The Dennis Rodman Conundrum

Metrics and what they can and cannot tell you about reality.

Ever get into a ludicrous sports argument? We all have that one uncle, that one friend who loves a ludicrous sports argument. Maybe you love a ludicrous sports argument. Maybe you’re that one uncle or that one friend. That’s fine. Welcome, friend. 

The most ludicrous of all sports arguments — and there are plenty to choose from — is the GOAT argument. Who is the Greatest of All Time? Pick your athlete, pick your sport, pick your team and there’s an argument to be made. 

Are the 1998 New York Yankees the best team ever? Better than the 1976 Montreal Canadiens? Sure. Is Serena Williams the GOAT? Or is Simone Biles the GOAT? These arguments are so ridiculous that people bring math to them. We’re going to have a ludicrous sports argument right now. It’ll be fun. It goes like this … 

Dennis Rodman is the greatest basketball player of all time. This is not a fact; it is a blatant, flagrant opinion. 

If you are a sports knower, specifically a basketball knower, more specifically a basketball metrics knower, you probably know where this is going. If not, please know this is going somewhere. For now, however, we’ll stick to sports. 

Compile a list in your head of the Greatest Basketball Players of All Time. Unless you were a fan of the Chicago Bulls in the late 1990s, Dennis Rodman is not on this list. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson might be on this list. Kobe, Shaq, LeBron James, Giannis and Steph Curry might be on this list. You might also put Sue Bird, A’ja Wilson and Sylvia Fowles on this list. Your list is your list.  

Is this particular list of the Greatest Basketball Players of All Time missing a few people? Yes. Is it missing Dennis Rodman? No. Except it is, and he should be at the top.

Maybe you’ve heard of PER or Player Efficiency Rating. Invented by a guy named John Hollinger, PER is a metric that “attempts to collect or boil down all of a player’s contributions into one number. Using a detailed formula, Hollinger developed a system that rates every player’s statistical performance.” Thank you, Wikipedia.

To grossly oversimplify, points, rebounds, steals, assists, free throws, 3-point shots and other good basketball things count to the positive. Turnovers, missed shots, fouls and other bad basketball things count to the negative. It’s a per-minute metric of how good a player is. 

Nikola Jokić has the highest single-season PER ever recorded at 32.85. Michael Jordan has a career PER of 27.91. Giannis, LeBron James and David Robinson are right up there, too. The default league average is 15.00.

In 1997-98, his last season with the Bulls, Dennis Rodman had a PER of 12.4. That’s frighteningly below league average. According to PER, Rodman should’ve spent most of that season — and most of his career — on the bench. 

Again, Dennis Rodman is the greatest basketball player of all time. 

Rodman was a monster on defense. He would stalk you, snarl at you, get in your head, force you out of position, force you to miss shots and make mistakes, take you out of your game and wear you down. He could defend anybody. He was relentless. He was patient. He was ruthless. He was a goddamn terminator.

Rodman loved to get rebounds. He loved getting rebounds more than Adam Duritz from Counting Crows loves singing the word “radio.” In back-to-back games during the ‘93-’94 season, Rodman snagged an incredible 49 rebounds. In the same two games, Rodman scored precisely zero points. He had plenty of games with 20+ rebounds and precisely zero points throughout his career. 

Dennis Rodman was not good at scoring, and he knew it, and he didn’t care. Other guys like Jordan and Pippen did the scoring. That was their job. Rodman’s job was to give his teammates more opportunities to score, and he did it better than anyone.

As a metric, Player Efficiency Rating does not tell the story of Dennis Rodman’s Greatest of All Time-ness. So what does?

Adjusted Win Percentage Differential is another metric. It’s similar to Wins Above Replacement in baseball. AWPD is a little more complicated, but it essentially shows how much a dead average (.500) team would improve if you put a particular player in the lineup. 

Dennis Rodman’s AWPD is 21.6%. That means he turns a .500 team into a .716 team just by showing up. That’s a 17-game difference. He turns a perfectly average team that’s probably not making the playoffs into a #2 or #3 seed. 

Jordan’s AWPD is somewhere around 18%. Giannis’ AWPD is somewhere around 17%. Dennis Rodman is the greatest basketball player of all time. Again, this is a blatant, flagrant opinion.

So what does this mean for you?

Here we have two metrics telling wildly incongruent stories. Either Dennis Rodman had a below-average career or he deserves his place in the Hall of Fame. Either could be true, but only one is true. 

This is not about glue guys. It isn’t even really about Dennis Rodman or basketball. It’s about metrics. It’s about what you measure and what that tells you about reality. 

There are a lot of metrics in marketing. Which metrics best tell the story of your brand? This is a sincere question with no simple answer. Let’s start with ROI. 

It’s often a key metric and for good reason. ROI is simple, concrete and easy to understand. You spent X, you got Y back. ROI travels well. You don’t need to be an expert to get it. You can tell Linda in HR about your fantastic ROI, and she will smile and say, “Good job.”  Linda’s awesome. We love Linda. 

Cost Per Lead and Cost Per Click are also easy to understand. Good to know? Sure. The only thing to know? Absolutely not. If Giannis gets a triple-double, we know Giannis had a good night. He was efficient. It doesn’t tell us how the rest of the team performed. Maybe the Bucks were playing lights out. Maybe they were playing like knuckleheads, and Giannis had to drag them up and down the court for 48 minutes. A triple-double doesn’t tell us if the Bucks are likely to make the playoffs. 

Just because a metric is easy to understand doesn’t mean it tells the whole story or the right story. In fact, the opposite is often true. 

What about stories that are a little more difficult to tell? Metrics that are harder to measure and more difficult to understand. Metrics that don’t travel quite as well but tell a more complete story. 

Relative price. Price elasticity. Share of voice. Mental availability. Physical availability. Penetration. Incremental lift. These are longer-term, effectiveness metrics. They’re harder to measure, and you need to know something about marketing to understand why they matter. Linda in HR might not understand price elasticity or how to improve it, but that’s not her job. You understand it, and that’s what matters. 

Effectiveness metrics can point you in a more interesting direction. Metrics like relative price and mental availability are leading indicators of profitability. CFOs might care about cost per click, but they flippin’ love profitability. 

You can measure anything you want. You can look at any metrics you want. That means you can tell any story you want. Not to win some boardroom argument (though that might be part of it), but to get a little closer to some meaningful truths about where your brand is and where it’s going. Truths about your customers and where they’re going. 

And if they’re shared truths that everyone, including Linda, can align on — even or especially if they don’t quite understand them — that’s even better. Ideal, even. The world still needs experts. 

An expert’s real job is to translate the messy, complicated reality of marketing and human behavior into a story that the rest of the company can believe in. 

Because what we measure inevitably becomes what matters. The trouble begins when what we measure becomes the only thing that matters. 

You can tell a more effective story. We can help. 

This Dispatch was very much inspired by “The Score: How to Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game“ by philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen. It came out a couple of weeks ago. It rules the Earth, and we’ll come back to it in the upcoming months. 

See you next time. 

Sources!

1. The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game – C. Thi Nguyen
2. Player efficiency rating – Wikipedia
3. The Dennis Rodman Paradox: What Leaders Miss About Their Best People – Jack McCullough, Forbes
4. NBA & ABA Career Leaders and Records for Player Efficiency Rating – Basketball-Reference.com 
5. The Case for Dennis Rodman, Part 2/4 (a)(ii)—Player Valuation and Unconventional Wisdom – Skeptical Sports Analysis 
6. The NBA’s 10 Most Meaningless Stats and Arguments – Kelly Scalletta, Bleacher Report