Former Coach Larry Brown Says Analytic Stats Don’t Work In NBA
By Bryan Rose
Analytics in professional sports has become all the rage. From Major League Baseball to the National Basketball Association, teams are hiring “stat geeks” and putting them in prominent positions within their respective franchises – many of those said franchises restructuring their philosophies and beliefs around stat based results.
Running a professional sports franchise with statistics as the main component to success might have become famous thanks to the Oakland Athletics and “Moneyball”, but it’s been around for quite some time (to a lesser extent) despite its recent surge in popularity.
However, there are some old school minds who think its garbage, say like, Hall of Fame basketball mind Larry Brown.
The former player and 2001 NBA Coach of the Year sat down with Glen Macnow recently and decided to give his thoughts on analytic based stats, stopping short of calling them worthless and pointless – at least in the NBA:
"“NBA isn’t MLB. At the end of the day, this analytic stuff doesn’t work in basketball. I look at players and how they share the ball. I don’t know how that works on a graph or at Harvard Business School. This is not a sport about stats. It’s a sports about making teammates better and making the effort to play defense.”"
Brown might have a point considering he’s won over 2000 NBA games as a head coach.
Then again, he’s the same guy who refused to bench Larry Hughes sooooo…..