NBA takes a gamble with taboo-busting Canadian hire

ESPN is reporting that the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks have lived up to their nickname by hiring a legendary basketball bettor, Winnipeg’s Haralabos “Bob” Voulgaris, to a job as their “director of quantitative research.” This is an astonishing event, and I am happy to have the good old Canadian angle pinned down without any difficulty. Voulgaris is one of our most fascinating citizens, period.

The argument that a professional sports team could benefit from the advice of a successful gambler who earned a fortune betting on

that sport practically makes itself. If social taboos had not prevented it, the hiring of someone like Voulgaris would have made sense, and might have happened, 50 years ago. Yet it is still such an audacious move that I am nervous, writing about it 10 hours after the news broke, over the possibility that it will turn out to have been a hoax.

Or that pressure will be brought to bear on the Mavs to reverse it. Or that the league’s leadership might still say “Oh hell no.” (You might say the hiring must have been cleared in advance with the league office. And with almost any current club owner who was not the Mavericks’ defiant, egotistical Mark Cuban, you could probably count on that.)

Still, let’s assume the story holds up until press time, and at least a little beyond. It goes to show the speed with which social superstitions against sports gambling are

disappearing. Anyone who has seen an English pro soccer club play a game with the logo of a betting house on its kit knows that the professional taboos will degrade pretty fast once the old social ones finally disappear.

As an employee of a team, Bob Voulgaris will have to

observe a strict rule against placing or participating in bets himself. Which is another thing that makes the story slightly hard to believe. But in interviews and podcast chats, Voulgaris has, since he became famous for big basketball bets in the first place, left the general impression that the betting

markets have caught up to him somewhat, and that his activity is diminished. The big edges in quantitative knowledge he used to earn a fortune — many of them seemingly involving the statistical tendencies of particular coaches and referees — have evaporated. If they

hadn’t, the Mavericks could not afford him.

I do not really know much about Voulgaris beyond what I have already sprinkled in here. He is a sort of half-veiled quasi-celebrity, one who became famous not as a commentator but as the subject of comment and reporting. He is somewhat

terse and deservedly arrogant. When he offers an opinion about basketball in an interview setting, he normally doesn’t explain so much as proclaim. The ultimate sources of and explanations for his views remain concealed, with occasional exceptions.

The most reliable public hints about the size of Voulgaris’s bankroll come from his participation in the world of poker as an occasional player, stakeholder and lender: he had an unhappy experience covering a $2-million+ debt for card player Erick Lindgren, as both men have confirmed. Many of the classic figures we think of as “gamblers” made their real money selling gambling advice or tips, and not necessarily by beating a betting market consistently — a task somewhere between excruciating and impossible, depending on what version of the efficient markets hypothesis you buy.

Voulgaris did it by spending inhuman amounts of couch time in front of an array of TVs and by homebrewing NBA stats different from the official ones publicly available. With new

player-tracking data becoming available to NBA teams, now is probably a sensible time for one of them to have a guy like Voulgaris around.

The analytics revolution in the major sports has been created by many different kinds of fan: computer nerds, enraged supporters of dumb teams, academic model-builders — and, yes, some gamblers. The gamblers have never been far to the forefront of this activity because they do not like to give away the store. (And, of course, their goals in trying to understand the statistical inner workings of a game will not be exactly equivalent to the goals of pure fans.)

But they participated in the early online dialogue because other people, despite being weirdos who don’t place bets on games, might know something that can make them money. It seems, as I say, like a very natural next step for teams to conclude that successful gamblers might know something that can win them games. Now one of them has got the message.

VOULGARIS IS ONE OF OUR MOST FASCINATING CITIZENS, PERIOD.