The Inconvenient Numbers
On basketball as feelings as numbers as basketball.
Katie Heindl writes, among other things, Basketball Feelings. I’ve been on her podcast. She’s thoughtful and graceful in her writing, and you should subscribe to her Substack.
She wrote about numbers in her latest essay.
Even if it was introduced with good to amiable intentions, it’s now warped into a one note dog whistle, an automatic signifier that someone is stupid. That’s dramatic, but not very. In its current iteration, if you admit to mostly verifying your basketball viewing experience through the eye test then you are copping to an ignorant one dimensionality of fandom and knowledge, practically cro-magnon. Again, that’s dramatic, but not very.
Why just watch, when you can compare what you’re seeing against numbers? Why take straightforward pleasure in watching an elegant three, an Old West-esque bank robbery of a fastbreak, a big, nasty block now rattling down through generations you’re sure can feel it, when you can instead turn these things immediately to data? Data, of course, the refined way to say numbers. Another dog whistle.
Still it’s my eye, and I suppose in some more stubborn or stoic sense, my gut, that I trust most, that grounds my experience with and in watching a game. Eyes that, despite what data purists will tell you, are still connected to the brain.
I’m absolutely on the side of the metrics, but you still won’t find me abandoning the eye test. It’s why I try and search for the actual flesh-and-bone-moving-across-the-court reasons why certain lineups work or why teams stuggle with a particular player on the floor.
I think you have to be able to connect those data points to actions and reactions of the sport.
However, what frustrates me most is when someone pretends that the numbers don’t matter when trying to prove a point. “I don’t care; he’s a baller,” which effectively means, “I think he’s good and don’t want to change my opinion.”
You don’t need numbers to tell you if you enjoy a player or not or if a game was good. They don’t have to add anything to your experience. If a player makes an awesome fade away, you can appreciate that regardless of what “the analytics say.” (They would say it’s a good shot if it’s from a player who makes them.)
But while Katie argues the dog whistle is directed at people who want to see and feel things and trust those experiences; I only seem to experience the opposite, a supposition that if I don’t see what someone sees, I’m not seeing it right. And if the numbers disagree, then they’re lying.
All the data is evidence when we spend our time arguing about basketball for whatever dumb reason. That’s it. It’s just concrete proof that events occurred.
But why do I get so bent out of shape about it? It’s the arrogance.
I studied psychology in college because I was really interested in how people think but more especially how they think “wrong.” Bias and misconception are the illusions of how we view things and how we react to things psychologically just by being human; they’re universal things.
You think you’re special, and yet when you experience trauma or grief, you’re likely to process it the same way millions have before. That doesn’t make it less meaningful to you, but it should also provide perspective on the scope of our experiences. Things can be real and meaningful and also small in the universe.
So the idea that someone believes they can really process hundreds of possessions or can watch on-ball and off-ball at the same time, process them, and remember them at once is like saying you can remember every page of every book you’ve ever read. You can remember words and paragraphs, quotes and themes, scenes, plots, and characters.
But you can’t synthesize them all omniversally. We’re not equipped to do so.
The data fills in the gaps, affirms the hunch, or denies the observational bias we’re all privy to. “I know he’s a great shooter. I’ve seen it.” Well, you saw one game for a 32% shooter. You remember the makes and forget the misses. Your brain is tricking you because it’s designed to hunt and remember danger or beneficial opportunities like a tall tree to hide from the big cat, not process wide swaths of memories to form concrete assessments.
OK, but why does this matter? At the end of it, can’t it all be opinion?
Some things can be because the game is beautifully messy and random and filled with tiny movements and thousands of possessions.
But what I’m invested in is the closest we can get to a truth about the game.
The league is difficult, so fraught with political traps and unfair circumstances that we owe it to try and get as close to accurate as we can when we talk about it.
How many great players were overlooked because people knew the eye test and didn’t realize how much they helped their teams win?
How many players did we give honors rightfully owed to others because we didn’t care enough to try and understand what matters in trying to win the game?
The worst is when paying attention to numbers is connected to an attempt to deprive the game of joy. You can feel joy when someone makes a bad shot just like you can enjoy a Fruit Roll-Up. But it’s not good for you. The numbers help us put things in perspective, they help us confirm the things we believe with reality.
They do what your brain can’t, and unless you can accept that, you’ll always be caught in the wind of what your attention span allows.
I don’t think anyone has to love numbers to enjoy basketball. I don’t think you need to pay attention to them at all.
But if you care enough about discussing the sport, you should want to know as much as possible. Watch as much as you can, read as much as you can, listen as much as you can. You won’t catch everything, but you’ll have tried to find something as close to the truth.
In a world where we can know so little truth about anything, shouldn’t we try when we can?
"I only seem to experience the opposite, a supposition that if I don’t see what someone sees, I’m not seeing it right."
I do love that, in writing about this from both of our favoured directions, we still met in the middle of the underlying sentiment. That's there's no best way, no better way, just the way you like and what we can learn from shifting our perspective from time to time.