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All this talk about LeBron James and where he will go is fascinating. At its core, do you know what the speculation is? Handicapping. From my Magazine buddies Ric Bucher and Chris Broussard to the guy I see at my local swimming pool who can't stop talking to me about it. Everyone is doing the same thing professional bettors do when they make their picks: reading everything possible, talking to experts, running scenarios. In other words, they're gathering information. They're handicapping.
The LeBron-watching world has been in a particular tizzy this week, thanks to that New York Times article that quoted a league exec saying King James to Chicago was a done deal. The market in the offshore sports books for where LeBron will go then became so volatile, with different teams leading the way seemingly every minute, that two of the most popular Island bookmakers, sportsbook.com and Bodog, just stopped taking bets on the sweepstakes completely. Bodog bookmaker Richard Gardner emailed me a statement that read, in part, "It is not worth the risk as a book manager to throw something like this up ... Calculating odds on something like this is like trying to run live odds on the 100M dash at the Olympic games and is definitely one of the toughest things I have had to deal with in my years in bookmaking."
Before any of this happened I had been looking for ways to accurately predict LeBron's final destination. After all, if this is nothing more than handicapping, there should be a wise guy system for it, because no one is better at reading tea leaves than sharps. So, I decided to construct an algorithm using bettor's logic and math.
Now, how do I do that?
The first call I made was to Jeff Ma. You may recognize the name. He's the MIT card-counting genius who was the inspiration for the bestselling book "Bringing Down the House." And that book was the inspiration for the movie about Ma and his buddies called "21." Ma moved on to become a fantasy sports/Internet entrepreneur, but he still knows a thing or two about making smart bets. He has a book coming out next week called "The House Advantage: Playing the Odds to Win Big in Business" that pulls back the curtain on a lot of those secrets (more on how those apply to sports betting next week).
I told Ma I wanted to build an algorithm that would tell me where LeBron was going. "First," he said to me, "You need to lay out the pros of each situation and assign value to them. Salary, cost of living, endorsement value. Ultimately you take it one step further: What place does he go to maximize the amount of championships he can win? A good place for next year or a team with young guys that can win three titles in the next six years. This is where you have gamblers figure out who has best chance of winning a championship."
So that's what I did. I polled gamblers, NBA experts here at ESPN and scoured the Internet for future odds. What I got was a broad swath of opinions -- from people who base their decisions solely on numbers to people who base them on talking to scouts, coaches, GMs and players -- about which teams in the LeBron sweepstakes are best positioned to win. Not just next year, but for the next five years.
Then I went to Kiplingers.com and figured out which of these potential LeBron homes -- Chicago, L.A., New York, New Jersey, Brooklyn, Miami, Cleveland -- has the lowest cost of living. Plus I did some skimming of experts to decide which town offers the best platform for worldwide marketing opportunities.
With those bits of information as my anchors, I developed two categories for building the LeBron algorithm. One I called "Legacy." This had three sub-categories, listed below, along with my info-based interpretation of LeBron's best options:
LEGACY
(A) Long term winning -- LeBron doesn't want just one title, he wants to be an all-time great, which requires multiple championships. The teams courting him best set up to win over the next six years are:
1. Chicago Bulls
2. New Jersey Nets
3. Miami Heat
4. Cleveland Cavaliers
5. New York Knicks
6. Los Angeles Clippers
(B) Short term winning -- Winning it all next year will solidify his status as the game's best current player. It will make him and the guys who signed him look like strategic geniuses for putting themselves in the position they did.
1. Miami Heat
2. Chicago Bulls
3. Los Angeles Clippers
4. Cleveland Cavaliers
5. New Jersey Nets
6. New York Knicks
(C) City Relationship -- Where would he be most beloved if he were to bring that town a title?
1. New York
2. Brooklyn/New Jersey
3. Cleveland
4. Chicago
5. Miami
6. Los Angeles
The other was called "Money." It had three sub-categories, too.
MONEY
(A) Total contract value
1. Cleveland can offer the most, $125.5M over six years.
2. Miami can offer the same five-year, $96.1M deal as all the other teams. But with no state income tax, it has the edge.
3. Everyone else.
(B) Marketing potential
1. New York/New Jersey/Brooklyn (best opportunities)
2. Los Angeles
3. Chicago
4. Miami
5. Cleveland (worst opportunities)
(C) Cost of living
1. Cleveland (cheapest)
2. Chicago
3. Miami
4. Los Angeles
5. New York/New Jersey/Brooklyn (most expensive)
Now, I had to build the formula.
For that I called Mike Orkin, who has a Ph.D. in Stats from Cal-Berkley. He is the Professor of Statistics Emeritus at Cal-State East Bay and runs the Business, Math and Sciences depo at Laney College in Oakland. He's also written a couple of books about the relationship between math and gambling. I sent him an email with the details above and he sent me back an excel spreadsheet with all of the info broken down into neat categories. He told me to fill in "importance values" from a scale of 1-10 for each sub-category (long-term winning, short-term winning, city relationship, total contract value, marketing potential and cost of living). And then he wanted me to rank each piece of data (the teams) according to what I thought LeBron's best options were, based on my handicapping.
I know it's confusing. Here's a sample of what it looks like:
Legacy (Category)
Long-Term (Sub-category, importance to LeBron ranked 1-10): 9
Short-Term (Sub-category, importance to LeBron ranked 1-10): 7
City Relationship (Sub-category, importance to LeBron ranked 1-10): 3
New York: 9
Cleveland: 9
Brooklyn/New Jersey: 8
Chicago: 7
Miami: 6
Los Angeles: 5
Once all the sub-categories and teams were given a value, the spreadsheet assigned the franchises a point value. Whoever has the most points is where LeBron will/should go. Obviously, I know my system has some flaws. Most important of which are the assumptions I am making. But this, my friends, is part of handicapping, too. Wise guys are constantly trying to glean insight into a coach's plans or a player's mindset from what they read. And that's what I did with LeBron. My assumption is that the two things that matter most to him are establishing a long-term legacy of success and becoming a billionaire. Both of these goals can be accomplished by winning as many titles as possible in the next decade.
According to my math, the winner of the LeBron sweepstakes should be ... the Bulls. Combining their point totals from the Legacy category and Money category, they beat out the Heat by 18 points. Next up were the Knicks, then Nets, Cavs and Clips.
No one can say for sure where LeBron will end up. But if he cares about winning and money, it's hard to bet against Chicago. (But I wouldn't ignore Miami, either.)
_________________ spanky wrote: Elmhurst Steve wrote: In the grand SCEME (not scope, Dumbass) pf things Awesome.
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