As a new NBA season approaches, let's not be scolds. Instead, let's appreciate the beautiful game we all love.
Initiation to sports fandom is built on innocence. We embrace a sport because it stirs something in us. It fills some need. We root for specific teams or players because of connections, some obvious (like geography) and some more vague. Often we trace our allegiances back to our youth, before we had any sense of sports' greater meaning in the cultures of places and communities. We just liked watching the games.
Things change. You find out about sports' dark underbelly. You learn about the (often absurd) economics. You find out your sporting heroes are above all human, and you find out that humans can be awful. In today's world, sports innocence and sophisticated fandom are mutually exclusive. You can't know things without knowing things.
But it seems as though all the increased fan sophistication has stripped more than innocence from a wide swath of the basketball community. It's hurt the fandom's ability to actually enjoy the sport consistently.
A column on the NBA.10/27: Kawhi Leonard should hold out for max10/20: Warriors perfect for the modern NBA10/17: Lakers might be worst team in NBA*10/13: How a hater came to love Kobe10/12: It's Westbrook's time to shine10/8: Cap NBA team profits10/6: 3 consequences of the NBA's TV dealFans have never had better access to the games or information about the game itself. Fans have never been smarter about the economics of basketball, the analytics or how the sausage is made. All that knowledge comes with a price, it seems. So many fans who know something now think they know everything. It poisons the game.
Need proof? Hang out on the Internet during a Pistons game. Josh Smith is one of the most idiosyncratic, electric and captivating players in the NBA. All you'll hear is how inefficient he is, how he's a waste of talent, how dumb he is for taking jumpers, what a horrible mistake his contract was.
That'd be fine if only Detroiters were carping. Complaining about one's team is a tradition as old as sport itself. But it's all the neutral parties scolding Josh Smith for ... being Josh Smith. These folks learned a little bit about shooting efficiency, read (or wrote!) a few pieces citing Synergy and want to show how much they know about basketball. And so they spend valuable time scolding Josh Smith. How is that fun for anyone?
Too often, amazing, unbelievable moments in basketball are instantly boiled down to their hot take concentrates. When a high-pressure moment goes awry, why do we have to race to the book of percentages to explain what the coach or player should have done? Why can't we consider the moment as a moment instead of an avoidable mistake?
Using math helps us understand facets of the game. Our fault is in believing that our understanding of the math of basketball is total. It's not even close. Our fault is in believing that because we've made progress in sports analytics, we know everything. We don't.
As someone involved in popularizing analytic understanding and adoption among fans in the early days, I feel partially responsible for the burgeoning Basketball Scold industry. The problem is that we've over-corrected. In the nascent blog days of 2005 and 2006, we had to fight to get any attention for per-possession stats and the idea of plus-minus. Some of us picked fights with specific TV analysts, coaches and scribes.
And it paid off. ESPN is overflowing with brilliant analytic minds. NBA front offices are filled what we once termed "stat geeks." A data analysis conference in Boston in March is the new Las Vegas Summer League. And with Synergy, SportVU and advanced box scores everywhere, the evidence is overwhelming: We won.
Yet we've gone too far in many ways. We've dehumanized the sport, just like Daryl Morey has been accused of dehumanizing his roster. So little time is given to consideration of the art of basketball, the wondrous palette of playing style, the sport in broad strokes. Everything is percentages and cap numbers and scalding commentary on the failures of this player, this play, that coach, that team. Every opinion carries with it a barely hidden supporting clause that reads "I am smarter than these players, coaches and GMs."
I've been guilty of this -- I owe at least a portion of my career to bashing David Kahn. (I still think there's a case for the avocado.) So consider this a call to action for myself: I hereby re-embrace basketball as something to appreciate as competitive art, not as an Excel spreadsheet and amateur debate society. I will use data and video and I will have opinions, but that's not everything there is to the sport. When Josh Smith happens, I might groan and I might snark and I will most certainly laugh, but I will not scold. There is joy in this sport, and I will seek it out and embrace it.
Because this is basketball, not a juco budget management class or intro to stats or an 82-game test of my sports knowledge. This should be fun, so dammit let's make it fun again.
Join me if you like. I'll be over there giggling at J.R. Smith, gawking at DeMarcus Cousins and loving every second of the Russell Westbrook Experience.