Photo courtesy of UT
"Put Damion in!" someone yelled with a minute left in the first half and the University of Texas struggling against Colorado. No, the shout hadn't come from Damion James himself, though it might have.
"I was begging to be put back in," said the 6-foot-7-inch forward, benched for all but a couple of minutes of the half after picking up two quick fouls. "I knew when I got back in the game, I was going to bring it."
And so he did. In the first eight minutes of the second half on Saturday, Texas erased a 9-point deficit to take a commanding 9-point lead. James scored only 6 of those points – it was hardly his best night of the season. Yet with his eight rebounds, he was the difference maker.
That comes as no surprise to Dr. David Berri, even though he has never seen James play. Berri is an economist and co-author of The Wages of Win, a mathematical analysis of basketball performance that turns a lot of conventional wisdom on its head. For example, individual scoring isn't that big of a deal, according to Berri. The NBA's Allen Iverson scores a lot, but he also misses a lot. What matters is overall efficiency, and for all his flair, Iverson is an incredibly inefficient player who doesn't really help his team win.
I had called Berri to understand why the Longhorns are playing exactly as well this year (they're 15-3) as they did last year, when they had the best college player in the country in Kevin Durant. I thought D.J. Augustin had to be the reason: To my eyes, the kid is clutch, averaging 20 points and six assists a game. But nope, that's not it. According to a metric that Berri and his co-authors call a "win score," the biggest reason the Longhorns have been able to pick up where Durant left off is James.
Last season Augustin had a win score of .149. So far this year, it's .182 – an improvement but nothing compared to James' .393, which is within spitting distance of Durant's score of .403.
"It's important to understand that when Kevin Durant is not there, somebody else is going to take those shots," Berri explained. "The question is: Are they doing that and the other things that create wins efficiently?"
With most things we do in life, performance is difficult to accurately assess: The data can be limited, the criteria arbitrary, and the analysis subjective. That's one appeal of sports: Objective measures reign supreme. If you don't score more points than the other team, you lose. Even so, in a complex and fluid team sport like basketball, individual performance is still hard to separate from team performance. We know who won the game, but without meaningful statistical analysis, we just don't know why. We don't know who is responsible.
For his part, James doesn't tout his stats and seems a bit surprised that some economist out in California would. Surprised but flattered.
"I don't think about Damion James," he says. "I just try to bring some energy and production when I'm out there – and help the Longhorns win. It's a team thing."
