I'll read the article in a sec, but I wanted to get this idea down before I do, to see if I touch on anything in it by accident.
I was thinking about analytics and how, depending on how they're implemented, they can be unintentionally (or intentionally) racist, sexist, etc. Social media keyword analytics is a good example; the analytics engines use contextual clues in the text of tweets and blog posts to make a judgment call on if your brand is being mentioned favorably, neutrally, or negatively. But language is used very differently between different groups of people.
If the analytics team making up the rules of judgment are a bunch of 30-something white men, are they going to accurately count Black Twitter's language usage, or Tumblr's more female/feminist leanings? Can the algorithms detect ironic usage of negative language that's sometimes used in marketing? The ownership of the business logic is very important for accurate results.
Anyway, yeah... like all things built by humans, analytics is only as unbiased as humanity is.
EDIT: I've read the article. Wilbon is, indeed, a tool.
Expecting players to live and breathe analytics is asinine. Professional sports is not a white collar job. It's a very well-paid blue collar job. I don't expect factory workers at an automotive plant to understand how to use CAD to design a car. I do expect them to know their job, whether its by instinct or by rote memorization or by in-depth knowledge of the whys for that one part of the car they're building. All three methods bring success in different ways and different levels.
Clyde Drexler is an awful coach because he played entirely on instinct, using athleticism to win. None of that translates well to a teaching/white collar job like coaching. But Glenn Rivers (as much as I hate him) played more with his brain than his body. He can teach people, because he knows the process of learning.
Even disregarding the very important fact that most of the athletes have no experience learning statistics and discrete mathematics, the sheer number of years in college gives us a stratification of players within sports. Dame and CJ both show a deep understanding of how the game is played, and why things happen on the court. They will be good at the white collar management/coaching aspects of the job later.
It's no surprise that CJ drops advanced stats in his interviews; he understands why they're useful. Not because he's "less black" or whatever Wilbon's on about, but because he doesn't purely succeed on instinct. He breaks players down as much with his brain as with his crossover.
This is a black/white thing insofar as it is an education opportunity thing. Getting mad at athletes for not accepting advanced nerd stats is useless because it's just blaming someone for opportunities they weren't necessarily given. And that's bullshit.
