James Harden and the Evolution of the NBA Metagame

Over at Grantland, professor Kirk Goldsberry has a great breakdown of how James Harden and, broadly, the Houston Rockets are succeeding with what looks to be an unorthodox style of play. Put simply, they shun mid-range shots in favor of a disproportionately inside-outside offense that emphasizes drawing free throws and 3-pointers over all else.

While this is all interesting, the last couple paragraphs raise a few ideas that deserve more attention. Here's the excerpt:

For those of us who grew up watching Bird, Magic, and Jordan, there’s an increasing dissonance between what we perceive to be dominant basketball and what actually is dominant basketball. Sometimes the two are aligned, but they seem to be increasingly divergent — and perhaps the most tragic analytical realization is that the league’s rapidly growing 3-point economy has inherently downgraded some of the sport’s most aesthetically beautiful skill sets. You can’t be Bernard King or Alex English, bobbing and weaving into space on the elbow or along the baseline, anymore. Hell, it’s hard to even be LaMarcus Aldridge or Al Jefferson. The Chris Boshes and Serge Ibakas of the world, once forever camped out in the post, now stray beyond the arc. That unassuming curved line has forever changed the NBA. For every graying Garnett, Duncan, or Kobe, lugging their 2-point jumpers toward the exit, there’s an upstart Harden or Love hanging out behind the 3-point line.

Houston thrives on the perceptual dissonance that separates traditionally great basketball from contemporarily smart basketball. While the rest of the league gradually meanders from the old way to the new way, the Rockets seem happy to exploit margins to extremes that no other team does — yet.

Cutting through the names and basketball jargon, we can summarize his point as, "Metagames matter far more than we thought." The concept of the metagame as described by Wikipedia:

In simple terms, it is the use of out-of-game information or resources to affect one's in-game decisions.

 It elaborates:

Another game-related use of Metagaming refers to operating on knowledge of the current strategic trends within a game.

While previously relegated to easily measurable and more centrally controlled games like those played with cards or various video games, metagame concepts capture the broad trend toward ever more refined world sports analytics. Any world(from touch football to the NBA) where games are repeated regularly, with a well-understood set of rules, can develop a metagame. Metagamesmanship involves finding opportunities in the set of rules in place and exploiting the conventional way the game is played to win. It is, to some extent, entrepreneurship in the Kirznerian sense. Innovative individuals see wins and points available that others either do not see, or undervalue.

Harden and the Rockets management see this. They exploit discontinuities in the game that others undervalue. 3-point shots, free throws, and shots in the paint are undervalued relative to mid-range jumpers. Moreover, their benefit is exacerbated by the fact that other teams do not play this way. Because of this, the average NBA team is more prepared than it should be to defend such midrange shots, and build their defensive schemes to do so. As such, the average NBA team will naturally be under-prepared to face an innovative team like the Rockets. 

We are staring at a brave new world of sports gamesmanship, where metagame trends matter more relative to raw player talents than ever before. The more information about players and the game is available, the value common sense, conventional wisdom and intuitive feelings have in evaluating talent. Cameras track every player movement. Strategy, rather than pure player talent, matter far more now than they did in the past. The more we know about the game, the easier it is to find entrepreneurial opportunities.

Yet, this is by no means a be-all end-all. As Billy Beane's "Moneyball" advantage faded as other teams adopted his tactics, we saw the advent of the modern stat-driven era of baseball. When talking of "eras" in sports, we are generally speaking of periods where the metagame was defined by a particular trend, where an entrepreneurial player or coach or manager finds a new strategy that changes the paradigm of the game.

Especially in sports where games are zero-sum (for every winner there is a loser), teams can do better than they otherwise would when they are entrepreneurial and exploit metagame trends, building a team that beats the most common strategy that they expect to face in a season. This is how Harden and the Rockets are succeeding this year, in the mold of innumerable metagame innovators in the past. The game is evolving, and this is the bleeding edge of the evolution.