Charles Barkley Doesn’t Love Analytics, but Analytics Sure Love Him

Analytics is useful and important. It is utterly baloney, though, to use still pretty simplistic analytics at current stage to gauge a player for a team sport that requires players to move and have direct body contacts constantly, like basketball and soccer.

For example, defense. There are better analytics than several years ago when rebounds, blocks, and steals were the primary statistics. But basketball is a team sport. The contribution of a player in team defense includes how much space a player can cover, how much a player's presence can direct the offense's ball movement, how uncomfortable a player can make his opponent feel, both physically and psychologically, how good a player is at directing his/her teammates in a defense scheme, how good a player is at anticipating a potential issue and cover it, how much a player can make his/her teammates trust his/her defense so that the teammates can aggressively pressure the opponents, and so on. One has to really understand the game to evaluate a player's defense correctly and fully.

It is the same with offense. A simple example is that Duncan requires more help defense than Barkley. That creates more space for his teammates, thus more opportunities on higher percentage shots, which will translate to more wins. It also help gets teammates more involved, make teammates better, etc.

I really like Barkley, both as a player and as a person. But it is nonsense to compare him to Duncan in regard to the best PF in NBA history.

Greatest power forwards of all time and no mention of Garnett?

Also omitted is Dennis Rodman which might not surprise most but when another 538 writer is famous largely for making the case that Rodman is arguably the greatest player of all time...

Granted Rodman started at SF and Garnett has played Center lately but Duncan has also been at Center a lot.

A great feature on Sir Charles, http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12289603/how-form...

Interesting article. I'm not very familiar with baseball, but it seems to me the "moneyball" approach suits better for baseball than basketball. Although both are team sports, I kinda agree with Barkley that basketball relies highly on individual talent, e.g. the chance of one-man-rules-the-entire-game seems much higher in basketball than baseball. An extreme hypothetic scenario would be that an average college level team, but with prime time Michael Jordan, probably would easily dominate any other team at the same level. I'm not sure if you can say the same for baseball.

Tangentially related, a blogpost [1] on statistical approach to baseball teamwork with a dominating player, along with the earlier HN discussion [2].

[1] https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/braesss-pa...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=771099

Charles Barkley is the best thing to happen to non player basketball. He does have a point though. Analytics are one thing but building a team completely based only on analytics is not a winning proposition.

That's really interesting! I didn't know that Barkley stacked up so well against those guys. I remember him more for his play post-2000's when he was on the decline.

Five thirty eight's website loads in the ads, images, and even tweets before it loads in the actual content. This is completely backwards from what a web experience should be like.