I am very fond of consulting basketball game stat sheets, I
do agree with the NPR article on scorekeeping in baseball claim that stats can
tell you the story of a game in ways that are more than just scorekeeping. The
NBA season just started this week and the raptors won their first opening game
in 4 seasons, that is a stat that tell me we are starting the season with the
right focus. Games are often won on the defense side and looking into the box-score,
I can usually tell which team played hard and with energy looking at stats such
as total rebounds, blocks and steals. Team play is often a deciding factor as
well and is reflected in the total number of assists, it shows that the ball
was not sticking to the point guard's hand and all players had a chance to
contribute in scoring, this is especially important because being a casual
basketball player myself I know players tend to get involved in other areas of
the game more when they feel that their efforts are not wasted.
One particular area where we can do away with statistics is
when comparing players by counting how many championships they have won, this
is the object of perpetual debates when the fact is, in team based sports game,
it takes a full, well functioning team to win a championship and many great
players never achieve that ultimate goal, even though 'less deserving' ones can win
many titles due to favorable circumstances.
This post reminded me of a stand-up comedy that I just watched the other day. The comedian compares announcers from Europe to announcers from North America and argues that North Americans are obsessed with statistics, in a funny way. It's called "Trevor Noah: African American" and it's on Netflix.
ReplyDelete