It's been a weird couple of days. Weird because I spent the entirety of it locked up with a calendar and an old nursery rhyme? Nah, that's par for the course. Weird because these new stat things crop up at the weirdest times. Kevin Durant has been the topic du jour, and I'm having a hard time understanding why. Scratch that. I know why. It just feels a little inexplicable, a little without a sense of time. See, it came up because ESPN's Henry Abbott conducted a series of interviews with (newly) former Mavs stats guy Wayne Winston. Interviews, by nature, are sporadic. You interview a guy when he's free. Vacating the Mavs job meant Winston was more free to speak his mind than he has been. It meant he was able to discuss his opinion of Kevin Durant. In a nutshell, it's not very high.
The whole furor is caused by adjusted +/-, which shows Durant having a less than positive effect on his team when he's on the court. I'm not going to get into it, not least because I spent a few minutes checking out the adjusted +/- central station for the moment BasketballValue.com and my head started just a little bit to explode. If you want to bone up on the stuff, hit the major players. Peep the Truehoop post that kicked this into high gear (linked above), or check out Ziller. Here's the new scoops, though. Responding mostly to the Abbott piece, Durant expressed frustration at the un-veiled criticism. Abbott, it should be noted, made sure to note his uncertain stance on Winston's position. Still, here are Durant's tweeted responses.
Everybody that is doubtin me as a player and my team as a whole..all i can say is that we all are tryin and workin our hardest!
What more do u want? let me be the player i am...i come to practice everyday..and push myself to my limit, God has put me n a gr8 position!!
I love all the REAL basketball fans who appreciate hardwork, passion and love for the game..and not jus "plus and minuses"...wateva dat is!
Here's my thing. "Wateva dat is"? Twitter grammar aside, I find that ending a bit problematic. Sure, it's a stab at humor in the face of new found self doubt. How would you feel if someone whose career it is to know this stuff just told you that you're actually hurting your team? Good for Durant. He's trying to keep it light! Here's what I don't like about that. It gives the idea that Durant has no idea what the +/- stat is. Now, it's fine if he doesn't understand the nuances. It's not like I expect NBA players to...all have Daryl Morey (or their team's equivalent) on speed dial (what up, Battier). But of all the advanced stats out there, it's not the most complicated one. Sure, the adjustment Basketball Value does is a little complex, but +/- is a stat that even shows up in boxscores. At its most basic level, it shows how much your team outscored the other team or got outscored by the other team while you were on the floor.
Abbott posted a second entry regarding this after Durant's twitters. In it, among other things, he attempts to explain the +/- stat. The post was dubbed a "Memo to a Young Baller." It's not the first correspondence of this type to occur in the last month, as Ron Artest has had some words internet-ly exchanged with a Lakers fan. In the post, Abbott is a bit condescending in explaining +/-. Now, my concern isn't with Abbott's tone, and maybe it's more didactic than condescending, but the tone comes with good reason. Durant ends a twitter message exclaiming ignorance of the stat. Abbott breaks it down in case Durant really is reading the 'memo.' I don't need the break down, I get it, but I know there are people out there who don't. Whenever advanced stats come up, apparently there are legions of protesters. I've never come across them, but that's what I hear. Maybe people are just bored with it. I don't know.
However, people who make a living doing this: writing about basketball or advising general managers, coaches, and owners? Yeah, I'd expect them to care about advanced stats a whole lot. Now, there are several teams out there who are a little ahead of the curve when it comes to advanced stats. The Rockets and Daryl Morey are the flagship of this fleet. Other teams noted for their advanced stats savvy? You guessed it. The Mavs and the Thunder. Here's my question. If the Thunder one of the leaders in understanding advanced stats, what does that mean for the players? It's one thing to know, through advanced stats, that this guy, this guy, and this guy are more effective than these other guys who inexplicably are more highly lauded, or to know which combination of players works best on your team. It's quite another thing to take that knowledge and use it.
We all know, thanks to the Michael Lewis piece, that Shane Battier takes full advantage of all the info he can get on his opponents to be the best defender he can be. Kobe has a very similar strategy when preparing for opponents, though he's more reliant on watching tape. With the advent of increasingly more nuanced statistics and ways of looking at basketball, you would think that NBA players would be using that information to get ahead. It's kind of like steroids for the mind, except it's all fair game. (Of course, steroids makes this a whole different discussion. Do players feel like their cheating by using info like advanced stats? Really, that just sounds like an excuse.)
The bottom line is, if the Thunder are one of the most stastically knowledgable organizations in the league, or even if Sam Presti is just more knowledgeable, shouldn't that translate to their players being more knowledgeable? In his 'memo,' Abbott takes a look at a bunch of tape to get to the underlying meaning of his first post. He notices one of the things Durant struggles with is effectively using the pick-and-role. Isn't this something Durant should know already? Shouldn't the Thunder stat heads and coaching staff know this stuff and be on top of it? I don't know. I'm just one fan who doesn't know much but reads a lot. I know what +/- is. Does your favorite player? Wouldn't you like him to?
In sporadically regular installments, OtB brings you a long-form joint re: NBA and its ontological extension unto all of sport. Epochrypha: writings or statements of questionable authorship or authenticity, but always impassioned and always with an eye on the times we're spectating in. Enjoy.
I've taken today off in order to complete some grad school writing, but first I have to get some of these thoughts off my chest, where they breed. Yesterday, though, at the day job, I went over this quote with my students: "All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in." -Toni Morrison, 1998
Now, this quote is obviously sardonic and offers a biting critique of those who wave flaming swords at the entrance to Eden (not quite as entrancing as the Miles Davis impersonation the archangel Gabriel better be playing if I ever make it to heaven, eh? but it’s a nice story sandwiched between two gates). Id est white-separatists. And I appreciate it on that level. At the same time, I also think it can be important to keep the human actually outside the heavenly. For the sake and integrity of both. This has to do with advanced stats and reality, but first I have to drop a bit more lit on you.
Look, Borges wrote in "on exactitude in science" of a fake empire where the cartographers made maps so detailed they were exact replicas of the land they were meant to chart. Associated Content puts it nicely: "This made the perfect map perfectly useless." At the time, cartography was a much debated and controversial revelation, like phrenology or genetics. How far can you go before you're playing God? But, then, are we not also always inundations of representation? Does not our every word leer with symbolism, standing in place of that to which one is referring? As they say, the devil's in the details. And it can be seen in the much debated and controversial revelation of today: advanced statistics in basketball.
I've been thinking about this while watching the first throes of the post-season. I've been thinking about the purpose of the more and more telling statistical measures in comparison to the descriptions we put down in words. (For more on words vs. numbers and the conflation of such, see: gematria) Okay, they're both the attempt to recreate what goes on in sports. But, and this is not a rip on statistics, the one attempts to boil down games to their essential parts, while the other attempts to exult and extend that which has already been experienced. This was never more apparent than in the casual mention by some analyst that stats could one day replace the games completely. You take chaos theory and any other advanced mathematical conceptions you want to throw out there and, in theory, you could predict what the game would be without actually playing them. Of course, such a thing is said in jest. Still, it's chilling. A breather:
I’ve been wanting to run this (and I was reminded by that beer bottle throwing incident) for a hot second now. Why, because it somehow elegantly (praise Oldman, please) documents what goes on in a "train wreck." How people react to disaster, and how war stimulates an economy. Oldman's character Zorg posits that "life...comes from destruction, disorder, and chaos." He takes an empty glass (not half empty, mind you) and breaks it. He then goes on to explain that this simple act of destruction foments all kinds of heated and fecund sweepings of life. It's not Kierkegaard, I know, but bear with me. See, me? I think it's those invisible, never idle hands that make the world go round. They create the details. They type blog posts, just like this. Zorg? He's like the Kobes and Lebrons of this world (of basketball blogging), the Shaqs that break backboards and twitter about it, if you will. Me? I'm like the little Sasha Vujacic that sweeps up the broken glass.
Who else makes up these invisible hands? The statisticians. The John Hollingers and Kevin Peltons of the world. But also the guys who hand stats to EJ, Kenny, and Charles; the guys who look up the random stuff that comes up when Reggie and the Czar are letting hypotheticals fly. The 15 guys who work under Daryl Morey organizing databases. The ball boys. The guys who mop up the sweat when players fall to the hardwood, who keep the players from slipping and breaking their necks. The associated press writers who get no recognition for the recaps and releases they write. The guys who arrange highlight reels, in game. The cheerleaders. The fans. The stranger next to you who high fives you when D-Ho brings the hammer of Thor down. And Henry Abbot's right. It's not Dwight that makes the game for you (okay, it kinda is); it's the guy you don't even know, but with whom you form a strange kind of bond. It's that guy, that shared experience, which makes the games great.
This is why I think Outside the Boxscore and blogs like it are so important. And I know self-aggrandizing outfits generally dress up the navel gazing thing by looking around for people to whom they might glorify their navel, but look. My esteemed (by me, at least) colleagues don’t do this, and I’m not only talking about us. I’m talking about the entire blogosphere. I'm talking about every team that has ever retired a jersey for the fans. I'm talking about the invisibles as mentioned above. It’s not like I think fans or sports writers are in danger of losing this, of losing their subconscious understanding of the intangibles that make sports great; I just think it’s important to say it’s important once in awhile. I don't want us to get lost in the details, y'know? Furthermore, as the cartographers, we must continue to understand that every map has a legend. A parting note.
"As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think." - Toni Morrison
