We Can All Learn Something From Dennis Rodman (no, seriously).
If I say the name Dennis Rodman, a bevy of different things might pop into your head. You might think about the guy with the crazy colored hair, or the guy who wore a wedding dress to a book signing. You might think of Kim Jong-Un’s buddy or the American ambassador to North Korea, somehow. You may even think of the best-selling author, or the television personality who’s appeared on a countless different reality shows. However, all the way down the list of “Things Dennis Rodman Is Remembered For”, unfortunately, is his stellar basketball career. Furthermore, once you push aside all the lipstick and feathered boas, there’s a lot that can be learned about life from Rodman the athlete.
My friend John recently sent me an advanced analytical breakdown of Dennis Rodman the basketball player. As a huge basketball nerd, and specifically, a big time Rodman fan, I was expecting to already know whatever I was about to be told. Luckily, I’m a n00b when it comes to anything mathematical, and with the help of advanced analytics, I was able to learn something new about one of my favorite players.
“Rodman was better at rebounding relative to his peers than any other player at any other skill, including points and assist.” Taking into account the fact that Rodman was 6-foot-7 in a land of 7-footers, he managed to garner a remarkable (and statistically un-matched) 30% of defensive rebounds and 17% of offensive rebounds while guarding every position on the floor. That means that 30% of misses by his opponents were collected by him. That’s quite the chunk. He even led the league in rebounding a record seven consecutive years.
Now, this is where things get really intense: at his peak, Rodman was over SIX standard deviations better at rebounding than anyone else in the league. No other player has ever achieved this level of statistical separation from his peers in any other skill. Dennis Rodman was not only a better rebounder than Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain, but he was better at rebounding than Michael Jordan was at scoring, or John Stockton was at assists, or Stephen Curry is at threes. He was the single greatest player to do a single thing.
John explained to me that six standard deviations means he was 99.9999998% better at rebounding than anyone else in the league. That means there would need to be 1 billion players in the league for someone to be as good at rebounding as Dennis Rodman. In the history of the NBA, there’s been approximately 3500 total players, and about 60 new ones enter every year. At that pace, we should expect another player as good at rebounding as Dennis Rodman in about 16 and a half million years. That’s mind-boggling.
So what’s the lesson here? Surely, this can’t just be an article about a sports guy doing a sports thing, right? Well, it’s not.
There’s a valuable lesson to be learned while looking at these numbers; as good as Dennis Rodman was at rebounding, his career points per game average is a measly 7.3. His career assists per game is a laughable 1.8 per contest. He didn’t shoot a particularly high field goal percentage, only hit 82 three-pointers in 911 career games played, and his free-throw shooting was straight up terrible. As a “defensive specialist”, he never even averaged more than one block or one steal per game throughout his entire career. Not once. For all intents and purposed, he was below-average at everything else that’s expected of a basketball player.
And yet, Dennis Rodman is a five time NBA Champion. He’s a two-time NBA All-Star and two-time Defensive Player Of The Year. He’s a deserving member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall Of Fame, because he was REALLY FUCKING GOOD at one thing. He’s a prime case study of a specialist, which goes way beyond sports talk and stretches to any career imaginable.
You don’t need to be good at everything in order to succeed; you just need to be really good at something. Too many people forget this simple fact and, instead, try to be superstars. We’re living in an era with the most self-titled and self-employed entrepreneurs we’ve ever seen. Everybody wants to run the show, and everybody feels like they’re above doing the dirty work. The unfortunate truth is that not everyone is a superstar.
However, the good news is, if you’re good enough at any particular thing, you’ll stand out and be rewarded for it. There’s nothing wrong with not scoring points. Passing the ball, setting solid screens, and playing defensive are just as valuable to the outcome, even if they don’t end up on the SportsCenter highlight reel. Hone a skill and be better at it than anyone else, and I guarantee you’ll succeed as a result. Whether that skill is woodworking, accounting, video editing, or anything else, just be the best at it and don’t waste your time or energy trying to be something that you’re not simply as a result of ego. There’s nothing wrong with being the rebounder. After all, whether you’re a basketball fan or not, you know who Dennis Rodman is, don’t you?
