In Nicaragua in the 1970’s, a new language emerged due to a social phenomenon: deaf schools for the first time were opened, and a rough, basic sign language developed. By the time a second generation of kids went through the schools, the language was more complete and capable of varied, subtle communication. But there’s a curiosity when comparing the two generations of signers.
The first generation failed a few tests. For example, former students of all ages were told a story about a big brother who is playing with a train and puts it under the bed before he leaves the room, telling the younger brother not to touch it. Then the younger brother, while alone, grabs the train and puts it inside a toy box. The former students were then asked will the older brother look under the bed or in the toy box for the train when he comes back? The answer seems obvious, but the vast majority of the first generation signers got the question wrong while nearly every newer generation signer, including the young kids, got it correct. The adults who only had a basic language structure could not perform the same “thinking-about-thinking” tasks that the others could. Language doesn’t just describe the world we inhabit; it shapes the way we think and thus changes the world.
There is a language to every area of life, basketball included. We talk in “stats” because that’s how we can conceptualize the game so we can communicate with others: we deconstruct the league and use its parts to represent the whole. Points per game is a way to describe scoring prowess. Rebounding and block numbers represent big men. Assists are a marker of unselfishness. But our stats don’t cover everything, and much of the game is hiding in the shadows of the unnamed.
The most impressive figure in the world of NBA stats is arguably Wilt Chamberlain, the man who holds a plethora of NBA records that will likely never be broken without a drastic change in the league. But he was a stats god partly because he knew about the stats. It’s a quantum-like problem of observation: the existence of things like points and assists, and the fact that everybody could track them, meant that Wilt in turn tweaked his playing style to acquire more of those stats.
Famously, Wilt decided to lead the league in assists, and after a couple of years he did it. Virtually every season assist leader in NBA history has been a point guard or a combo guard with the possible exception of big point guards who didn’t have a clearly defined position — Magic Johnson and Oscar Robertson. Wilt didn’t lead the league in assists per game — he was third one year and second the next — but he led the league in total assists, and it was a seismic shift in his playing style. It was a deliberate choice too, as the observation of the assist changed the way he played basketball.
"“Wilt is very goal-oriented, and under Alex (Hannum) he wanted to win a title and become the first center to lead the league in assists. He liked to pass to Hal Greer or myself, because we just caught it and shot it. Chet Walker usually caught the ball, took a dribble or two and then shot it — no assist for Wilt (under the assist rules of that time). So Wilt preferred to give the ball to us.” — Billy Cunningham“He said in training camp that he wanted to lead the league in assists. He thought that would be cool. Of course, we all thought that would be cool too. But he didn’t want us to run. He wouldn’t throw outlet passes off rebounds. Only Billy or Chet were allowed to run out and score on the fastbreak if they got long rebounds.“Wilt wanted to be involved in every half-court play, so he stood there in the middle and all of us would run around him and he tried to pile up his assists. You’ve got to remember that assists were kept much more strictly back then. There was none of this stuff like today where you can take three dribbles and a head-fake and it counts. You got assists if you caught the pass and made the shot. So that meant Wilt would only pass it to guys who could catch and shoot — Luke, Billy sometimes, Wali, Hal and me. In my case, he’d try to get me to just go backdoor for a layup, because he didn’t trust me to do much else. And he’d never pass it to Chet Walker, because Chet always had to be pump-faking or use a dribble and take away the assist.” — Matt Goukas"
This phenomenon happened with other stats Wilt chased too, most notably points. And it’s happened to a smaller degree with other players. There’s the infamous and all-too-common triple-double chase where the game of basketball is tossed aside on a few possessions so a player can achieve an arbitrary milestone. Players who chase the stats we pay attention to can unfairly increase their perceived value because stats are easier to read than the other nuanced facets of the game.
Players aren’t the only ones who are influenced by stats. The audience itself, and all the writers and other media members, are probably more entranced by the numbers. Arguments for various awards begin with things like points per game and blocks per game, and players are noticed quickly with a standout performance in a keystone stat. Most die-hard NBA fans know this, of course, but it goes deeper.
People underestimate their blind-spots and how little of the world they understand. We can all do some meta-analysis and discuss which players are overrated by per game stats, but that’s only the surface. Imagine an NBA that grew up differently and some stats were tracked while others weren’t — the NBA was actually behind in officially collecting and disseminating statistics when the ABA made a few innovations, so this isn’t a stretch. Maybe the league wouldn’t track assists, which are subjective anyway, and instead screens would be tracked. And on defense, all steals would be credited to the team, not the player, while blown rotations and failures to contest shots would be in the box score instead. How would the league change? How would we view the best players and defenders?
Assist darlings would quite possibly be thought of as lesser players. It’d be more apparent with guys whose primary attribute is a high assist rate, but a few legends would be thought of differently. The NBA narrative about guys like John Stockton, Rajon Rondo, and Mark Jackson would change, for example, and we’d view a good point guard in other, nuanced ways, like setting up an offense beyond a fancy pass to a made basket, and perhaps we’d be more okay with scoring point guards because we wouldn’t have that defining stat dominating the conversation. The whole idea of what a point guard should do would shift because the discussion would have different language.
If screens had been tracked for decades, there’d be more focus on off-ball actions and less on the ballhandler. Right now the paradigm is concentrated on the importance of who has the ball, but with a few changes in which stats we choose to follow and what we discuss, the ballhandler would be more of an extension of the entire team and we’d set the primary value on how the other players move, get open, and create for others. If you count it, track it, and have discussed it for decades, more people will care and notice.
Defense is another beast entirely. We’re still behind in how we discuss and understand that end of the court. Part of the problem is that we track the wrong things. Defensive rebounds are important, but it’s a team-controlled and role-oriented activity where many of the rebounds are easy to grab and thus easily replaceable. Blocks are one small slice in how players can contest or prevent shots — it’s a mostly blind approach. Steals are valuable, but you can’t defend by only gambling. It’s, again, a mostly blind approach to studying the game. If we focused on defensive fundamentals like blown rotations, we could have an alternative history of the NBA’s best defenders. Maybe it would be more like baseball where it was (and still is to a large degree) all about error prevention.
We actually have been gifted new stats and they’re catching on with wider audiences. The rim protection stats, for instance, have been very popular and influential. Roy Hibbert was a beneficiary, as he was the first paint defense king when SportVU was fully armed. He was most likely viewed as a more valuable player because of the stat, and it changed how we thought of him, his team, and his contract. We would have noticed his good defense without the aid of SportVU, but it’s the economy of the language and the availability of the stat that led to the widespread acclaim of his interior defense. That’s the real reason stats are so insidiously influential — they make the underlying subject easier to talk about.
Our language influences our thinking, and in the NBA this corresponds with stats and other widely used terms. This is why scouts and coaches can have so many disagreements with other people — with a different set of vocabulary, they’re thinking about the game in a truly different way. It’s not just about how we summarize or discuss the league. Those words and stats inform how we view and perceive the game at a fundamental level that we can’t completely understand. With a new generation of statistics and information at our disposal, we’ll know more about the game than ever before, but we have to take a step back and ask, what have we been missing all these years?