| Abstract: |
Using a detailed personally-assembled data set on the performance of
collegiate and professional basketball players over the 1997-2010 period, we
conduct a very direct test of two questions. Does performance in the NCAA
“March Madness” college basketball tournament affect NBA teams’ draft
decisions? If so, is this effect the result of decision making biases which
overweight player performance in these high-visibility college basketball
games or rational judgments of how the players later perform in the NBA? The
data provide very clear answers to these two questions. First, unexpected
March Madness performance, in terms of unexpected team wins and unexpected
player scoring, affects draft decisions. This result persists even when models
control for a direct measure of the drafted players’ unobserved counterfactual
– various mock draft rankings of where the players were likely to be drafted
just prior to any participation in the March Madness tournament. Second, NBA
personnel who are making these draft decisions are certainly not irrationally
overweighting this MM information. If anything, the unexpected performance in
the March Madness tournament deserves more weight than it gets in the draft
decisions. Finally, there is no evidence that players who played in the March
Madness tournament comprise a pool of players with a lower variance in future
NBA performance and who are therefore less likely to become NBA superstars
than are players who do not play in MM. Players with positive draft bumps due
to unexpectedly good performance in the March Madness tournament are in fact
more likely than those without bumps from March Madness participation to
become one of the rare NBA superstars in the league. |