The Game Theory By Malcolm Gladwell

The Game Theory by Malcolm Gladwell, gives amazing insight into the world of professional sport statistics. Gladwell argues that athletic dominance in a team sport can’t always be seen by the eye. Allen Iverson, for instance, was the 2001-2002 NBA’s Most Valuable Player. He was viewed as one of the best basketball players of his generation. However an algorithm devised by David Berry, Martin Schmidt, and Stacey Brook, shows the true value of a basketball player by grading their number of wins they contribute to their team. Using that algorithm, the economists discovered that Iverson ranked 116th player throughout his career. This shows that he was highly overrated because spectators only saw his point production as the main statistic. The Iverson case shows that with any statistics, it is hard to weigh each of them and determine which is more important. The algorithm also showed the undervalued players of the basketball and the baseball realms. For the case of Antoine Walker and Jason Kidd, both make the same exact pay. However, Walker produces .6 wins for his team while Kidd puts up a staggering 21 wins for his team. This shows that either Walker is overrated or that Kidd is very underrated or perhaps even little of both. From the baseball standpoint, Ty Cobb is hailed as one of the best hitters in baseball history while Tony Gwynn is a name that few people know. Cobb’s batting average was a solid .366 while Gwynn’s was a .338. Although these stats seem far apart from each other, but simple mathematics proves otherwise. If each player were to have a hundred at-bats, Cobb would get a hit 37 out of the 100 times, while Gwynn would have 34 hits out of the 100 attempts. Those 3 hits sent Cobb to the Hall of Fame and to the record books while Gwynn was seen as only an average hitter. I found the heart surgeon debate very important to explain the controversy. Finding the best heart surgeon is difficult because there are so many factors