Unexplainable - How good was Michael Jordan, really?

Episode Date: July 28, 2025

It's easy to assume there is objective truth in basketball stats. A clear story of what happened in the past. But our friends at Pablo Torre Finds Out uncovered something that throws an entire era into question. Guest: Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Frozen lasagna, medium power, 15 minutes. Sounds like Ojo time. Let's play. Feel the fun with Play Ojo. The online casino with all the latest slot and live casino games. What you win is yours to keep with no wagering requirements. Instant payouts and no minimum withdraws. Hey, I just won.

Woohoo. Feel the fun. Play Ojo. Honey, forget about the lasagna. Let's celebrate. 19 plus Ontario only. Please play responsibly. Concerned about your gambling or that of someone close to you. Call 1866-531-2600 or visit Connexonario.ca. One of the things that always blows my mind, no matter how many times I think about it, is that I've never really touched anything.

Like, I can feel my chair. It feels solid. I'm sitting on it right now. But no part of me is actually touching it. I'm just feeling the electromagnetic force between my atoms and the ones in the chair. I'm kind of hovering. We're all hovering all the time. This kind of thing tends to happen a lot. The closer you look, things get sort of wiggly. Even simple questions. Things I've taken for granted my whole life. Like this great one I came across recently. Exactly how good was Michael Jordan, you know, the basketball goat,

how good was he at actually playing basketball? So the way any normal basketball fan would try to answer this question is by going to the stats, right? You'd look up any given game, you'll see how many points he had, how many blocks, how many assists. But then you start asking yourself, how do they know how many he had? Well, the answer is that an official in the stadium entered those things into a database. And like, okay, points are easy. You know, you put in one point for a free throw, two points for a layup, three points for a three-pointer, simple. But everything else, blocks, assists, they're kind of judgment calls.

Those numbers that get etched into basketball history as records that fans end up viewing as somewhere between objective truth and almost scripture, a lot of those numbers are just something we assume happened. Like my butt assumes it's touching my chair. I started thinking about this after I listened to an episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Pablo Torre finds out, where they pulled on this thread of NBA stats, and they sort of ended up unraveling the whole sweater. So we wanted to share it with you. As they say in the episode, in a very unexplainable way, the deeper we go in NBA history, it feels like the more we don't

know. Okay, here's Pablo. Tom Haversh, Joe, it is a pleasure to have you in the flesh at this desk with revelations to present to me. Happy to be here, Pablo. You being a protagonist of this story matters because this story begins really in my life at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which we just call Sloan, as if people know what that is, typically. It's very embarrassing when you're at like a cocktail party

or you're at an event and you're just like, yeah, I'm going to Sloan next weekend. Or I just got back from Sloan and people are like, what are you talking about? Right. In our defense, Sloan became a thing that got mentioned in season nine of the office. Hey, so Wade wants to send people to the Sloan conference. We got to compile a list of our target clients. Already on it. But in reality, what this is is a giant nerd fest.

Yeah. Where the celebrities there in the VIP room, which is very well guarded, by the way, those celebrities include people like you. Because we'll get to the big names in sports, but like you. you made your career on numbers, right? Like, forgive me for simplifying your life, but I have always considered you like basketball analytics expert Tom Haberstro. I grew up loving basketball, playing basketball, baseball, football, and just loving the math side of the game.

And then kind of broke into ESPN being a stats researcher. The biggest break I could ever imagine is at 25 years old, I'm going down to Miami to cover LeBron James. Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosch in 2010 at a time when the analytics wasn't a word. So you were like putting these historical performances into statistical

context as a matter of the beat that you were right. Like when Skip Bayless is saying oh, LeBron doesn't have a clutch gene, I actually go into the data and I say like actually here's what the data says. He's much more efficient than Dwayne Wade and Kobe Bryant and Ray Allen. And I was

covering the team, the biggest team in sports, with an analytical length. using statistics to tell stories. Right. And so when we go to Sloan, which is a thing that started at an MIT lecture hall, by the way, right? That has since bloomed, mutated into something that takes over like the largest convention centers in Boston,

as it will this Friday, actually. What we're doing is going to a place where you, Tom Haberstro, are something of a celebrity. And both of us have, you know, moderated panels at Sloan, which is, what a brag. Yeah. This is the panel I'm moderating because, as Charles Barkley put it, I couldn't get girls in high school. So thank you.

Welcome to Basketball 100 panel. We're supposed to look into the future and tell everybody what it's going to look like in 25 years. So good luck with that. At a certain point, to be a kid in America who loves sports went from, I want to be an athlete to I want to be a general manager. And this is like the power center where that stuff actually seems possible because you see, the people who count as like heroes and idols to, yeah, to sports nerds. Yeah, well, there's Daryl is the head of Dorkapalooza, which I think Bill Simmons coined, is that he is Dork Elvis.

Dork Elvis of Dorkapalooza, which is the Sloan conference. I'm not so sure how Daryl feels about that nickname. Eh, fits. But he is the face of it. The guy who claimed famously that empirically speaking, James Harden is a better scorer than Michael Fibing Jordan. If you looked at date at the time, once he had the ball in his hands,

and it's still true to this day, and I get a lot of shit because someone asked me who's a better score, him or Michael Jordan. And it's just factual that James Harden is a better score than Michael Jordan.

Based on the math. Based on literally, like you give James Hardin the ball, and before you're giving up the ball, how many points do you generate, which is how you should measure offense? James Hardin is by far number one. So obviously he's now running the Sixers.

Yeah, running the Sixers. And then there's Alex Rucker, who is a stats nerd, who rose in the front office of the Toronto Raptors, who figured out like Sport View data and camera tracking and how to arrange the defensive players optimally and rose to become the executive VP of basketball operations for an NBA team. Now I used to kind of oversee analytics and the research and development, the data scientists, the computer geeks, if you will.

And so now I oversee all the departments within basketball operations. And then, of course, like, There's, I mean, Mr. Moneyball himself. My God. And he's at Sloan. Yes, Billy Bean himself shows up. Game is really smart. In fact, I would say that baseball has become one of the most intelligent industries in the world, in my opinion.

And you see it now with the use of analytics. The people running baseball teams are much different than when I started. I think it's a compliment to the intelligence of the game. And so this conference now, as it's gotten more and more expensive and more exclusive and hard to get into, It's very clearly part business school, part Silicon Valley, Big Tech, and also if we're being just very honest about ourselves and each other, it's also part, you know, Internet Forum come to life. Yes, Internet Forum come to life. The reason why we're sitting here today, Pablo, is because of an Internet forum back in 2009. It all starts here in the APBR Metrics Forum, which I did not know about until you called me up.

like deeply excited to explain what this is. This is a meeting of the minds. It is the NBA Reddits before NBA Reddit existed. So I used to be in this forum all the time. Every day I would check in to kind of like see what's going to be happening in the future. Like it was a glimpse into this is where the industry is going. Yes. This is how to optimize the game.

What's the most efficient way to score a basketball? Here's a study. Before Sloan, you guys were doing this on this message board. And then one night, Tuesday, July 14th. 2009, someone posted the headline, scorekeeper story with a bomb. The revelation in this that a poster had heard from a friend tell him a story about his experience as a statkeeper in the NBA.

He's a stackkeeper from 1997, the Vancouver Grizzlies. This is peak Jordan era. I'm 11 years old. I'm reading this forum, and this scorecule. Keeper is saying he was cooking the books for the Vancouver Grizzlies. I remember vividly, Pablo, sitting at my island kitchen table, watching SportsCenter and Nick the Quick, Nick Van Exel. Yes.

In the Laker game where he has like a zillion assists. 23 assists. And this guy, this is what he said, because I'm a Laker fan, I gave Nick Van Exel like 23 assists one game. If he was vaguely close to a guy making a shot, I found a way. to give him an assist. So immediately, I want to just start fact-checking this, right? So when you look at this game, when you go back into the archive, Tom,

and you go and see this game now with fresh eyes, what does it actually look like? If you watch the film, the very first assist that Nick Van Nekyll has, it's not even on the screen. So the Vancouver Grizzlies just make a shot. Sharif Abdurrahim, the star young player, makes a shot. Eldon Campbell takes the ball out. and passes it to Nick Van Exel ostensibly,

but we don't actually see it on film because we cut away to Shreif of Duhrahim, and then suddenly on the left side of the court, Eddie Jones is dribbling up and takes five dribbles on the left side and then pulls up for a pump-fake three-pointer, way after the fact of maybe there was a Nick Van Axel Fantom Pass. We don't see it. It's not on the tape. When you look at the box score, I couldn't believe it,

but the timestamp of that play is reflected in the box score and it says Van Exel assists. That feels like an assist by neither the letter or the spirit of the law. Yeah, yeah. And so there were 23 of these. Now, to be fair, there were legit assists here in this game. The idea isn't that he didn't have a good game, Nick Van Axel. It's that it wasn't a 15 assist game.

It was a 23 assist game. And the key is you're more interested in 23 assists. It's the only reason I remember it. So I remember this moment. And now I'm learning it's all a lie. So I should say maybe this is obvious. This is an enormous problem for the integrity of like the NBA itself. And so where does this story go from here?

It doesn't get contained in that internet forum. Tommy Craggs at Deadspin picks it up. This is Deadspin. We're talking at the peak of its powers. Craggs gets on the phone and talks to the stackkeeper. But all I can think about is who is the. this guy. And in the story, all we know is his name is Alex and he works in the Navy. And we also know that he worked for the Vancouver Grizzlies in the late 90s. Yeah, what I'm laughing at already is

just the idea that this is your message board, Tom. You're a poster on this on this nerd forum. And here's a guy who is basically taunting you, guy who worships numbers saying, by the way, um, turns out you can't actually trust the thing that you wanted to make your career around. Yeah, and so part of me is just like, I need to know if this person's there's a mystery figure here. Yes. And for 13 years, this story was dead until

the Jaron Jackson Jr. story happens. Right. So, okay, so this Jaron Jackson alleged conspiracy on Reddit, another internet forum story, ends up being debunked, but it rekindles in your brain the actual conspiracy that you believe

to be a lot deeper than people may on the surface realize. Right. And so it dawns on me. Like, I, I need to go to the internet to find my answer of who Alex is. But I'm going about it the wrong way. I'm going about it on Google. I should have been going to eBay. So when you called me saying that you went to eBay and you found something, I was personally a little worried for just your sanity. Yeah, yeah. But you know what? is on eBay, a lot of old documents. One of which is what's called a media guide.

For the kids who don't appreciate the institution of the media guide, back in our day, they used to print directories and send them out to media members. Yeah, like, hey, what are the statistics from last year? There's no basketball reference. You need to open up the media guide. A physical book. A book to look at, oh, this person was the 13th pick. in the 1992 draft.

Here's the phone number for the assistant PR person. That is where I needed to go. I needed to find, Pablo, the 1996-97 Vancouver Grizzly's Media Guide. How in demand was this lost artifact? What if literally no one but you, Tom Habristro, even gives the beginning of a shit about this? There is one person who is not.

not only giving a shit, but willing to sell that shit to anybody who wanted it for $5. Tom, you've been dangling this reveal in front of me for so long. This right here. It's like a, basically a clip art cover. Very glossy. Look at this bear paw right here. A bear paw over an IBM mouse. This is so 1997.

Look at this. Yes. Yes, Brian, big country, Reeves in the middle, holding a basketball with two giant paws, as it were. We got Sharif Abdurahim number three. Very excited Sharif, by the way. And a literal map of the NBA in case you didn't know where the Indiana Pacers were located. So I want to you do something. Yes. Okay.

I want you to open up the page. This is real. I've never held this before in my life. How does it feel? Oh, it's weighty. I want you to open up to page 177. What does it say? Vancouver Grizzlies, Corside Crew, Italics, T. lettering, sans-sera font.

Yeah. Okay, lower on down, there is a title there, game caller slash technical. The name next to that is Alex. Yes. Alex Rucker. I'm telling you, Pablo, it's felt like in usual suspects when the reveal happens, the Kaiser Sose moment, when he dropped the mug on the floor, the media. guide falls to the floor in my mind's eye at your home and immediately, yeah, this voice plays.

I used to kind of oversee analytics and the research and development, the data scientists, the computer geeks, if you will. And so now I oversee all the departments within basketball operations. In some ways, this was like an inside job on a number of levels. Like, he's an, this is an analytics guy. He should know full well about the sanctity of stats. So what do you do with this information now that you know who Alex from the Navy actually is? I call him. It's all about you. And when you fly with Virgin Atlantic in their upper class cabin, they take the VIP treatment to the next level. With a private wing to check in and your own security channel at London Heathrow, you can glide from your car to their clubhouse, a destination

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I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America actually. We're all talking to each other to see what did we do wrong? What did we not see? I'm in Washington, D.C. this week to interview Ruben Gallego. He's a Democratic senator from Arizona, and he's been thinking openly about running for higher office. But he's recently run into some hot water because of his connection to Congressman Eric Swalwell. I have to learn from this, and I will learn from this. But, you know, for me, it's not a 2028 question.

It's about what it means to be a better first boss in my office and also a better senator to my constituents. This week on America, actually, we asked Gallego about predatory behavior in Washington, his plans for immigration reform and more. I want to make sure the people out there who, don't know Alex Rucker intuitively, Tom. Yeah. Understand why this name means something. Who is Alex Rucker?

So Alex Rucker is one of the most well-known figures in the NBA analytics movement. He was a pioneer of the Sport View data. Sport View is the camera tracking data where we can now see where everyone is on the floor, how fast they're going. The revolution was around the accuracy of what was being recorded. If you want the most efficient way to put two points in that basket, start learning how to do these predictive models with camera tracking data. And Alex Rucker was at the forefront.

And not to say he was the only one, but this is one of the more well-known characters in this space. Yes, and he used that to then, and I remember this intimately, to then follow his former boss, Brian Colangelo. He of the very normal collars, find a new slant, to the Philadelphia 76 is replacing Sam Hinky, of course, of the process fame and my own personal neuroses. Al Trucker was the VP of analytics and strategy, the executive VP of basketball operations.

In 2020, he's running the 76ers alongside Elton Brand, the GM of the team. This is a guy who is that well-known, that respected. There were headlines! The Philadelphia Inquirer had the headline, Sixers' team of NBA stats gurus is taking analytics to the next level. Yeah.

And a big picture of Alex. Then Darrymori comes in. And he takes over for basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers. It's just always incestuous. Yeah. The sloanness of everything. Here comes Dork Elvis. Yeah.

Yeah. Big footing, the previous guy. But that, by the way, that's where I left Alex Rucker in my brain. I didn't think about him until this story. And until I picked up that media guide, I hadn't really thought about Alex Rucker. But I had to confirm. I had to go straight to the source. I don't know how long we'll go, but you let me know if there's a hard out that you need to be gone for.

No, man. We'll roll. Happy to shot. All right. Three, two, one. So when you make this Zoom call, it turns out, which I imagine is fairly uncomfortable for Alex Rucker. What does he say when you confront him with the evidence that actually he might be the scammer who selectively edited NBA history? Well, he owned up to it.

First off, pretty quickly, he owned. That was me. But here's why that happened. He was 20, Pablo, 20 years old, running the stats for a professional NBA team. I was immature. I handled things in a way that I certainly wouldn't today. But, no, that's just a part of my life journey, right? Like, you know, I, it's funny as you kind of reach adulthood to the extent that I've reached it.

It's like every time, I'll sit here and think back to how I was two or three years ago. And I always look back like, man, like, why did I do that? Why did I think of that? And hopefully I continue on an arc of becoming, you know, a continually better person and refining who I am and, you know, having an impact on others in a positive and loving way. With all your respect, you put a 19, 20-year-old in charge of anything, and you're playing with fire, so. So the very basic fact that a 19, 20-year-old was in charge of these sacred numbers that we came to Revere as just historical fact is already, like, jarring to me.

How does somebody that young get the idea to even, like, do this to get away with this? He gets the idea to do this almost immediately upon arrival in Vancouver. When I first got the role, I'm bringing the computers home. I'm practicing by myself. I'm trying to develop these skills so that I can do the best I can once, you know, the first jump ball happens. My job is to create the most accurate, you know, historical reference. record of what occurred in the game. And I learned very quickly that that was not the prevailing viewpoint.

It went to the training in Detroit. Part of this training is they would show us video clips. They show us talking to Malone clip. And there's a discussion. And there's, that wasn't an assist. It was a pass. And then Malone dribbled a couple times, pump fake, and then made a tough shot.

And that's great. But like, that's to me not, that didn't. There's no real connection. There's no causal connection between the past and the basket. And the majority opinion, by a mile was, oh, no, that's definitely an assist. I was like, well, that's John Stockton. I'm like, yeah, I understand, but so.

I left there clearly understanding that, you know, yes, we are supposed to create the most accurate representation we can, but the NBA is also an entertainment business, and it's up to us in a very small part, a statisticians, to support and reinforce stars and excitement and fun. And that message was definitely reinforced internally within the Grizzlies. So what he says to you there, Tom, is to me, like, pretty fucking important, right? This message was definitely reinforced internally within the Grizzlies.

So the team itself was actually in favor of this happening. It wasn't just Alex Rucker lone actor here. This was something endemic. This was something understood that you grease the wheels or you, you, you, you, pump up the stats for your guys. When he says, yeah, John Stockton, the assertion right there is like, we need John Stockton to be a star, so we're making that in a sense. Yes.

But the key here is, this is the Vancouver Grizzlies, right? They're the new expansion team. They're in Canada. People don't know. There's a team in Vancouver. Right. So how does a stat keeper market the team or have a role in marketing the team? Well, it's that.

It's what if Sharif Abdurrahim has 10. 10 boards instead of nine boards, because 10 will get you on SportsCenter. So how do you do that? You cook the books. So the Nick Van Exel thing, that phantom assist, that wasn't even on screen, how did the Grizzlies feel about that? Because that's the opposing player. He was actually congratulated after the game.

Think about that. By his employers. By his employers saying, hey, good job out there. We're definitely going to be on SportsCenter now. That's incredible. Like, that's how you market the team. Tom Haberstro in a kitchen in Connecticut is now going to see that teal Vancouver Grizzlies aesthetic. Yeah, that's right.

The Clause. There's Bryant Reeves. That's where he ended up in the NBA on the Vancouver Grizzlies. So that's part of how they marketed the team was through the stat keeper. So when you adult grown up, Tommy, look at the numbers, right? And you see Shreif Dorehim's stats, how obvious is it that this was. actually materially happening. This was pretty heartbreaking because when you look at what Alex is alleging and then you look

at the numbers on basketball reference and you search or you filter for his best block games, what I found out that was in Sharif Abder Rahim's first two seasons with the Grizzlies, he registered three plus blocks, at least three blocks in 13 games. In all 13 games, he was playing at home. Okay, two plus blocks. It's not exactly subtle so far. Yeah. How about multiple blocks?

Okay. In those first two seasons, he had 38 games in which he had two plus blocks. 32 of them were at home. So the invisible hand of Alex from the Navy, Alex Rucker, is pretty obvious in retrospect. Yeah, and he, in so many words with Deadspin, he admitted that like a lot of the blocks and steel, and assists, like you could fudge a little bit. And Bryant Reeves and Sharif Abdurahim were part of that fudgery. The fudgery as an incentive for specifically a team desperate for attention.

How obvious was this to you when you look at the record beyond Vancouver? Yeah, so I looked at the data of just which teams saw a large disparity between their home blocks and their away blocks. Yes, exactly. Okay, so I went from 1984 now to the presence. that's when block started getting charted in the NBA officially in 1984. We had a thousand teams in NBA history that we have their block, home away block record. The top four teams in disparity from home and away were the Toronto Raptors, the Toronto Raptors, the Toronto Raptors.

In this time period, three of the top four, 200% inflation at home. The Toronto Raptors in 97, 98, 99, 2009, 2000. Like this era. The other expansion team in Canada. The thing that's almost offensive about this, though, is how unsubtle the expansion teams were doing this. Like, yeah, the Canadian teams wanted people to know that they existed, which meant they needed to be on SportsCenter, like a top 10 plays, highlight reel.

And so they were juicing the statistics that involved this element of human subjectivity. That's right. And the expansion teams, the Raptors and the Grizzlies, like we know about them, but also I've looked. looked into the Pelicans, too. When New Orleans got their team and renamed it the Pelicans, they had huge block home away disparities too. Of course. And so I'm like, all right, well, then this is an expansion story. Yes. This is just like these new teams need to market and how do you do that? You kind of, you know, twist the knobs a little bit. Yeah, an incredible fraud on its own.

But then I figured out that this was much more widespread than just the expansion teams. This was everywhere. And I had the data to back that up. Wedding season is here and your wallet is already sweating. Between the Bachelorette in Vegas, the destination ceremony, the registry gifts, and the outfits for every single event, being a good friend has never

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Plus, the most exciting laptop we've seen in a while and maybe the most exciting game controller we've seen in a while. All that on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcast. Before we get deeper into your numbers, which I am legitimately concerned about, what is Alex Rucker doing now? Like when you call him up and you zoom with him, where is he? It turns out he's out of the NBA completely. He is the CEO of a Boys and Girls Club in Texas. Gainesville, Texas. But I do feel obliged to mention that one thing Alex Rucker never fudged, it seems,

was his own military resume. Because after leaving the Grizzlies and messing with all those statistics, he did graduate from law school and he did become an actual United States naval aviator. For more than like a decade. the dude really was Alex from the Navy. And so when he is watching the NBA game as this guy who was molding, I presume, in good faith, the futures of the youth of Gainesville, Texas. What is he thinking about basketball?

I didn't know how he was going to interpret this scoring era, because like we're talking about inflation and Luca Donchich scoring 73 and Bede 70, all these crazy. I've never seen this before, Tom. Just this egregious. There are halftime scores that would be final scores 20 years ago. No question. And so here I wanted to ask Alex Rucker, who was one of the architects of this fudgery inflation in the late 90s.

And I want to ask him, like, what does he think about today's NBA? Is it bad for the league that, what is it, there's four 70-point performances in two years when it used to be won a decade? No. I mean, if it was happening every game, I might be concerned. But it's like, this is a natural byproduct of a higher pace and a much higher efficiency and just frankly, a better quality of offensive gameplay. And if, you know, if I'm sitting down and we're sitting around, you know, living room just chatting about it, to me, this is the best basketball we have ever seen. So what Alex Rucker is saying is that he is, A, a fan of the modern game, and B, does not suspect that anyone like him is cooking the books to get the numbers. to the historic highs they are now. And initially, I was thinking, like,

oh, this guy is going to identify, this is scamming too. Like, it wasn't just me back in the day. This is happening right now. And he said the opposite. And he's saying also that the era of a stat scammer, a stat keeper scammer, it seems to be done.

Like, he's saying that, don't even worry about someone like me doing something like what I did. every play from a game is immediately seen by all of these eyeballs across the world as if we're all fact-checking the game in real time now. And so he thinks it's clean now. There's so much more scrutiny oversight review of it now where you should have a lot more faith and confidence in the data that's pumped out now than the data that was pumped out 10, 20, 30,

40 years ago. You know, in the 90s, ironically, it's probably in the low 90s is my guess, right? If you look at a stat sheet among the non-point stats, probably 90%-ish accurate, maybe higher. And now I would guess that it's north of 95. I want to translate this estimation that Alex Rutgers is doing for us, right? Because he's saying, like, back in the day when he was stat-keeping, it was like, you know, I don't know, a B-plus, A-minus at best, 90-ish-per-accurate.

But now it's an A-plus. It's north of 95. He's not worried at all. But in the historical basketball record, Tom, as the numbers guy, what does that gap actually look like in your understanding? So he described it as assists were being given out like candy, like in the 90s when he was around.

I think blocks were highly subjective. And the data bears out that when we go back to 1984, when blocks were first introduced into the box score, there is a 25% gap. between the home block rate and the away block rate. Okay? What does that mean? That means for every three blocks,

there's another fourth that's given to the home team. But like an extra freebie block for every three you get is literally like the difference between an all defensive team nomination potentially. That's a huge gap between the two. But when you look at the numbers now, okay, the number of blocks for the home team this year, 4,087, okay? The number of blocks for the away team is 4,026.

So that's a gap of 61 blocks. It's basically equal. Right. You want to know what 84 was, the gap between home and away blocks? Please. 1,102. Exponentially larger than the 61 block difference of today.

And what? when we look at the 97-98 season, it's still over a thousand. Man. So what does that look like in a graph? You can see in 1984, on the left there, there's a pretty big gap between the home team block rate, 5.8 per game or per 48 minutes, and the away team is 4.7. But as we go through time, it starts to shrink. That gap continues to fade away until you get to now where it's.

just about gone. So what is undeniable is that the difference between home and road in terms of blocks has basically converged into nothing when it comes to the difference between being away and getting your friendly neighborhood scorekeeper to cook your books for you. And this kind of matters because when I think about my childhood, right. I think about like, like take LeBron, okay. LeBron versus MJ, right?

This is the most radioactive debate amongst maybe in sports, right? Yes, we're reciting numbers like we are making arguments about, you know, my dad could beat up your dad. Yes, yes. And in the context of Michael Jordan, LeBron, this is really important. A lot of times we say, LeBron didn't win depoy, defensive player in the year. Michael Jordan did in 1988. Yes, this is an enormous plank in the Michael Jordan political. political campaign.

So I had this moment of like, I mean, I had Jordan posters in my room, right? And I'm like, wait, the 88 depoy can't be a lie. Please don't. When I pulled up basketball reference, this is what I saw in his stat line. Home and Away splits, 165 steals at home, 94 steals away. 84 blocks at home, 47 blocks about half away. That's pretty bad. 80%.

When it comes to how obvious that gap is. It's huge. And maybe that's random variation, right? But we can't know for sure. But what we have here is Alex Rucker saying in that era, it was endemic that stat keepers for their home team were juicing the stats. I remember Alex Rucker saying, the NBA is entertainment too

and they were trying actively to create, to boost their stars, the John Stockton's of the world. So why would Michael Jordan be exempt from the same training that literally the scorekeepers were given to make the sport more popular? It's possible Michael Jordan was just really good

at blocks at home. Like it's possible that he was 80% better at home at blocking shots. Sure, having Benny the Bull around was somehow this inspiration phenomenon for him defensively. Yes, and hearing the music coming out onto the floor just made him... Alan Parsons project made him that much of a better defender.

Springy, more springing or anticipating the shots better. And there's some theory that like this isn't stack keeper bias. This is like the opponent is worse on the road and so therefore easier to block. But why wouldn't that be true right now? That's the thing. is your big picture analysis that shows that individually, maybe all of these things can make it very noisy and hard to isolate why this is happening.

But the big picture makes it pretty clear that this difference has vanished. And it also brings in my other childhood hero, Vince Carter. Like watching him at North Carolina completely enchanted me. He was high flying, could shoot. The way he moved, it was beautiful. And what team did he join? The Toronto Raptors. He made basketball in Canada a thing.

At what time, what era was this? The late 90s. And so, of course, I look. So, okay, what is on the Vince Carter resume that now looks quite different in the light of day? His rookie season, he averaged 1.5 blocks, which, by the way, for a guard, that's insane. That's a lot.

That's a lot. He wins rookie of the year. But then you look at the splits, 55 blocks. At home, 22 on the road. Mm. Not good. It doesn't make me feel good. Those thirsty Canadian scorekeepers, man.

Man, not Vince Carter, too. Half man, half inflation. Right, and the 60s were, too. Like, 60s had 130 possessions a game in Wiltz era. Like, the Oscar Robertson era had... Now you're coming for Wilt and Oscar. What I'm coming for, Pablo, is everybody. Everybody.

And I think going through this, it makes me appreciate that, like, maybe the 60s era, wilt's 100 points and the Oscar Robertson, we can't even fact-check that because there's no film. It is worth noting, by the way, how hard it is to even get film of games from the late 1990s, let alone in the 60s.

Like, that Van Exel clip from 97 that we showed you earlier in the episode, that came to us because of a young NBA fan in Latvia named Reynus Lazzis, and Reynus runs a site called Lamar Maddick.com and what he told Tom is that he had gotten his Van Exel video from an underground internet marketplace where people trade digitized VHS tapes of old NBA games. That is what it takes to fact check statistics from the 1990s.

The deeper we go in NBA history, it feels like the more we don't know. What else are you trying to ruin here, Tom? saying, these are the emotions I was going through was, wait a minute, it's all a lie. And this is the part where it gets uncomfortable for us. I mean, we got to go there, right? We got to talk about what this all means. Tom, we have made careers zagging away from the zig of the eye test, right?

Trust the numbers. Yeah. It's the thing in our civilization that stands as proof. of objectivity. Sports and specifically statistics, it's not an artistic subjective review because there's definitionally a scoreboard and these numbers,

we have something that is the closest thing to truth. We thought. We thought. This is one thing Alex Rucker mentioned to me and it stuck with me in my head is it's good to have a healthy appreciation, a healthy respect, a healthy skepticism of data.

Right. If the incentives are to make the game popular by giving people what they want, which is points, and we lose the ability to both interview the people who were, as Alex Rucker was, self-admittedly guilty of juicing the game themselves, and also we lose the ability to even look at the tape.

As you put it, it just feels like we are obligated to ask more questions about the things that we consider historical quote unquote fact. Right. Statistical record. It's now we have to revisit it. Look, is today's NBA objectively pure, Pablo? Like, is this the purest form of basketball?

Because we now have the statistical controls on the scorekeepers to fact-check them in real time. Is the human element removed from the game? What do you think? I think the human element is appearing. in a different form. The NBA knows, because they've done this with focus groups, they tell the viewers to dial up how much enjoyment you're getting out of watching a game. People are dialing it up their enjoyment when there's high scoring, more scoring, right? So is there manipulation in today's NBA game? I don't think it's taking the form of a stackkeeper on the sidelines. I think the

manipulation comes in kind of like behind the scenes, like from up top. Right, like the league office deciding we want faster-paced games that are more open. We're going to introduce freedom of movement rules so that Steph Curry can break free and get shots off. So Pablo, what I found out today is that there's two inflations we're talking about here, right? There's the inflation of, hey, there's so many points being scored now. The games are 150 to 152. And Luca Dantra's just 73. That's a certain type of inflation.

And so there's that, like where the least. is prioritizing certain parts of the game that they want to see. But the title of the most inflated era in NBA history, which is what so many people are declaring the modern game to be, who deserves that title

now that we've done our investigation? The era that we're most nostalgic about. It's the Jordan era. It's our childhoods, man. The Alan Parsons Project, the Bulls, just the dream team. The 80s. and the 90s.

Magic, Larry. That's the pure league, right? Back when men were men and were earning every point and every block, except for when a guy in a media guide tells you, actually, I was boosting, literally inflating the numbers because this whole thing has been show business in a way that was quite real. What we have found out today is that the human element has always been a part of the thing

that we made our careers on, which is you guys need to stop trusting your eyes and start trusting math. Start trusting the data until the data is impure. Yeah. Tom Habristro, thank you for ruining everything that we hold dear. I'm sorry.

Oh, man. I just need to take a bath after that. And speaking of impure, I just need to clean myself up. This cardigan has never been sweatier. For more Tom Haversstrow, by the way, Tom Thefinder.com is his substack. You'll find high-level data-driven insights and analyses.

But for now, this has been Pablo Torre finds out a Metal Arc Media production. And we'll talk to you next time.