Much to my chagrin, this past weekend forced me to confront the parallel lives I've lived this term. On the one hand, I'm struggling to make it through a required statistics course to complete my government major. I am a self-declared qualitative thinker, and all those numbers, symbols and big numbers next to small symbols are almost enough to make me jump ship and reenlist in the sociology department. On the other hand, I'm a staff contributor at Clipper Blog, part of a group of ESPN-affiliated basketball blogs that ceaselessly promote the use of advanced statistics to measure performance. Needless to say, statistics make a lot of sense to me when I'm evaluating which five-man unit permutation produces the best results on the court together. The whole chi-squared business, not so much.
Last weekend, I attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, a union of stat geeks and academics mixing in a half-professional, half-social environment with bloggers, journalists and executives all hoping to absorb the most up-to-date evaluative metrics and cutting-edge technology. When Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey founded the conference in 2006, he was just a member of the Boston Celtics basketball operations staff and the conference's biggest problem was finding free lecture halls at MIT that weren't being used for card-counting practice.
The nerd invasion has upgraded venues to accommodate its growth in popularity, first to the Hynes Convention Center, then to the massive Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Morey, whose niche popularity landed him the nickname "Dork Elvis," has since become Houston's general manager and a scion of the advanced statistics community.
The conference's attractiveness is not limited exclusively to well-connected folks like yours truly. It has gained a popular following amongst college students who have experienced the power of academia and the scientific method in the classroom and see no reason why such practices cannot be applied to their favorite sports.
In past years, the discussion surrounding the conference's purpose was one of hope for the future that what "we" are doing will make an impact down the line and all those who watch or participate in sports will be better off for it. But with a proliferation in technologies that document every pass, shot and deflection on the court, as well as a sustained interest in advanced statistical analysis from the academic community, the new era arrived sooner than expected. A popular nugget of wisdom at the conference this year came from Upton Sinclair, who said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Most people are shocked at how fast the world changes and how quickly new developments become old developments until they aren't developments at all. As documented by renowned storytellers Michael Lewis and Aaron Sorkin, the transition to the "Moneyball" age won't be painless. Moreover, it shouldn't be. In order to get to the meat of a player's performance, you need to trim the fat. The industry titans who participated in the conference's featured panel discussions always circled back to this phenomenon. Consciously or not, they were resigned to the fact that implementing new technologies and methods for evaluating sports are disruptive to the status quo.
When I began writing for ClipperBlog, the most surprising aspect of the blogging community was the shared interest in improving the quality of basketball analysis. The approach struck a familiar chord with me because it so closely resembled the perspective of academics here at Dartmouth. I was first exposed to the potential of complex analysis through the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. Through the appropriation of a color-coded map of the United States, the Dartmouth Atlas presents the massive variations in health care delivery practices and results. It was this data, presented in an accessible, easily digestible format, that readily showed me the power of advanced statistical analysis.
On the coach ride back to Hanover, I recalled my freshman fall when I first saw the Atlas in all its glory. Then I thought about what a presentation on the nascent subject of basketball analysis might have looked like four years ago, and I couldn't help but smile.
