On the eve of the 2014 NBA All-Star weekend in New Orleans, a bit of research fell onto the doormat of basketball’s blogosphere.
“Databall,” an article by Grantland’s Kirk Goldsberry, explains a paper which proposes to institute a revolutionary new measurement known as EPV—short for Expected Point Value. The statistic seeks to quantify the scoring potential there is in each and every frame of gametime footage. One of the myriad goals of this invention is to make less opaque the series’ of little things done between the lines of the box score; well-set screens, proper spacing off of the ball, pump fakes… “Intangibles no more,” says the hyperbolic version. But, as of yet, such thinking hasn’t taken significant flight. The research has barely even scratched the surface. And for most, even the more established advanced metrics of recent years haven’t gained traction. Try asking someone outside of hardcore fans what PER is. The game played is still measured, by a long shot, in terms of more numerically distilled and viscerally obvious actions. There is no better indication of this than what’s about to take place in the NBA’s spotlight in Louisiana: a collective ooh-ing and aah-ing over isolated incidents of shooting, dunking and speed. But at what point does the analytics movement catch so far up to the culture of the NBA that such (so-called) tried and true displays of ability start to lose traction in the mainstream, or at least in the economy of the league? Probably not anytime soon. The analytics movement and the search for a more whole understanding of the art that is basketball will always be an uphill battle in a world that prioritizes headlines like “The Top 14 of 2014” over ones like “A Better Understanding of Team Defense.” Just like the armies of sociologists and scientists locked up in ivory towers, ineffectual on capitol hill, our newest warriors with the roundball under the microscope are not likely to overtake the resistance to their work. What resistance? That of tradition, of style and the id. Asking audiences to appreciate what they thought was invisible on the same pedestal as that which has been assaulting their associative, star-seeking senses forever is no small order. The dunk, the circus shot, the buzzer-beater and the block are set—almost no matter what—to continue dominating most languages of basketball. This is not to say one should disenjoy themselves this weekend. Only to include in their giddiness an awareness that’s what happening is something of a farce. Because in basketball, we’re still trying to figure out what skills really are.View this discussion from the forum.
