Barkley wasn’t just wrong about advanced statistics. Speaking weeks before the ninth-annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (which kicks off tomorrow), he seemed to be fighting a rearguard action. “The war’s over,” CBSSports.com’s Matt Moore
declared. “The nerds make the decisions whether Barkley likes it or not.” Keith Olbermann
concurred: “Most of the dinosaurs like Chuck don’t even realize the war is over … ”
To which I’d ask: What war is that? The war that pitted writer versus writer, and GM versus GM, to prove once and for all that advanced stats are valuable? Sure. That war — let’s call it Moneyball I — is over.
But Barkley was firing a shot in a second war. Let’s call it Moneyball II. This clash doesn’t pit a blogger versus a newspaperman in a debate over the value of PER. It pits media versus athletes in a battle over who gets to tell the story of basketball
. “I viewed Charles Barkley’s comments as being completely about media criticism, not about how a team is run,” said Craig Calcaterra, who blogs at HardballTalk. “If Barkley were still playing and a coach came to him and said, ‘Here’s something we discovered in our analytics department,’ I’m sure he’d be receptive to it. But he doesn’t want to hear someone in the media second-guessing his authority about basketball.”
Moneyball II is an older war. It’s about who really owns the game. It’s about a group of people whose jobs by their very nature threaten another group of people. You may know this war by another name. It’s called sportswriting.
