Stats in the Wild

There’s a new paper out this month by Casey Ichniowski and Anne Preston concerning the NCAA tournament and the NBA draft (thanks to my PhD buddies Chris and Felipe for passing it along). Their argument is that unexpectedly strong tournament performance (especially team performance) causes players to be selected earlier in the NBA draft. This isn’t a bad thing though — in fact, they suggest that these strong tournament players tend to outperform their draft position in the NBA.

I believe their results saying that tournament performance affects draft position (this has also been shown by Chaz Thomas in an undergraduate thesis, and by David Berri, Stacey Brook, and Aju Fenn), and I mostly believe their results that strong tourney performers should be drafted even earlier, though their set up is a little odd for this second issue.

The clearest way to show that teams make mistakes in the…