If you have some time on your hands, this article written by Michael Lewis ("Money Ball," "The Blind Side" [the book I recommended a couple months back]) for NY Times magazine is very interesting. Sports will never be completely predicted by stats, but the new statistics that are being applied to sports I care about (see www.footballoutsiders.com/info/methods and their explanation of DVOA; to a lesser extent, basketball) are making the role of statistics in determining the "value" of players and the possible contributions they can make to a team absolutely fascinating (to me, at least).
I acknowledge that boiling sports down to pure numbers takes away from much of the human factors that make it great -- passion, drive, will, discipline, inspiration etc -- so I'm not saying stats are the end-all, say-all. But they provide some nice insight.
Anybody have thoughts on this? Are stats taking over too much of how sports / players are judged? Do they need to be more of a factor?
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JD, how ya doing? it's been a long time. I'll have to take a look a better look at that article. and speaking of stats, I think I still have the stats from our world championship flag football season. yep, can't let the glory days go yet. hope all is well amigo, take it easy.
With regard to your questions, I don't think stats ever complicate things too much. I think the stats may make some players turn into headcases (a la Max Hall). But those type of events are bound to happen anyway. It is only a manifestation of their personality that would have come out anyway. So if some metric gives better insight than the current methodology, why not?
That being said, in sports as in the world of finance, there can be an over reliance on statistics. Bill Simmons has a great write up on this with regards to the greasy haired Canadian MVP that should have never been. They need to be interpreted with reason and understood. You can't think statistics speak for themselves. Its the correct analysis that matters...
I don't think I ever said that stats complicated things -- conversely, maybe that it may lead to oversimplification, or rigidness, or something else that takes away from the "immeasurables" that usually inspire us as spectators. If you begin breaking everything down to probabilities and numbers, do you feel that "dehumanizes" sports?
I do like what you're saying about how improper analysis -- based on lack of context,etc -- is most often the problem with stats. Not the stats themselves.
Re: the Bill Simmons article you mentioned, are you referring to him making the argument that the Suns' system under D'antoni was what enabled Nash to rack up a ridiculous amount of assists -- really just because they scored 120+/game (and didn't play a lick of defense)?
Think about Chris Paul would do in a system like that.
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