Michael Lewis' "The No-Stats All-Star"

How anyone can read that story, read all the times he says that Battier is not the best player on the team, is not one of the top players in the NBA, and still say THOSE are the points he's trying to make blows my mind.

I am a Battier fangirl. No need to lie about that. But the sheer lack of reading comprehension by more than a handful of you is troubling.

 

Couldn't get to the second page because I didn't want to log in to the Times service. Wasn't worth it to me because I didn't want to read seven more pages on such a flawed premise.

Battier is a fantastic player, but only when he's surrounded by more fantastic players. He's incredible at those intangibles that can't even be coached, because most players wouldn't take the time to use the tricks. But to call him anything more than a great 3rd or 4th banana is a joke.

I would love to have Battier as the No. 4 guy on the Lakers, but I would need Kobe, Gasol and Odom first.

 

Which, GBNF, if you had read the story, was exactly the point.

Don't listen to the people on here. The story said Battier does the little things. Hell, they went out of their way to talk about how he's not on paper a very good player. He's not one of the three best players on his team. THAT'S THE POINT.

 

And that deserves a 4,000-word (or more) article?

 

A. It was in the NYT mag. 4,000 words is nothing.

B. how many features do you read on a given day that "deserve" to be written? It's a feature, a look inside, a different kind of background on a role player. Just interesting.

 

So we needed the almighty Michael Lewis to prove that Shane Battier is a great role player, the kind of guy who makes good teams better but does not make bad teams good?
Anyone who watches the NBA already knew that.

 

That's a legitimate criticism. I thought it was interesting. But yeah, it's kind of generally known.

My beef is only with those who seem to think Lewis is saying Battier is better than Kobe.

 

I guess I'm most annoyed with the fact that Battier is NOT Horry or Rodman or even Steve Kerr, who each won several NBA championships. Battier hasn't won anything. He's the fourth best player on a team that's going to be bounced in the first or second round of the playoffs. Big deal.

 

Umm, I don't think anyone seems to think Lewis is saying Battier is better than Kobe.

 

that was a bit of hyperbole, GBNF. But the point of the story wasn't that Battier's a superstar or one of the best players in the NBA. But that seemed to be what some got out of it (admittedly, more so on Chee's thread)

 

I don't recall anyone saying he was as good as Kobe. But the attributes of turning a team into a winner are usually reserved for superstar players and the article's attempts to change that dynamic failed when looking deeper at the numbers and players with similar skill sets to Shane.

Battier's abilities are completely overvalued in terms of his ability to take a team into the next level as that NY Times piece alluded to....period.

 

Read the piece, GBNF. Just go to BugMeNot and get a log in if you don't want to give the Times your email info. But it's important to read sports writing you might not agree with (in full) if only so that you can articulate why you don't agree with it. IJAG is correct in that some of the reading comprehension here at SportsJournalists.com is flawed and myopic to the point of absurdity. The larger point of the article is not to suggest that Battier will help you win championships, or that his value is greater than Kobe's, Garnett's, or even Ron Artest's, but to pose the question: How do we measure the immeasurable, and what value do those immeasurable qualities have? Are they really immeasurable anyway?

I think some of the analysis here is correct in that Lewis is bending his reporting to support a thesis that may not be as strong as he'd like it to be, and because I'm not a Battier fanboi, I can say that I'm a little uncomfortable with the rabid defenders who have tried to explain throughout Battier's career why he is a better player than the layperson might understand. But people like Lewis and Malcolm Gladwell are important to read even if they aren't necessarily perfect every time out because they bring a fresh perspective to a occasionally tired genre of writing. Just like John Updike and Gay Talese were able to see things about Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio that other writers could not, so can Lewis and Gladwell. Their approach focused more on using logistical analysis rather than than literary, but it's still worth examining with an open mind.