Interesting read:
https://theundefeated.com/features/mission-impossible-african-americans-analytics/
"Let’s take the Golden State Warriors locker room, for example. I thought the complete stiff-arming of the statistical revolution might very well be generational. Old black folks don’t, but younger black folks might.
Wrong.
I asked Draymond Green, the Warriors star whose new-age game is constantly being defined statistically, if he engages in any advanced analytics conversation either professionally or personally. His answer was emphatic.
“No. Neither. Professionally, I play completely off of feel. I hear people discussing my game in terms of all these advanced numbers. I have no part of it,” Green said. “Even paying attention to it, from a playing standpoint, would make me robotic and undermine my game. I’m supposed to step back behind the line in real time to avoid taking a ‘bad two’? That’s thinking way too much. I don’t get the fascination at all.”
Green’s teammate Shaun Livingston finds a professional application, but analytics don’t have any play in his vast life as a sports fan.
“I use it as a scouting tool,” he said after a recent Warriors playoff game. “I want to know, defensively, someone’s 3-point shooting tendencies or whether a guy is a bad free throw shooter so that I know when exactly I want to foul him. I use them as an advanced scouting report. When I played for Mike Dunleavy, he was great with the scouting report … So was Erik Spoelstra … and those things were an important part.
(None of these things are new. )
“But in terms of conversations among [black people]? No. Never. Our conversations seem to go the other way, away from data and more toward intangible things. Like impact. There are too many areas where the numbers don’t assess the impact. We tend to talk about sports in those ways. ‘Look at his energy … That guy has skills but he’s soft! … He’s a big game player.’
“I think the analytics are really overrated when it comes to putting a team together. What statistical analysis is going to tell you whether a guy is a good teammate, whether he can lead, whether he has his teammate’s back? Don’t you have to see and figure that stuff out independent of any numbers?”
Later
"If the larger sports world is moving in the direction of analytics and we aren’t, isn’t that dangerous? Are we then talking about a dearth of black professionals in the talent pool being scoured by the white, analytics-driven executives who run teams, leagues and networks?
Is it a coincidence that Nate McMillan, an old-school, pre-analytics player/coach, who was handpicked by old-school, pre-analytics player/coach Larry Bird in Indiana, is the only black coach hired this offseason?
One person who has a unique view of this all is ESPN’s broadcast analyst Amin Elhassan, the Sudanese-born former video coordinator, former scouting coordinator, former assistant director of basketball operations (under Steve Kerr when he was general manager with the Phoenix Suns), who studied engineering at Georgia Tech. All this is to say that Elhassan is a black man who knows — even lives — all forms of analytics. He says he worries that black people are either being excluded or excluding themselves.
“So many front offices are staffed by guys like me, who didn’t play the game, who didn’t come in through the coaching ranks … Don’t tell me that there are no black people who are good at math. There are black people who expert at qualitative analysis,” Elhassan said. “I worry that it becomes a way to exclude. Don’t tell me there aren’t any black people on Wall Street who are passionate about basketball. These people exist. Wall Streeters, people with qualitative analysis backgrounds. I know them. I went to school with them. I just don’t believe that one ethnicity is more predisposed to this than another. You realize, of course, that this is the new gateway into the game … into sports?”
For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new “Old Boy Network” of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can’t simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that’s reserved for the few?
Well, this organization is strong on advanced analytics and, well, you know … a lot of people just don’t share our organizational philosophy!"
Finally
"My friend Neville Waters, a multiple sports fanatic with an MBA from Georgetown, shook his head when the name Dwight Howard was mentioned. “Teams are going to look at Dwight Howard,” he said, “and through advanced analytics mostly determine they want to give him tens of millions of dollars even though there’s apparently no advanced metric that tells you what the results prove … He’s not a good teammate and is a complete risk to sign …”
https://theundefeated.com/features/mission-impossible-african-americans-analytics/
"Let’s take the Golden State Warriors locker room, for example. I thought the complete stiff-arming of the statistical revolution might very well be generational. Old black folks don’t, but younger black folks might.
Wrong.
I asked Draymond Green, the Warriors star whose new-age game is constantly being defined statistically, if he engages in any advanced analytics conversation either professionally or personally. His answer was emphatic.
“No. Neither. Professionally, I play completely off of feel. I hear people discussing my game in terms of all these advanced numbers. I have no part of it,” Green said. “Even paying attention to it, from a playing standpoint, would make me robotic and undermine my game. I’m supposed to step back behind the line in real time to avoid taking a ‘bad two’? That’s thinking way too much. I don’t get the fascination at all.”
Green’s teammate Shaun Livingston finds a professional application, but analytics don’t have any play in his vast life as a sports fan.
“I use it as a scouting tool,” he said after a recent Warriors playoff game. “I want to know, defensively, someone’s 3-point shooting tendencies or whether a guy is a bad free throw shooter so that I know when exactly I want to foul him. I use them as an advanced scouting report. When I played for Mike Dunleavy, he was great with the scouting report … So was Erik Spoelstra … and those things were an important part.
(None of these things are new. )
“But in terms of conversations among [black people]? No. Never. Our conversations seem to go the other way, away from data and more toward intangible things. Like impact. There are too many areas where the numbers don’t assess the impact. We tend to talk about sports in those ways. ‘Look at his energy … That guy has skills but he’s soft! … He’s a big game player.’
“I think the analytics are really overrated when it comes to putting a team together. What statistical analysis is going to tell you whether a guy is a good teammate, whether he can lead, whether he has his teammate’s back? Don’t you have to see and figure that stuff out independent of any numbers?”
Later
"If the larger sports world is moving in the direction of analytics and we aren’t, isn’t that dangerous? Are we then talking about a dearth of black professionals in the talent pool being scoured by the white, analytics-driven executives who run teams, leagues and networks?
Is it a coincidence that Nate McMillan, an old-school, pre-analytics player/coach, who was handpicked by old-school, pre-analytics player/coach Larry Bird in Indiana, is the only black coach hired this offseason?
One person who has a unique view of this all is ESPN’s broadcast analyst Amin Elhassan, the Sudanese-born former video coordinator, former scouting coordinator, former assistant director of basketball operations (under Steve Kerr when he was general manager with the Phoenix Suns), who studied engineering at Georgia Tech. All this is to say that Elhassan is a black man who knows — even lives — all forms of analytics. He says he worries that black people are either being excluded or excluding themselves.
“So many front offices are staffed by guys like me, who didn’t play the game, who didn’t come in through the coaching ranks … Don’t tell me that there are no black people who are good at math. There are black people who expert at qualitative analysis,” Elhassan said. “I worry that it becomes a way to exclude. Don’t tell me there aren’t any black people on Wall Street who are passionate about basketball. These people exist. Wall Streeters, people with qualitative analysis backgrounds. I know them. I went to school with them. I just don’t believe that one ethnicity is more predisposed to this than another. You realize, of course, that this is the new gateway into the game … into sports?”
For more than a few moments I felt guilty as hell for hating the intrusion of advanced analytics as much as I generally do. Because even though the reliance on this stuff seems to be a new safe haven for a new “Old Boy Network” of Ivy Leaguers who can hire each other and justify passing on people not given to their analytic philosophies, an entire group of people can’t simply refuse to participate in something as important as this phenomenon. The cynical me can easily make the argument this is a new path to exclusion, intentional or not. Or is it creating an entirely new way of approaching sports that’s reserved for the few?
Well, this organization is strong on advanced analytics and, well, you know … a lot of people just don’t share our organizational philosophy!"
Finally
"My friend Neville Waters, a multiple sports fanatic with an MBA from Georgetown, shook his head when the name Dwight Howard was mentioned. “Teams are going to look at Dwight Howard,” he said, “and through advanced analytics mostly determine they want to give him tens of millions of dollars even though there’s apparently no advanced metric that tells you what the results prove … He’s not a good teammate and is a complete risk to sign …”
