In recent days, former Milwaukee Bucks guard Eric Bledsoe and ESPN analyst Dick Vitale scoffed at the ever-increasing attention given basketball statistics, analytics and numbers.
"I hate it ...," Bledsoe told NBA.com. "Somehow it can show that an average player can be better than a superstar player in some aspects, and that don't mean nothing ... . You're going to put your best five on the court, analytics or not."
Vitale bemoaned the flood of numbers he receives to supposedly help him prepare for telecasts.
"It takes away from the beauty of the game ...," he said. "It's becoming crazy."
Now, for a shock: such sentiments do not offend Ken Pomeroy, a modern-day Pythagoras with a website (kenpom.com) that showcases basketball addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
"I can actually sympathize with Eric and Dick on some level," Pomeroy said. "Sometimes I hear numbers that are used, and I feel like they're not terribly meaningful. They sound cool. But they don't really add anything to a broadcast or try to make a point.
"You can definitely overdo it with the numbers, and go to a place that doesn't make a lot of sense."
Pomeroy questioning the attention paid to numbers is like Leonardo di Vinci dismissing Renaissance art.
Yet Pomeroy, who is acknowledged as a top college basketball analyst, finds the growing attention to basketball numbers a bit much. For instance, take plus-minus ... puh-leeze.
"I cringe every time I hear people talk plus-minus," Pomeroy said.
Plus-minus supposedly shows how a player's performance helps or hurts his team's chances of winning. But, of course, much depends on what teammates are on the floor with you.
"You put me on the floor with LeBron (James) a few minutes, and my plus-minus is probably going to look pretty good," Pomeroy said. "That doesn't mean I'm a good basketball player."
Pomeroy said he found greater value in such statistics as offensive and defensive efficiency, percentage of rebounds grabbed and percentage of field goals that are three-pointers.
Former Kentucky All-American Kevin Grevey, who is now a scout for the Los Angeles Lakers, said numerical analysis has its place.
Lakers coach Luke Walton meets each morning with the team's analytics expert, Grevey said. Each week the Lakers' analytics staff conducts mock drafts based on numbers.
But the Lakers still have scouts like Grevey watching and evaluating college players.
"What I like to see, and what analytics doesn't tell you, is a guy's heart," Grevey said. "His love for the game. His passion to play. His willingness to compete. His I.Q. as a player. Is he a happy player? Is he a good teammate? Is he engaged?"
Del Harris, a longtime NBA coach, said that analytics are a poor tool for evaluating high school or college players. There are too few games played to get a good sense of a player through numbers, he said. Plus, the players can play against wildly different levels of competition.
Harris also said basketball is not the best sport to try to reduce to a mathematical formula.
"Stat numbers in football and baseball are better indicators because it's a stop-start game in both those sports," Harris said. "Basketball is a fluid dynamic-type game where players are never in the same position at any time during the game. That is you'd never have 10 players in the same geometric position twice in the same game. It's like a snowflake.
"And decision-making becomes so much more important in basketball than it does in the other sports. Not that it doesn't matter for a quarterback or a pitcher or catcher or hitter. But basketball is a constant decision-making process. And to this point there's no way to put a metric on that."
Still, more and more analysts pull out their slide rules and try. Pomeroy offered a word of caution: the science of numbers and the artistry of sports sometimes do not mix.
"Certainly with basketball, that is true ...," Pomeroy said. "That's one thing about people who dive into basketball stats. You sort of have to have that understanding, or you're occasionally going to sound like a fool."
