Hypothesis: The outcome of any pick-up basketball game depends more strongly on the match-up between the two worst players on each team than the match-up between the two best players on each team.<\/p>\n
Argument: If the talent differential between the worst players is sufficiently large, then on defense, the better of the two is essentially free to double-team the other team’s best player on every single possession, while the reverse is not true. Thus, the team with the single worst player is effectively playing four-on-five against the team with the second-worst player, and it’s rare for the best player to be better than the second-best player by enough to overcome that numerical disadvantage.<\/p>\n
Conclusion: This means that, when it comes time to pick teams, it’s more important to avoid<\/strong> getting the worst player on your team than to actively seek to get the best player on your team.<\/p>\n Discuss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hypothesis: The outcome of any pick-up basketball game depends more strongly on the match-up between the two worst players on each team than the match-up between the two best players on each team. Argument: If the talent differential between the worst players is sufficiently large, then on defense, the better of the two is essentially… Continue reading Hoops Hypothesis<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basketball","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}