I’ve been meaning to post Michael Lewis’ profile of the Houston Rockets and Shane Battier. I grew up watching the Rockets, so I had a particularly keen interested in this article.

It’s also relevant to this blog because there’s a mutual appreciation between soccer and basketball. It’s right there on the cover of this month’s ESPN The Magazine. So this very thoughtful passage is worth special attention:

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.

It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.

Taking a bad shot when you don’t need to is only the most obvious example. A point guard might selfishly give up an open shot for an assist. You can see it happen every night, when he’s racing down court for an open layup, and instead of taking it, he passes it back to a trailing teammate. The teammate usually finishes with some sensational dunk, but the likelihood of scoring nevertheless declined. “The marginal assist is worth more money to the point guard than the marginal point,” Morey says.

I think soccer statistics are more team-oriented, no? Low scoring games mean it’s impossible to selfishly rack up goals or assists. And the stats measured by clubs — successful passes, kilometers covered, successful tackles — only help the team.

Interestingly enough, Lewis — the author of this article — wrote the 2003 classic “Moneyball.” That book profiled Billy Beane, the godfather of analytical assesment in baseball.  And Beane has now turned his attention to soccer. The Oakland A’s — where he is general manager — recently purchased the San Jose Earthquakes of the MLS. Beane is attempting to replicate his advances in baseball analysis for the Earthquakes. He’s working with a business professor at the University of Leeds to develop a proprietary system for evaluating soccer players. It’s all very hush-hush, but I hope we hear more about it soon.