Working Paper: NBER ID: w17928
Authors: Casey Ichniowski; Anne E. Preston
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.
Keywords: March Madness; NBA Draft; Decision Making Bias; Player Performance
JEL Codes: J61
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| Unexpected March Madness performance (D29) | NBA draft decisions (Z22) |
| Unexpected March Madness performance (D29) | Draft position (Z22) |
| Positive draft bumps from unexpectedly good March Madness performances (Z29) | Likelihood of becoming NBA superstars (Z22) |
| Mock draft rankings and performance metrics (Z22) | NBA draft decisions (Z22) |