Victory is a lossy compressor
The NBA's conference finals wrapped up this past week, and as a Heat fan and a Seattle émigré I was pleased with both results. Happy that the Cavs lost, because I still resent them for being the destination to which LeBron fled in 2014; happy that the Thunder lost, because fuck Howard Schultz. For the uninitiated: Schultz, as owner, presided over the sale of the Seattle SuperSonics in 2006, which led directly to their relocation to Oklahoma City. The Thunder are, in a very real sense, the Sonics. I am not over it.
Both losses were noteworthy.
The Cavs were, after game three, safely assumed to be dead in the water — no NBA team has ever come back from a 3-0 deficit in the playoffs. Their head coach, JB Bickerstaff, infamously (yes, it can already be classified as infamous) claimed that from an analytics standpoint they were really up — that the underlying numbers had the series at a 2-2 coin flip they happened to be losing.
The Thunder, last season's champions, were being discussed around the halfway mark as candidates for the greatest team of all time: whether they could break the all-time regular-season wins record, or, more humbly, be the team that finally snapped the league's eight-season no-repeat-champion streak. Those discussions promptly ended in December, when — in what turned out to be foreshadowing — the Spurs beat them three times in ten days. Even gods can bleed. Now the conversation has gone the other direction entirely: whether they should blow up their core three and pursue a win-now trade for Giannis, or some similarly older-but-better superstar.
All of this is, in my opinion, kind of silly, by all parties involved.
Bickerstaff should not have tried to invoke the spirit of Pythagorean victories to motivate his team or deflect criticism about their dire straits. And yet — it's not like he was completely incorrect. In much the same way that, if you know with absolute certainty a coin is rigged to land heads 70% of the time, you shouldn't start betting tails just because tails came up the last three times. Now, if it comes up tails ten times in a row, maybe that's a sign to reevaluate your threshold for "absolute certainty."
And the discourse around the Thunder's prospects glosses over the fact that the second-best player on their team — and, during some stretches, arguably the fourth-best player on their team — were both out for the entire series. Which is a boring but plausible explanation for why they lost. (It should be noted that they lost in seven, and scored more total points than the Spurs across the span.) But the narrative of Wemby, the seven-foot-seven godkiller, has taken root.
Let me be clear: the Knicks and the Spurs did win, and no number of hypothetical simulations changes or devalues that fact. But as soon as we turn the page onto next season, the nuances that led up to the result will grow hazier and dimmer and more nebulous, until recovering them requires archaeology rather than recall.
The NBA is a league where we talk about rings, not net rating.
Which is to say: victory, whether over the course of a single game or an entire season, is not a lagging metric assembled from the true granules of play-by-play data. It is the thing itself — the reified artifact. The banner, the line in the record book, the ring.
And there is nothing wrong with this, in the same way that it is no crime that both PNGs and JPEGs exist. Victory is a lossy compressor: it takes the full, lossless record of a season and squeezes it down into something small and portable, discarding almost all of the granular detail in order to do so. It is enormously useful to be able to optimize for file size — for what travels, for what gets remembered. But it is not the only use.
All of this is to say: I bring it up not just because I'm waiting for Zach Lowe to publish his Tuesday episode previewing the Knicks-Spurs series, but because in America sports are metonymous with many things, and one of those things is business.
And I have found it far more revealing, in trying to understand a company that has — capital M, capital I — Made It, not to read their most recent batch of press releases, but to crank up the Wayback Machine and go look at the launches they shipped in 2018 that failed.
The press release is the JPEG. The failures are the bits that got thrown away. If you want to understand how something actually won, you don't get to recall it — you have to decompress it, and the only way to recover what victory discarded is to dig.