
Charles Barkley Doesn’t Love Analytics, but Analytics Sure Love Him - wglb
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/charles-barkley-doesnt-love-analytics-but-analytics-sure-love-him/
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jamesli
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.

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Steko
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.

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gfunk911
It's the War and Peace of somewhat convincing sports arguments.

[http://skepticalsports.com/?page_id=1222](http://skepticalsports.com/?page_id=1222)

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nl
Upvoting for the link, and for your summary.

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cauterize
A great feature on Sir Charles,
[http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12289603/how-
form...](http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/12289603/how-former-nba-
star-charles-barkley-became-role-model)

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sf56
[http://imgur.com/HlkYt5i](http://imgur.com/HlkYt5i)

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markovbling
smooth!

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fredliu
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.

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aveeno2015
I think there are many things that current statistics don't measure directly:
setting good screens, spacing, help defense, match ups, garbage time, lost
opportunities, pass that results in another pass to an assist, intentionally
resting players to make a championship run, saving energy in a game to make
plays in crunch time, etc... Measuring many of these things require judgement
and understanding the game...

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dexen
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...](https://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/braesss-paradox-and-
the-ewing-theory/)

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

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yalogin
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.

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inspiredworlds
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.

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npkarnik
?? Barkley retired after the 1999-2000 season.

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goatslacker
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.

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PhantomGremlin
Firefox + NoScript = very pleasant website experience.

