The Undefeated debuts

Boring as an oxen's ass. And, at least thus far, symptomatic of the kind of annoying social engineering/choir preaching the site would like to do on the front end so as to establish a voice that, if it wants to push the conversation forward, it may have to eventually abandon to get where it wants to go.

It'll take this site time - as it takes a lot of sites that pride themselves on a new or original perspective - to get past all the deontological and epistemological hand-wringing and just get on with writing and reporting more essential stories. Once the site has established its platform of thinking rules, then we'll see what it is and isn't.

Readers are almost always right there with us in terms of what we're thinking. Blogs have proven that shit; they've stripped bare the idea that we're as original as we imagine. Most people do not believe the sports-myth bullshit. Here's the thing: Most of the media does not, either. Many of the athletes don't, either. But most of the media's gotta put something on the Internet, or something on the TV or something in the newspaper, and we don't all have the time, funding or inclination to be longform essay snowflakes or culture blog thinkertons, so, sometimes, you get grilled cheese for dinner instead of the lobster mac-and-cheese with truffle-butter shoestring fries.

So it goes.

The real myth that the media could be profound and perfect on a nightly basis, or that we could sit there and consider, as J.A. Adande would have us do, the weight of history on language as we decide whether to change two words in a quote or write a paragraph explaining the quote so that it retains cultural and linguistic authenticity.

 

Some nice 10-cent words you pulled out there.

For shits and giggles, what do you think of the white version?

MacGregor: Has sports ever been greater? Not according to descriptions

 

Not sure what kind of -ological this falls under, but don't expect to talk analytics in the barbershop.

Mission Impossible: African-Americans & analytics

“No. Neither. Professionally, I play completely off of feel. I hear people discussing my game in terms of all these advanced numbers. I have no part of it,” Green said. “Even paying attention to it, from a playing standpoint, would make me robotic and undermine my game. I’m supposed to step back behind the line in real time to avoid taking a ‘bad two’? That’s thinking way too much. I don’t get the fascination at all.”

Green’s teammate Shaun Livingston finds a professional application, but analytics don’t have any play in his vast life as a sports fan.

“I use it as a scouting tool,” he said after a recent Warriors playoff game. “I want to know, defensively, someone’s 3-point shooting tendencies or whether a guy is a bad free throw shooter so that I know when exactly I want to foul him. I use them as an advanced scouting report. When I played for Mike Dunleavy, he was great with the scouting report … So was Erik Spoelstra … and those things were an important part.

“But in terms of conversations among [black people]? No. Never. Our conversations seem to go the other way, away from data and more toward intangible things. Like impact. There are too many areas where the numbers don’t assess the impact. We tend to talk about sports in those ways. ‘Look at his energy … That guy has skills but he’s soft! … He’s a big game player.’

 

Where's MacGregor overwriting these days?

 

It's only overwriting if you think it is. I generally like Jeff's stuffs.

He's at the Smithsonian Mag.

Just wrote this: The Inside Story of Christo's Floating Piers | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian

 

Yup, that's usually how opinions work

 

That was, groan. There were two segments in particular that seemed to tweak me.

"It’s like calculating points per 100 possessions, a very popular go-to stat in NBA circles. Why is that more important than points per 48 minutes, which is the actual time in which an NBA game is played?"

Wilbon has covered the NBA forever and ever. Some teams play faster, others play slower. But it is possible for a fast team to play good defense or a slow team to play good offense. Dean Smith realized this decades ago, it's not that hard. And...

“Teams are going to look at Dwight Howard,” he said, “and through advanced analytics mostly determine they want to give him tens of millions of dollars even though there’s apparently no advanced metric that tells you what the results prove … He’s not a good teammate and is a complete risk to sign …”

This isn't really true. No one is saying, "Hold on, this advanced number says he's been great." He'll get that money because A. The salary cap is going up at such a rate, tens of millions ain't that much, and B. At least one asshole will always chase a big name, even if it's fading. It's how Wilbon's buddy Magic ended up a Laker, and we didn't have the devil of advanced numbers to lead us astray. (FWIW, tracking, if you want to call that analytics, provides insight into one notable element of him being a bad teammate, and stats can chart a likely decline of a 13th-year center on the wrong side of 30)

 

You guys are all racists.

 

In the case of Howard, that's exactly how he ended up in Houston -- Daryl Morey ignored everything about basketball because his formulas told him Howard would be a monster.

 

Please. I like this song.

 

They should talk to Jeremy Lin. I bet he loves analytics.

 

This was the intellectual/musical version of The Undefeated 25 years ago. If ever Merida's crew was going to dissect the intersection of this, that, and the other, it should be What became of this movement 25 years ago?

Or was it just a song, for shits and giggles, and money?

"I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan and I shouldn't have to run from a black man"