Beyond the Numbers: Why the Strategy for Success in Sports is All About the People

He is the anti-Moneyball sports executive. On the heels of the release of Moneyball starring Brad Pitt, I had the chance to sit down with Toronto Maple Leafs President and General Manager Brian Burke.

I had heard Burke speak at the MIT Sloan School of Business’s 2011 Sports Analytics Conference. He had one particular quote that stuck out.

“We are a business like any other. What I would encourage everyone to remember is that the guys who work on the talent side, while it is the most fun, it has a much higher casualty rate than the people who work on the business side.”

This comment hits on a fundamental aspect of the human experience. When it comes to dealing with people, things can be very complicated. Burke was suggesting that when you work in talent evaluation, there is a much higher probability that you will make mistakes because human beings are complex systems whose future actions are difficult to predict.

Anyone who follows sports will agree with this analysis. How many times have we seen highly touted prospects amount to nothing in the professional ranks? It happens again and again. We call these players busts.

Why do they end up as busts? Sometimes it is simply due to injury. Not everyone is created equally. Some of us have a tendency to break down with a higher frequency than others. I think of the NBA’s Brandon Roy when I think of busts. He came out of college and was an immediate success. Lingering in the back of everyone’s minds was an initial criticism that he had a history of knee injuries. Four years later, Roy is a shadow of his former self. His knees held true to their promise that they would not hold up to the grind of professional sport. Yet somewhere along the line, the executives of Roy’s team felt that Roy would be okay and so they gave him a contract that is rumoured to be worth over $80 million (U.S.).

Beyond physical injuries, players can crack mentally. I think immediately of Alexandre Daigle, the hockey player who was to be the saviour for the Ottawa Senators franchise. Sadly, Daigle never amounted to anything as a hockey player. It was clear that Daigle just did not have the right mentality for the professional game. But what does that mean? How can a talent evaluator venture even to guess whether or not a player has the right mentality? To me, this is the psychological equivalent of alchemy. 

When the Greeks had figured out the limitations of trying to quantify the physical world through the study of mathematics and physics, they turned their sights to more complicated subjects. Which is to say, they turned their focus to what they called metaphysics. This is the study concerned with trying to understand how beings relate to one another.

I have covered professional sports for over 15 years. Given that length of experience, I have seen enough to identify patterns. The current trend in sports is to predict future performance by looking at the past. Using several metrics, some of the best mathematical minds have transformed the way sports is analyzed and interpreted.

Brian Burke is a counterpoint to the current trends in sports. While he values the contributions of numbers, he has correctly identified their limitations. And he isn’t the sort of person who will dismiss Moneyball out of hand. Like the ancient Greeks before him, he just realizes that there is more important level of understanding that needs to be recognized. Namely, the metaphysical understanding of being. 

Burke shared many of his observations of how to build a winning team. Not once did he refer to statistics. In Burke’s mind, there are far more important elements in creating a successful organization.

I look forward to sharing my upcoming interview with Brian Burke in Lifestyler's December issue. It went so long that the full interview will be available our website, also in December.

In the meantime, the Leafs are 2-0 and looking like a halfway decent hockey club. I predict great things for this team. With Brian Burke at the helm, I have every reason to believe that the Leafs will become a contender in the short-term. In the long-term, it is without any sense of mockery that I believe that Burke’s Leafs will end the team’s Stanley Cup drought.

— Gregory Dole