Basketball is getting like baseball, everyone is either a statistician... or a capologist, or both... does anyone else find it exhausting?
The reason baseball was swept up in such a dramatic turn towards statistics (sabermetrics) is because, more than any other major North American sport, baseball can be broken down to individual situations. A player steps up to the batters box and it's really just him in control of what happens next. Same thing happens in fielding (where everyone has their own area of the field and expectations to go along with it). Sure you can never completely eliminate contextual factors (eg: quality of the pitcher, the ballpark, etc.). But it impacts a player's stats far less. Basketball doesn't have that same characteristic, and I wish a lot of these statistic-minded analysts would recognize that more often. On the whole though, the increase in statistical analysis in basketball has been a good thing. It's allowed us to confidently challenge peoples' personal observations on the game, and its the reason why a guy like Stephen A. Smith is no longer able to get a job scouting/analyzing.
