…Bill James style.

Bill James is the father of SABRmetrics in baseball, and currently (I believe) in the front office of the Red Sox. He was highlighted as a primary factor in Billy Beane’s Athletics success by Michael Lewis in the book Moneyball. He writes about basketball in a recent Boston Globe piece:

If you reduce the number of possessions in a game by giving teams more
time to hold the ball, you make it more likely that the underdog can
win – for the same reason that Bubba Watson is a lot more likely to
beat Tiger Woods at golf over three days than he is over four. It’s
simple math. The longer the contest lasts, the more certain the better
team is to win. If the NBA went back to shorter playoff series – for
example from best-of-seven games to best-of-three – an upset in that
series would become a much more realistic possibility. A three-game
series would make the homecourt advantage much more important, which,
in turn, would make the regular season games much more important. The
importance of each game is inversely related to the frequency with
which the best team wins.

Notice how he parses out the factors that affect (in this case) basketball game outcomes. Can we do something like that with risk?

Note: he also wrote this in the same article:

A fan can look at the standings in December, pick the teams that will
make the playoffs, and might get them all. This has a horrific effect
on the game. Everybody knows who’s going to win. Why do the players
seem to stand around on offense? Why is showboating tolerated? Because
it doesn’t matter. Why don’t teams play as teams? Because they can win
without doing so (although teams like these may crumble when they run
up against the Pistons or Spurs).

The notion that the outcome of a basketball game is predetermined to a large extent sounds a little like my point in my earlier post today on whether security professionals matter.