December 27, 2016
The calendar is about the flip to 2017 and the only sports resolution being made from this side of the computer screen is to stop trying so hard to embrace analytics.
There just comes a time when you have to admit there is simply too much information out there that just doesn’t matter. There is too much emphasis on stuff that takes away from the split-second decisions on playing field.
Mind you, this is not a case of this old, stupid dude howling at the clouds. Instead, this is the case of an old, stupid dude wondering if there aren’t so many clouds filled with statistics that you can’t see clearly.
Here in Philadelphia, the Sixers were really the first team to make analytics a heralded priority. In what amounted to a national experiment supposedly filled with red, white and blue graphs, we were all supposed to be mesmerized by following the bouncing decimal points.
At the bottom line, it was nothing more than tanking. It was nothing more than waiting for a winning ticket and then praying that Joel Embiid eventually had healthy feet.
In other words, the ultimate analytic model is that God throws dice – and good luck trying to figure out what number is going to come up or when it’s your turn to win.
It was actually a good strategy – but it had nothing to do with analytics. All it really amounted to was an embarrassing middle finger to the NBA, letting the league know that the team was so rich it didn’t have to sell a single ticket to see its value rise.
Sam Hinkie had the perfect temperament to suffer the losses and not worry about the pounding on the walls or the howling of the critics. Eventually, if the Sixers were bad long enough, they would get enough talent to put together a decent team.
Analytics?
To some extent, but hardly the stuff of player tracking and such. It was a willingness to lose, lose, lose and then get better as the result of better players through the draft.
And this is why in 2017 this fan will spend less time trying to understand the so-called numbers inside the game and more time watching how the games are actually played.
There is no doubt that analytics have helped teams and there is no doubt that every team needs to pay attention to the tracked numbers. However, teams would be better served if they tried to lessen the gap between their analytics approach and the on-the-field approach.
At this point, there remains a huge divide between the analytics devotees and those who want to depend more on the so-called eye test. It is a communication gap, and the irony of this is that analytics are best used to improve the lines of communication.
Analytics are the basic tool used to draw new fans into the building, to get more eyeballs to watch a team’s games on TV, to get more people to wear a team’s colors.
In order to do so, the analytics armies in marketing reach out to fans to get information.
See the irony here?
Too many times, the men and women who delve into analytics in the front offices above marketing try to shy away from communication. It is exactly the opposite of what should be done.
You could make a pretty good argument that the real reason Hinkie is no longer in Philadelphia is that he would not communicate with the fan base when his players got into off-the-court situations.
In this case, the analytics should have been clear – talk to the people and the graph of acceptance goes up.
There is no need to gab, gab and gab some more as was the case with Ruben Amaro when he ran the Phillies, or Howie Roseman in his first go ’round with the Eagles. Those me-me-me moments are unnecessary, but there are times you have to speak – and that remains the biggest weakness of relying too much on the inside numbers of a sport.
Much of the time here is spent watching and analyzing hockey, a sport that really came up with the first popular analytics when plus/minus numbers were made public – and then became critical in contract negotiations.
To be totally fair to the analytics community, much can be gained from the advanced stats in all sports. In Major League Baseball WAR has become integral, as has Inside Edge Fielding. In hockey, zone starts are a truly telling stat, while puck possession can be a pretty good barometer as well.
Frankly, you would be a lot more informed as a fan if you paid attention to some truly useful information – but not the belief that the metric mountain is a mountain to success.
At this point, the mission of a team’s analytic department should be as much to widen the base of its expertise. The numbers along are inconsequential without a relationship to problem-solving.
It is the opinion here that the Phillies have a pretty solid character at the helm right now in Matt Klentak. He happens to have an economics degree from Dartmouth and in this day and age of Ivy League grads running teams as corporations, that is usually his calling card.
However, he was also the captain of Dartmouth’s baseball team his senior year. And that should count as much in his resume as his economics.
All of this analytics material had much of its beginning with The Oakland A’s under Billy Beane leading to the book Moneyball.
What is often lost is that Moneyball was about finding market efficiencies as much as deep, deep inside numbers. Thus, if you are in New York, LA, Chicago or Philadelphia, you can afford to swing, miss and cover up your mistakes.
So, this coming year, it’ll be a little more of back to the basics of watching to see if a player swings and misses, hits a three-pointer, throws into coverage, or shoots wide from the short side – and less about numbers that may or may not support why any of those just happened.
