skill, the differences we observe are the product of chance.


Quote:
So, this is one performance measure, it's a starts, you can do this for other performance measures, this is how much a player receives in compensation, when he reaches free agency, you can use any number of performance measure and you get the same result. Most of the deviation goes away the next year which means that most of the deviations, most of the differences between teams are the result of chance and not skill. So, different performance stats, different player career stage. You can norm for additional factors like a player position. You can evaluate not the team level performance, but you actually look at the person in charge, whether it's a general manager or an owner, and you can track that individual's performance over his career, and again you don't see persistence. The vast majority of the variation is purely a product of chance.


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We asked people how much draft outcome is completely due to random chance versus draft outcomes are completely due to drafting skill? Where on that continuum, skill to chance, do you believe draft outcomes fall? And we asked this of NFL fans and we screened them, for actually following the NFL and what do you see, you see people, they don't think it's all skill. But the vast majority of people believe that it is on the skill side of the continuum. Almost nobody says that it's chance-related. By far the most are two-thirds, three-quarters, skill. And these are folks that actually follow NFL, follow the draft. They know that there's a little chance involved, but they greatly underestimate the amount of chance that's involved.

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Last edited by veganfan21 on Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:26 pm 
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Every aspect of sports has more luck than most are willing to admit, especially when it comes to winning/championships.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:37 pm 
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Drafting at the top has a lot of luck. Drafting for depth takes talent, whether that's the GM and scouting or the instructors through the minors excelling at getting players to buy in and execute. What the Cardinals do, as the Twins and Braves did before them, in having a constant pipeline of above-average everyday talent speaks more to drafting/developing aptitude than picking the right guy out of the top three or whatever.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 5:38 pm 
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Like everything in life, it's both luck and skill. So I'm not gonna read the article. What I said is the simple conclusion.


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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 6:12 pm 
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leashyourkids wrote:
Every aspect of sports has more luck than most are willing to admit, especially when it comes to winning/championships.


I'd agree, especially in the NFL, but in the NBA I do think it's almost a guarantee that the more talented team is going to beat the less talented team in a seven game series in each round. Not accounting for injuries, drama, etc. Seems less luck is involved there except for catastrophic injuries.

In the NFL you'll have more surprises of course since it's do or die in the playoffs, catastrophic injuries are more likely, and as a result the best teams can be upset during a single game. Those are games though. In terms of constructing teams, as I've made clear in this thread, I do think drafting is more than 50% luck/chance. So many variables at play, both in terms of the actual players and their intangibles, but the actual crop of players itself. The Bulls had the no 2 pick the year Durant could have entered the draft right out of HS, but he went to school for a year and the Bulls ended up with Tyrus Thomas at no 2 instead. The next year KD goes no 2 to OKC/Seattle. I know KD could have gone no 1 even if he entered the draft in 2006 instead of 2007, but again it's about the crop of players available and there's obviously no control over that. Total chance.

Curious Hair wrote:
Drafting at the top has a lot of luck. Drafting for depth takes talent, whether that's the GM and scouting or the instructors through the minors excelling at getting players to buy in and execute. What the Cardinals do, as the Twins and Braves did before them, in having a constant pipeline of above-average everyday talent speaks more to drafting/developing aptitude than picking the right guy out of the top three or whatever.


This could potentially conflate picks with systems though. What if other teams are also consistently finding decent players late in the draft but are not on top of player development systems as the Twins/Braves/Cardinals are? Players drafted into crappy organizations can either fizzle out because the support systems aren't there, or they find themselves with different teams. We'd need to see how often the teams you mentioned both hit and miss with regard to these late round picks. If this Wharton guy's analysis can be extended to the MLB then those teams should miss as often as they hit, even in the late rounds.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 6:48 pm 
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To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 6:57 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.


I can see skill here and there. Some people see things that others don't see in particular players. At the same time maybe someone else grabs that guy before you get your shot. Then you draft a bust. Maybe this happens for six out of eight years. I say you're unlucky. FavreFan might see this as cause for termination.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 7:05 pm 
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It's definitely a combination of both. I'd say a lot of the skill ata GM level is evaluating the talent of scouts and being able to cut through the bullshit and understanding the politics of it all.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 9:12 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.



Let's look at Steph Curry for example. David Kahn drafted 2 point guards ahead of him. Johnny Flynn. Ricky Rubio. Curry easily better than both. Now you can say that G.S. got lucky to draft him where they did or could say that Kahn was incredibly stupid for passing on him twice. Does a Buford West or Presti make that mistake if they are in the same position? Don't think so.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:36 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.


Also, this is strictly about drafting. A GM's talent is more obvious when it comes to constructing an entire team, making deals, etc.

As for a GM's scouting talents, really, how reasonable is it to say one GM is "better" at scouting than another? How would you measure that? The analytical study I posted above was pretty exhaustive when it came to NFL data. The supposed best of the best swung and miss as often as they hit it out of the park. That says less about the talent of the GMs and more about the variables they can't control.

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PostPosted: Mon Jun 26, 2017 11:40 pm 
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long time guy wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.



Let's look at Steph Curry for example. David Kahn drafted 2 point guards ahead of him. Johnny Flynn. Ricky Rubio. Curry easily better than both. Now you can say that G.S. got lucky to draft him where they did or could say that Kahn was incredibly stupid for passing on him twice. Does a Buford West or Presti make that mistake if they are in the same position? Don't think so.


What if GS had Thabeet or Flynn ranked higher on their draft board than Curry? They settle for Curry once their top two options are gone. In that case they got lucky.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:15 am 
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FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.

Yeah it isn't 100% luck. Otherwise, why not just draft random DIII players and hope they are all diamonds in the rough.

SI did a good writeup of how the Cowboys ended up with Dak Prescott -- this is how luck comes into play.
http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/1790 ... t-2016-nfl

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:34 am 
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newper wrote:
Yeah it isn't 100% luck. Otherwise, why not just draft random DIII players and hope they are all diamonds in the rough.


But that isn't an appropriate analogy. If you pick at the 3, 4, 8, and 12 spots in consecutive years, and the guys you had as your top choice went off the board each year, before your turn and ended up sucking, and the guys you ended up drafting (all of whom were not your first choice) ended up being perennial pro-bowlers, are you an uber talented GM or just lucky? And being lucky doesn't necessarily mean you aren't talented.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:45 am 
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veganfan21 wrote:
long time guy wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.



Let's look at Steph Curry for example. David Kahn drafted 2 point guards ahead of him. Johnny Flynn. Ricky Rubio. Curry easily better than both. Now you can say that G.S. got lucky to draft him where they did or could say that Kahn was incredibly stupid for passing on him twice. Does a Buford West or Presti make that mistake if they are in the same position? Don't think so.


What if GS had Thabeet or Flynn ranked higher on their draft board than Curry? They settle for Curry once their top two options are gone. In that case they got lucky.



In that case then it would be luck. If there really isn't another choice then yes it's luck. Look at what the Knicks did with Porzingus. Is that luck or skill?


Let me give you another example. Ainge with Tatum this year. Ainge had Tatum rated as the No. 1 player in the draft I believe. Just about everyone else had Fultz. The easy choice would be to take Fultz. If it doesn't work then he could always fall back on simply taking the consensus No.1 overall pick No. 1. He wouldn't take much heat for taking the safe pick.

He gambles that Tatum is the best player in the draft and trades down. If Tatum turns out to be the best player then Ainge displays a lot of skill in how he evaluates players. It isn't luck at that point.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 11:05 am 
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veganfan21 wrote:
newper wrote:
Yeah it isn't 100% luck. Otherwise, why not just draft random DIII players and hope they are all diamonds in the rough.


But that isn't an appropriate analogy. If you pick at the 3, 4, 8, and 12 spots in consecutive years, and the guys you had as your top choice went off the board each year, before your turn and ended up sucking, and the guys you ended up drafting (all of whom were not your first choice) ended up being perennial pro-bowlers, are you an uber talented GM or just lucky? And being lucky doesn't necessarily mean you aren't talented.

That isn't an appropriate analogy because if you are telling me you are picking your next best available, then you are applying some skill in choosing who to pick by the very nature of having ranked the players. If it was 100% luck who became good or not, you could draw names out of a hat. Even someone who picks up SI's top 50 players in the draft column and uses it to pick players is now applying some sort of skill to their drafting.

I think the question needs a little finessing. The question seems to be something like "My #4 overall pick should be one of these 20 players, because they compromise the best available in the draft -- various people may disagree (and sometimes strongly) who would be the best selection at #4, but there are very few arguments it should be someone that is not included in this list of 20. Of these 20, is the success of the player I pick 100% due to luck, or does my logic/skill/reasoning influence the chances that the player will be successful?" If that is the question, I think it is not 100% luck; your pick may be different due to team needs/style than an overall consensus would point to. However, I think it is a safe argument that in the Luck + Skill = 100% equation that Luck > Skill.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:20 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.

On behalf of sane, logical, and reasonable people everywhere...I'd like to apologize for this thread's existence.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:27 pm 
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The biggest luck part of NFL drafting is acquiring a quality starting quarterback. Is there any front office that has shown an aptitude?

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:28 pm 
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wdelaney72 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
To be clear, the argument is if luck is 100% involved or just a big factor. I say luck is a big factor but there's an obvious skill/talent gap between the best and worst GMs. Vegan says it's 100% luck like bingo. Let's not misrepresent the argument.

On behalf of sane, logical, and reasonable people everywhere...I'd like to apologize for this thread's existence.


Here's another guy who apparently has no use for data. Sad!
Quote:
We asked people how much draft outcome is completely due to random chance versus draft outcomes are completely due to drafting skill? Where on that continuum, skill to chance, do you believe draft outcomes fall? And we asked this of NFL fans and we screened them, for actually following the NFL and what do you see, you see people, they don't think it's all skill. But the vast majority of people believe that it is on the skill side of the continuum. Almost nobody says that it's chance-related. By far the most are two-thirds, three-quarters, skill. And these are folks that actually follow NFL, follow the draft. They know that there's a little chance involved, but they greatly underestimate the amount of chance that's involved.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:29 pm 
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Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:30 pm 
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I'm pretty confident we can call the Front office of the New England Patriots more skilled than lucky.

FFS I'm a Sox fan and can even admit Theo Epstein is more skilled than lucky.

Carry on with your data....skill > luck

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:47 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved. I don't think the GMs who liked Tim Couch, Ryan Leaf, Akili Smith, etc., are bad GMs. They were unlucky GMs. They all had scouting reports in front of them that more or less said the same thing about each. They made informed decisions to pick those guys. They didn't get any ROI on those picks. I don't think they're bad at their jobs because they picked eventual busts.

Take Jerry Angelo. He surrounded Urlacher with a core of players that catapulted the Bears to the Super Bowl. Briggs, Harris, Vasher, Tillman, Berrian, etc. Then he didn't have much to brag about in terms of draft picks up until the point he was let go. What changed? Did he get dumber at drafting over time?
wdelaney72 wrote:
I'm pretty confident we can call the Front office of the New England Patriots more skilled than lucky.

FFS I'm a Sox fan and can even admit Theo Epstein is more skilled than lucky.

Carry on with your data....skill > luck


Are you saying the Patriots skillfully let the other teams in the league have 150+ chances at Brady in the draft before nabbing him with a 6th round pick?

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 12:54 pm 
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veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved.

Yes I would be. Any time I see an argument this ridiculous I'm probably going to go hard against it.

This is a simple argument that I think you are trying to complicate for no reason. Let's start over. Is drafting 100% luck or is there at least 1% skill when it comes to drafting? If it's the latter, I don't even care to continue this argument. I just want you to admit how ridiculous your 100% argument is.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 1:01 pm 
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wdelaney72 wrote:
I'm pretty confident we can call the Front office of the New England Patriots more skilled than lucky.

FFS I'm a Sox fan and can even admit Theo Epstein is more skilled than lucky.

Carry on with your data....skill > luck


If a player drafted by another team is a bust but proves to be a skilled player in the hands of Patriot coaches, does the original drafter get credit for identifying the talent?

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 3:40 pm 
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veganfan21 wrote:

But that isn't an appropriate analogy. If you pick at the 3, 4, 8, and 12 spots in consecutive years, and the guys you had as your top choice went off the board each year, before your turn and ended up sucking, and the guys you ended up drafting (all of whom were not your first choice) ended up being perennial pro-bowlers, are you an uber talented GM or just lucky? And being lucky doesn't necessarily mean you aren't talented.


newper wrote:
That isn't an appropriate analogy because if you are telling me you are picking your next best available, then you are applying some skill in choosing who to pick by the very nature of having ranked the players. If it was 100% luck who became good or not, you could draw names out of a hat. Even someone who picks up SI's top 50 players in the draft column and uses it to pick players is now applying some sort of skill to their drafting.


That's a low bar for saying you have "skills" though, which is what I'm getting at. You said I'm applying some skill in choosing who to pick next, which is true, but you ignored that my top pick was a bust. I have only picked a stud because someone else took my top ranked player, who ended up being a bust. Is that skill?



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If that is the question, I think it is not 100% luck; your pick may be different due to team needs/style than an overall consensus would point to. However, I think it is a safe argument that in the Luck + Skill = 100% equation that Luck > Skill.


Agreed

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 3:52 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved.

Yes I would be. Any time I see an argument this ridiculous I'm probably going to go hard against it.

This is a simple argument that I think you are trying to complicate for no reason. Let's start over. Is drafting 100% luck or is there at least 1% skill when it comes to drafting? If it's the latter, I don't even care to continue this argument. I just want you to admit how ridiculous your 100% argument is.


How are you defining skill though? The entire structure of a draft in any league is based on chance - everything from where you pick to who is available to draft. Krause had two high lottery picks in 2001 that he used on Curry and Chandler. He left the team a few years later. If he had two high lottery picks in 2003 he might have his own statue right next to MJ's.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:06 pm 
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good dolphin wrote:
wdelaney72 wrote:
I'm pretty confident we can call the Front office of the New England Patriots more skilled than lucky.

FFS I'm a Sox fan and can even admit Theo Epstein is more skilled than lucky.

Carry on with your data....skill > luck


If a player drafted by another team is a bust but proves to be a skilled player in the hands of Patriot coaches, does the original drafter get credit for identifying the talent?


That does happen. Sometimes the player has to grow up. Sometimes the organization is a mess (see Bears, Chicago). Doesn't matter. All of that sits within the power and responsibility of the GM who is responsible for players and coaching staff.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:14 pm 
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veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved.

Yes I would be. Any time I see an argument this ridiculous I'm probably going to go hard against it.

This is a simple argument that I think you are trying to complicate for no reason. Let's start over. Is drafting 100% luck or is there at least 1% skill when it comes to drafting? If it's the latter, I don't even care to continue this argument. I just want you to admit how ridiculous your 100% argument is.


How are you defining skill though? The entire structure of a draft in any league is based on chance - everything from where you pick to who is available to draft. Krause had two high lottery picks in 2001 that he used on Curry and Chandler. He left the team a few years later. If he had two high lottery picks in 2003 he might have his own statue right next to MJ's.



A skilled GM with a nose for talent probably drafts Gasol over those two in that draft.

A skilled GM doesn't draft Darko over Melo or overrate Tayshaun Prince.

Skilled GM doesn't trade Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac. Those are but a few examples.

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:34 pm 
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veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved.

Yes I would be. Any time I see an argument this ridiculous I'm probably going to go hard against it.

This is a simple argument that I think you are trying to complicate for no reason. Let's start over. Is drafting 100% luck or is there at least 1% skill when it comes to drafting? If it's the latter, I don't even care to continue this argument. I just want you to admit how ridiculous your 100% argument is.


How are you defining skill though? The entire structure of a draft in any league is based on chance - everything from where you pick to who is available to draft. Krause had two high lottery picks in 2001 that he used on Curry and Chandler. He left the team a few years later. If he had two high lottery picks in 2003 he might have his own statue right next to MJ's.

Seacrest vibe

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:52 pm 
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FavreFan wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
FavreFan wrote:
Nobody here is underestimating luck or chance or whatever. You're simply overestimating it. That's it. It's not 100% luck and it's asinine to suggest it is.


I do think guys are underestimating chance, otherwise you wouldn't be as strident as you are here about the level of skill involved.

Yes I would be. Any time I see an argument this ridiculous I'm probably going to go hard against it.

This is a simple argument that I think you are trying to complicate for no reason. Let's start over. Is drafting 100% luck or is there at least 1% skill when it comes to drafting? If it's the latter, I don't even care to continue this argument. I just want you to admit how ridiculous your 100% argument is.


How are you defining skill though? The entire structure of a draft in any league is based on chance - everything from where you pick to who is available to draft. Krause had two high lottery picks in 2001 that he used on Curry and Chandler. He left the team a few years later. If he had two high lottery picks in 2003 he might have his own statue right next to MJ's.

Seacrest vibe

:lol: how? He wouldn't have answered the question. You're dodging every example I throw your way that complicates what you're referring to as skill. Was Angelo a skilled drafter from 2002-2007? What about from 2007-2011 or whenever he was fired?

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PostPosted: Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:54 pm 
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long time guy wrote:

A skilled GM with a nose for talent probably drafts Gasol over those two in that draft.

A skilled GM doesn't draft Darko over Melo or overrate Tayshaun Prince.

Skilled GM doesn't trade Kobe Bryant for Vlade Divac. Those are but a few examples.


A skilled GM doesn't draft Bowie over Jordan, doesn't draft Joe Smith over KG, doesn't draft Kerry Kittles over Kobe, doesn't skip over Jimmy Butler, and so on. I think I get your point.

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