Charles Barkley: Stats guys "never played the game"

It's one type of information. It's not the only type.

 

Nobody has ever said it is.

 

From a scientific point of view, baseball is easier to study because there are fewer variables. It's much more of a one-on-one interaction until the ball is batted, but even then the fielders do not have a massive impact on the stats over the course of a season. A hitter might get the odd hit taken away, but he is often given a hit just as many times because of poor fielding.

Basketball has so many variables from who is guarding you to are you getting passed the ball or who else is on the floor with you. I do like the advanced metric of +/-. I always noticed what the score was when I entered the game and what it was when I left.

 

They indirectly say it constantly.

 

I would love to see an example of this.

People who automatically get their back with any type of new stat or way of looking at the game can't stand that their old views are challenged. Sports evolve. They always will. There will be better infomation with every generation. Why anybody would willingly ignore it is beyond me.

 

I'd hate to be lumped in with Devil here ... but I think basketball is at the point in its evolution where things are going overboard. Maybe about where football was three or four years ago. It's just so difficult to strip away all the variables and isolate what you're looking for, and yet there is a loud chorus saying you can do exactly that. (Michael Lewis is partially to blame again, for when he wrote that story about Shane Battier called "The No-Stats All-Star," featuring the awesomeness of Daryl Morey.)

And there is definitely a subculture that treats PER as WAR, i.e. the be-all end-all of Who Is Better. It might just be a subculture on Twitter and message boards, but it's definitely there.

 

Who says people are willingly ignoring them?

You take the information from the stat head and add it to the decision. Sometimes the stat heads don't get their way. Sometimes the people who watch the guy play and see certain things about a guy's throwing motion that needs corrected, which is not on a stat sheet, get their way.

Sometimes they both agree.

 

I actually was very interested in the Battier stuff. Should he have been an all-star? No. But it did show his value.

There is a great part in Simmons basketball book that said the key to the Pistons was trading Dantley for a lesser player in Aguirre. It was a great example of things other than stats being important to such a team game.

 

Dantley and Aguirre were roughly equivalent players at the time of the trade.

The main factors were, 1) the Pistons wanted to eliminate any internal debate on the roster as to who was running the team; Dantley didn't like being told what to do by Isiah Thomas and Dantley had established a big-brother relationship with Joe Dumars (and John Salley), opening up the possiblity of a power struggle and dissension between the two starting guards if Dantley stayed; 2) On the court functionally, while still an effective scorer Dantley was the proverbial black hole of the offense, once the ball went to him it was never coming out again, bringing the entire offense grinding to a halt and 3) It was apparent Daly wanted to give extended minutes and possible starting time to Rodman, and Dantley was unwilling to accept any cutback of his own PT to accommodate this. (Aguirre wasn't exactly wild about the idea either but having just newly arrived in the trade he didn't have much leverage to do anything about it. Plus Isiah was fully willing to sell his pal Aguirre on the idea with promises to run more plays for him coming off the bench to make it worth his while scoring-wise.)

 

"Stats" are not important.

They are simply a representation of things that are important.

Too often I've seen this devolve into something along the lines of, "A pitcher isn't afraid of OPS+, he's afraid of Giancarlo Fucking Stanton," and here we go again down that road.

 

And very little of this can have a numeric value attached to. You can analyze it after the fact, though.