An Open Letter to Charles Barkley

Oct 30, 2014; Cleveland, OH, USA; Former NBA player and current television personality Charles Barkley walks off the court after watching the New York Knicks defeat the Cleveland Cavaliers 95-90 at Quicken Loans Arena. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Yo. Chuck. My man. My dude. I was just chillin last night, messin’ with my spreadsheets and watching the big TNT game, you know how it is, when all of a sudden you come out screaming about Daryl Morey. Next thing I know, you’re saying all kinds of stuff about why analytics are bad.

Ok, so, I’m not even going to address the fact that, like, 90% of that was just factually incorrect (the Spurs are huge on analytics, as is every team that’s gone to the Finals in the last four seasons, if “good teams” don’t allow 118 points only Memphis and Miami are good teams, Chandler Parsons was picked in the draft because the team had analytics, etc), but I wanna talk about why you shouldn’t be so afraid of analytics. ‘Cause I actually think this is kind of important, and I’d rather it if you didn’t go on TV saying this kind of thing to several million people again, if I can help it.

So, here’s the thing: I get it. I mean, in fairness, you say analytics guys are nerds who can’t play basketball, and I’m pretty sure you got that part right, or at least you nailed it on the head for me[1. Though I’ve certainly never had a problem with the ladies, HEY-O. I’m pretty sure like 3/4 of Nylon Calculus is also happily married with kids, so maybe the “can’t get girls” joke missed the mark a bit]. I’m sure most of my co-writers here would attest to that too. We’re nerdy as hell, and while all of us play basketball all the time and some might be good none of us are even close to being D-League caliber, let alone NBA. And I get that once upon a time athletes had their corner and nerds had their corner and we stayed in our little corners and didn’t bother each other, the occasional aggressive wedgie excepted. That kind of separation of nerds and athletes hasn’t been true in a long time though. It wasn’t even true anymore when I was in high school, and that’s a hell of a feat.

But I understand, honestly, that in your day athletes did their thing and nerds did their thing largely so that they didn’t have to do the other one. Nerds became nerds so they didn’t have to get hit by the dodgeballs so to speak. Athletes avoided the classroom so they didn’t have to do math.

So I get how it can feel threatening that all of a sudden the nerds are coming in and doing athlete stuff, and making you worry that you might have to do the nerd stuff. But look, the nerds aren’t — maybe Shane Battier excepted — actually playing basketball yet, so you’re good. Chill. Enjoy that the nerds are doing the hard stuff for you. We’re nice that way.

And I also know that this stuff is not really set up for you to like it. In America, if you so much as say the word “math” people just start SCREAMING IN ANGER. It’s like a reflex test, where if when they hit your knee with a hammer and you kick it means you have working nerves, but instead if someones say math and immediately respond “GET THAT F*@%ING CALCULATOR OUT OF MY FACE YOU USELESS NERD” it means you’re American[2. You probably think I’m joking about this but I’ve gotten that exact response, verbatim, on three different instances to stuff I’ve written. I’ve gotten responses that are in the same spirit far more often than that.]. So I get how suddenly coming in and saying, “I want you to listen to some basketball math!” makes some irrationally angry.

And then how we’ve framed it hasn’t done a lot of good. If when we say the word “math” people literally start shouting, throwing the words “advanced” next to stats and saying “analytics” instead of, like, “division” which is usually all we’re doing, we probably shouldn’t be shocked when people get really irrationally upset. That’s our bad, maybe we should have thought that one through.

But, like, Chuckmeister…Chuckster…Chuckerino, are you really telling me you can’t deal with some basic division? Like, man, just using points per possession instead of points per game would have made your rant way more coherent, and that’s literally just dividing points by another number. It’s not a secret or anything, it’s just like “if I want to split up points into this many groups of possessions how many pieces will be in each one.” It’s accelerated counting. PER — which most of us stat guys don’t like either — is largely just adding stuff that’s been divided all together. Regular game stats are just counting, so I get that it’s less complicated, but we’re talking some 4th, 5th grade math here. I’d be willing to bet you can figure that out.

And even if you don’t wanna have to figure out the division, we know this stuff works, so you’re welcome to ignore it, but you can’t really disparage it. I mean, the division works because it’s freaking division and if you’re not convinced at this point that division is a thing that can be applied to the world to learn more about it then I guess I should just stop here.

But we also know it works because the analytics teams are better than the non-analytics teams by a lot this year. Like, Atlanta is the most analytics-saavy team in the East, and they’re the best by a lot. The Raptors are really darn analytics heavy too, and they’re second. Hell, every single damn playoff team in the West is analytics-heavy except maybe the Clippers, and the non-playoff teams are almost exclusively not analytics friendly (OKC, Utah, and Sacramento excepted). I mean, the Kings are probably the only example of a team where analytics have gotten them nowhere, and they’re a mess for other reasons.

But here’s the rub Chuck. I say all this because I know this issue is actually, for all the apparent stupidity, pretty complicated. It’s rooted in how we’ve grown to think of math and science as a country and as segmented social groups, how the issue is framed as exclusionary or excessively complicated, and it’s inextricable from the fact that we’re talking about basketball, which makes it hard to take seriously.

But Charles, I want you to take this seriously, because this is bigger than basketball. We’ve got an entire country of kids who look up to you and listen to you, who value your opinion. who hear you say this stuff and then come into my classroom the next day and say stuff like, “Charles Barkley doesn’t think math matters, why should I?”

And you may think that that isn’t what you’re arguing, but it turns out it is. Because math is math, and if it’s not applicable to basketball, what is it applicable to? Basketball is just another thing, another part of life we can learn about and we can use math to learn about, and it turns out when you and your friends and people all over the TV disparage the use of analytics and whatever else you alienate another kid from my ability to explain why he should learn algebra, and maybe do something really freaking cool like build a freaking rocket.

We’ve accidentally built a culture where it’s ok to be afraid of and angry about math and science and it’s getting dangerous fast. I’m not asking you to become a statistician, Chuck, and I’m not even asking you to like the fact that us nerds have encroached on your ground. You need a haven, and I get that[3. Though, you know, your gambling returns might get a lot better if you started keeping us around.].

All I’m asking is that you stop proudly showing off your fears, because I’ve got kids to teach who don’t need that holding them back.

Best,

Hal