Building a Pro Sports Roster
Last week I listened to an incredible episode of Invest Like the Best featuring Shane Battier. Battier is the subject of a popular Michael Lewis article, “The No-Stats All-Star.”
Battier is the epitome of putting his team in a position to win. Lewis describes him as “a basketball mystery: a player is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”
Battier describes in a keynote presentation (The Art of the Intangible) how he would fail to show up in key individual statistics (e.g. points and rebounds) but, when he was on the court, his team’s rebounding share would increase because he brought intense focus and effort to the unglamorous action of boxing out.
In basketball only one person can touch the ball at a time, but there was always an action away from the ball that he’d find to boost his team’s chances of winning. He provides the following analogy: imagine you’re in a boardroom as part of a team giving a presentation to a major corporation, can you add a positive impact when you’re not the one with the laser pointer in your hand?
Being the best player and giving your team the best shot of winning aren’t the same. Lewis writes “It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.”
The goal of this blog (and podcast) is to learn how to build a successful organization in pro sports. In football that is the general manager’s role, and there are only 32 of those positions in the world. Imagine if the owners of NFL teams were also the general manager, and that there were less than a handful of teams. Then you’d have pro wrestling.
One thing came to mind after listening to Shane Battier: Adam Cole is a no-stats all-star of professional wrestling.
In June of 2021 Adam Cole summed it up perfectly when cutting a promo on Karrion Kross. Cole said that to make Kross feel special WWE gave him the lights and fog machine, but to make Adam Cole feel special they only had to ring the bell.
I’ve written before how Cole is a master of two unglamorous aspects of professional wrestling: 1) making your opponent look good and 2) bringing the same level of effort regardless of match scale.
These are important skills to consider when building a pro wrestling roster. Like other pro sports, there’s often a divergence between what’s apparently best for the individual player and what’s best for the team (arguably more-so in pro wrestling).
A collection of high achieving individual performers does not necessarily make for the best team. I think the challenge is assembling a team of people where self-interest and winning are aligned (and stay aligned as the team composition changes).