What do Charles Barkley, Mikhail Prokhorov, and Phil Jackson have in common? “Wait,” you say. “Charles is a #1 FEAR, while Prokhorov and Jackson are #16 BCILs. What could they possibly have in common?” Admittedly, not much, though what all three of these men do have in common is that they are not big fans of basketball analytics, the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics “I think analytics are becoming more and more refined throughout the league,” said Prokhorov recently during a question and answer session. “But I am not convinced you can calculate your way to victory. I do believe there are intangibles that no stat sheet will show you.”
Barkley, Prokhorov’s opposite Type, hasn’t taken as friendly an approach, stating that “analytics is crap” and that proponents of analytics are “a bunch of guys who ain’t never played the game [and] they never got the girls in high school… Analytics don’t work at all. It’s just some crap that people who were really smart made up to try to get in the game because they had no talent.”