The Bob Tollison School Of Defense

James Harden is clearly a stellar graduate of the BT-SOD as evidenced by this vine:

You can call me Al

There's an old joke, what do you call someone who graduated last in his class at Med School?.....Doctor!

Now we can add, what do you call someone who graduated in the middle of his PhD. class in Econ at Harvard 6 years ago?.......I don't know, but it's not Associate Professor.

Interesting short paper from Vanderbilt on class ranking and publishing productivity at top grad schools.

Here's the abstract:

We study the research productivity of top Ph.D. programs in economics. We find that class rank is as important as departmental rank as predictors of future research productivity. For example, the best graduate from UIUC or Toronto in a given year will have roughly the same number of American Economic Review (AER) equivalent publications at year six after graduation as the number three graduate from Berkeley, U. Penn or Yale. We also find that research productivity of graduates drops off very quickly with class rank at all departments. For example, even at Harvard, the median graduate has only 0.04 AER paper at year six, an untenurable record at almost any department. These results provide guidance on how much weight to give to place of graduation relative to class standing when hiring new assistant professors. They also suggest that even the top departments are not doing a very good job of training students to be successful research economists for any not in the top of their class.

That's right, the median Harvard Grad has 0.04 AER equivalent papers at tenure time! Ouch.

Do departments concentrate all their resources on the top few students?

Is the talent pool in economics very shallow and schools are taking students who shouldn't be there just to fill up their TA slots?

What the fudge?

Mrs. Angus took a picture of me last night after I heard about the Harden trade:

I have since calmed down a bit, and am actually OK with the deal.

Durant, Westbrook, Perkins & Ibaka all left money on the table to sign contract extensions with the Thunder. OKC was offering James $54 million over 4 years and asking him to take about a $4.5 million discount over the life of the contract.

He wouldn't.

The Thunder got a lot in return. A high lottery pick either this year or next, another first round pick, a proven scorer to come off the bench in Kevin Martin, and a potentially solid rookie in Jeremy Lamb.

I would like to think that if I was going to be making $13 million a year, I would give up an extra $1.2 million per year to stay on a championship caliber team instead of being tossed into a bare cupboard and getting "coached" by Kevin McHale.

But James Harden wouldn't and who knows, maybe I wouldn't either.

I know the team could have kept Harden this year and seen what developed, but that is apparently just not the Thunder way (see Jeff Green), and it is not clear how Harden would have reacted to being in limbo for the season.

The funniest reaction I've seen to the trade is this bit of genius from Matt Yglesias. Russell Westbrook  was second team all NBA for the second year in a row, and is just getting better and better overall and at playing the point. James Harden is a shooting guard, the easiest thing to find in the NBA.