The Analytics Lie

By now, we've all heard the saying "Men lie, women lie, but numbers don't lie." That catchphrase has been used a lot when discussing players and teams. Usually when comparing them is when the phrase comes up. My retort to that is "Numbers don't lie but they don't tell the whole story either." This is becoming more apparent as the analytics era lingers on.

The NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, has recently stated that numbers are inconclusive when it comes to resting players during the season. Resting players has become a major topic of conversation recently. There has been an uproar among fans and media alike about this, resting star players. Yes, Coach Pop and the Spurs are credited with starting the trend but the league followed suit after listening to the analytics. So the analytics said that if you have players not playing back to back games or not playing 4 games in 5 nights then they will be available for the end of the season. Well, the league ran with it and a few years later the Commissioner had to admit the analytics to be inconclusive.

Another situation where the analytics fell short is in the proliferation of three point shots taken in the NBA. The logic goes; three points are worth more than two points, shoot more three pointers than two pointers, the team will score more points, the team will win the game. Simple enough, right? Well here is where the problem lies. That logic works perfectly for the Golden State Warriors. Not so much for twenty to twenty five of the other teams. When you have great (not good) shooters then you absolutely want to take advantage of shooting three pointers versus two pointers. But last I checked, no other team had multiple 50/40/90 shooters on their team and the Warriors basically had 3 of them at one point. So yes, it makes perfect sense why this use of analytics works. When other teams tried it, lets just say it worked better in theory than in practice. Analytics was once again misleading.

There are definitely more situations where analytics has been the main deciding factor in how the game was played and coached. To be clear, I am not totally against the use of analytics. I am, however, against using it and disregarding what you see and feel over the course of the game and season. Because there are so many variables unaccounted for in analytics, I'm surprised that it became as popular as it did. With that being said, lets get back to the game being played on the court and not in algorithms.