Former NBA player Charles Barkley doesn’t like analytics:
During TNT’s studio show following the Houston Rockets’ victory over the Phoenix Suns on Tuesday night, Charles Barkley ripped Rockets GM Daryl Morey – and the NBA’s burgeoning advanced stats movement by extension – saying: “I’ve always believed analytics was crap.[…]”
“The NBA is about talent,” Barkley added. “All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common – they’re a bunch of guys who have never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game.”
Having an intuitive mastery is one thing. Having a demonstrably empirical basis for decision making is another. They’re not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Fetishizing the intuitive and dismissing the empirical by hashtag humble bragging about how many girls you got in high school is just sad, man. If the statute of limitations on your teenage years hasn’t expired, neither has the statute of limitations on your support of exploitative prostitution.