Doctor MJ wrote:
To me it's just a question of what human beings can do, and what they can't.
In terms of any kind of evaluation that can be done by a human playing against another, scouting, etc, I'll defer to all these guys - and that's a lot of stuff.
It's just that when we talk about holistic evaluation of a player's impact, I don't believe there's any substitute for analytics, and it's of such importance that it makes our lists on here oftentimes better than what could be done by typical players and coaches.
This isn't like it's some basketball-only thing either. The triumph of SABRmetric thinking over old school baseball tropes in many areas was resounding. Meanwhile, if we go into games like poker or chess, you wouldn't actually even have the discussion because those who are best at the game take it as a given that if you don't understand the data, you're an amateur.
Uhm data is of course always of at least some use but please do not compare basketball to baseball from a quantitative standpoint. Analytics are king in baseball because problem definition is very easy, the results are very straightforward, and the implications have very little complexity.
- Player [X] hits the ball into [Y] Zone [Z]% of the time when faced by pitcher type {M}.
- Player [R] completes out [S] [T]% of the time when a runner in bracket [M] is on 1st base traveling to 2nd.
- Pitcher [P] achieves result [L] [E]% of the time when facing batter type [L].
- Pitcher [J] favors Pitch range [M, C], when the count is [2,0], while he favors range [M, S, P] when the count is [1-2], etc.
- Pitcher [B] sees performance decline after [K]# of pitches by [T]% over the next [Y] pitches and a further decline [D]% after [K+Y] Pitches. Against Right handers T=T1/D=D1 and against left handers T=T2/D=D2.
If Basketball were as simple (er situationally isolated) as baseball we could rank-and-sort via RAPM and PER and be done with it. Analysts wouldn’t even be necessary, we could just write an algorithm for a computer to take care of future results while mining the past and be done with it. As an ardent fan of the game hopefully you appreciate why it’s not that simple.
And as someone who played PLO and NLH for money in college (live and online) you cannot compare that to basketball. Situational tendencies are actually the most important quantitative aspect of poker (hand ranges are very level 2, pretty basic, and inconsequential unless you’ve played with the people you are sitting with a number of times). Ditto for pot odds…they’re ever so slightly more complicated when you’re talking about stuff like post-flop combo draws and thinking about calling with mid pair so we’ll call that level 2.5 :lol
The exact kind of situational analysis that is most valuable in poker is not available in basketball. And when you’re someone who is good at seeing through/reading people/giving false signals live has its own “art” to it that is not present online, which is why a lot of the poker nerds have trouble transitioning to live play (also the number of hands seen per-hour is waaaayyy lower so they can’t even properly apply translate their game to live). BRM is tougher to apply, variance is so high it’s almost not worth considering (except in some micro-situations where you have to not blow up the pot), etc, etc. I was blessed enough to be elite at both because I never really favored one over the other, but they are completely different games and there are a lot of really good online players who suck exactly because there is no art to their game. Taking “sicko” lines isn’t something that they would ever even attempt on a table.
Can’t speak to chess directly, played when I was very young but I imagine it’s the same thing, even moreso because the potential moves in chess are waaaay more finite than No-Limit holdem. There is essentially an “optimal” response move/move-set for every board. Any game like that is optimally played by a computer, and any time a computer is the best at something approximating their analytics will yield the best results (by the human playing the game).
Your "point" sort of stands on its own merit, but comparing basketball to baseball, much less to poker or chess, is entirely disingenuous. And you sure probably qualify your statement with “proper use of,” because people think analytics = data copy-paste from Bbref. That’s not analytics (it’s barely analysis).
Doctor MJ wrote:He'd be a good politician if he were any good at it.
Pffft, Frank Underwood would eat that ass alive.
