Why analytics/moneyball leads to more success but worse entertainment

[Bboystyle]

Y'all saying analytics ruined basketball are really missing those iso, poorly spaced brickfests from the early 00s that much. Y'all really prefer the league where a 20 point gap meant your team won 99% of the time over the era where a team went up 20 points damn near every game of a playoff series and lost all those games.

man stop. where's the proof that every team that was up 20+ in the playoffs loss 100% of the time?

 

[UpNext]

man stop. where's the proof that every team that was up 20+ in the playoffs loss 100% of the time?

I said "where a team went up 20 points damn near every game of a playoff series and lost all those games"


Did you not watch the Memphis/Minnesota series ?

 

[boskey]

What sports are least effected by this? Those are going to be the sports that grow in popularity in the future

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Y'all saying analytics ruined basketball are really missing those iso, poorly spaced brickfests from the early 00s that much. Y'all really prefer the league where a 20 point gap meant your team won 99% of the time over the era where a team went up 20 points damn near every game of a playoff series and lost all those games.

I didn't like that early '00s ball as much at all. But not every good team played iso, there were plenty of good squads (Blazers, Pacers, Nets, Kings) that had completely different games and still contended. There WAS too much iso. But as I pointed out earlier, the fix was easy (zone) and that combined with a long period with no expansion steadily improved the product.

Personally I don't think analytics "ruins" basketball. My statement at the beginning is merely that it's effective but reduces the entertainment. Nowhere near ruined.

What sports are least effected by this? Those are going to be the sports that grow in popularity in the future

I think football and soccer are less affected, because both of them have greater levels of unpredictability and complexity to lead to a score. The reason baseball and basketball are so affected by it are because scoring in both of those sports is more predictable and simplified. A baseball pitch has to come through a small window, the runner has to follow an exact path around the bases, a basketball has to fall into a small hoop that is always within shooting distance of the action and most 3pt shots are pretty similar. Whereas a football end zone or soccer goal is far larger, can be reached in a far more complex range of ways, and it often takes an long series of moves to even get in position to take a shot at the end zone/goal. Those layers of complexity will keep teams from becoming quite so uniform even if they're all using the same analytical programs.

Not a sport, but chess is actually being affected very dramatically by this as well. The problem is that every game has the exact same starting position. It's gotten to the point where ability to strategize and think of your feet is becoming less important than how well you guess the day before what starting moves your opponent will make and then memorize all the branched computer responses. Any player who tried to play at the highest level without computer preparation in this era would get smoked.

 

[Hersh]

brehs r arguing semantics . point is every team is using analytics.. and inching towards positionless ball.. despite every team having superstars that play different ways .

most teams rely in order .

1. superstar usage
2. analytics usage ( open 3 . bucket at rim. ft)

it's how every team combines these 2 aspects .

 

[ISO]

@Rhakim still waiting on you or anyone to explain how any of those teams I listed play alike

 

[Gil Scott-Heroin]

What sports are least effected by this? Those are going to be the sports that grow in popularity in the future

The problem with this is, the popularity of a sport is going to dictate how much money is invested in it, which means the more popular a sport is, the more likely it’s going to have number algorithms to maximise winning, in order to generate more revenue.

It’s funny to me how folks think this has affected popularity, when you take the NBA for instance, and it’s followed by more folks across the globe than ever before. It’s the reason why the salary cap keeps growing and growing; it’s the reason why the league is expanding its outreach to places that the average American would’ve never heard of, let alone be able to point out on a map.

The younger generation(s) only concept of basketball entertainment is based upon what has happened in this [analytics] era, because it’s the only one they’ve lived through, so how could they possibly have any point of reference of the past in order to lose interest in the first place?

 

[Gil Scott-Heroin]

Y'all saying analytics ruined basketball are really missing those iso, poorly spaced brickfests from the early 00s that much. Y'all really prefer the league where a 20 point gap meant your team won 99% of the time over the era where a team went up 20 points damn near every game of a playoff series and lost all those games.

You bring up a great point here, and I’m not surprised nobody could argue against it.

The course of an NBA game is more unpredictable than ever given the nature of the 3-pt and it’s variance, well, isn’t not knowing something typically more entertaining than knowing?

If you know how a film is going to play out after the 1st act, is that going to hold your attention the same as a film that has more twists and turns?

 

[mastermind]

I don't think the game has ever had a vast spectrum of different styles of play, at any one point.

Yes, of course, the shot approach we have now is probably to more of an extreme, but variety of play is still relatively the same.

An era always has its default based on whatever influences shaped it into become what it is, compiled with the depth of talent pool, officiating and the natural progression of the game. Keeping in theme with the link I posted in my previous post, nobody can say that the late 90s/early 2000s NBA had any great diversification of gameplay; expansion had an effect, along with the introduction of more perimeter based ISO/street ball, which resulted in slow-paced, low-efficient 1v1 contests. That was the theme of gameplay during that time, as you have today with the 3-pt shot, as you did back in the 70s where it revolved around post-play.

I especially think it's unfair too to typecast today's game as being homogeneous as if we don't have stars from basically every walk of basketball life:

Jokic
Bron
KD
Luka
Steph
Giannis
Tatum
Morant
Kyrie
Embiid
AD
Zion
Kawhi
Harden
DeRozan
Klay
LaMelo
Westbrook

While there's certainly some crossover there (as there is with any stars from any era), just look at how different they all play. They all have their own style, and aren't carbon copies of one another.

I'd even argue that whatever homogeneity existence the league is now in due to analytics, that it's countered by the fact that because it's now in a positionless state, where its star players are more skilled, diverse and have have more freedom than ever before, they're not marginalized by what position they play. Previous eras, the point guard primarily ran the offense, the shooting guard simply relied on the PG to lay the table for him, and the big man operated on the block and didn't venture too far away from the paint.

I think my point is players are pretty robotic in their shooting form, handles, how they find their shots, etc. It is becoming more and more homogenous now as the game becomes more global and we have more videos to show us how everyone plays.

Like I want to see someone dribble with their head down and get to the basket like Clyde Drexler used to. That is what I mean.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

Here's an article on how chess gameplay is falling victim to computer overreliance as well:

Chess Is Just Poker Now

A cheating controversy involving two grandmasters shows how computers have transformed the game.

www.theatlantic.com

"In the past 15 years, widely available AI software packages, known as “chess engines,” have been developed to the point where they can easily demolish the world’s best chess players—so all a cheater has to do to win is figure out a way to channel a machine’s advice. That’s not the only way that computers have recently reshaped the landscape of a 1,500-year-old sport. Human players, whether novices or grandmasters, now find inspiration in the outputs of these engines, and they train themselves by memorizing computer moves. In other words, chess engines have redefined creativity in chess, leading to a situation where the game’s top players can no longer get away with simply playing the strongest chess they can, but must also engage in subterfuge, misdirection, and other psychological techniques. In that sense, the recent cheating scandal only shows the darker side of what chess slowly has become."



"As engines became widespread, the game shifted. Elite chess has always involved rote learning, but “the amount of stuff you need to prepare, the amount of stuff you need to remember, has just exploded,” Sadler said. Engines can calculate positions far more accurately and rapidly than humans, so there’s more material to be studied than ever before. What once seemed magical became calculable; where one could rely on intuition came to require rigorous memorization and training with a machine. Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested. “The thrill used to be about using your mind creatively and working out unique and difficult solutions to strategical problems,” the grandmaster Wesley So, the fifth-ranked player in the world, told me via email. “Not testing each other to see who has the better memorization plan.”"




“Due to the predominance of engine use today,” the grandmaster So explained, “we are being encouraged to halt all creative thought and play like mechanical bots. It’s so boring. So beneath us.”

 

[Remote]

Chess, once poetic and philosophical, was acquiring elements of a spelling bee: a battle of preparation, a measure of hours invested.

I don’t buy that.
Chess was always analytical. It’s the quintessential analytical game.

It’s why every war, every battle, every fight is described as a chess match. It’s a search to make the optimal play and/or seduce your opponent into making a suboptimal play.

Claiming something is poetic and philosophical is a way to romanticize the past.

I can’t understand how people bash analytics and claim it ruins a game.

It doesn’t.

All analytics attempts to do is to find the most optimal way to win (or in some cases to exploit a market inefficiency).

The casual fan who doesn’t understand this thinks we need to go away from analytics. Which is to say “I don’t care if this move is right. It’s boring to me personally.”

But the genie never goes back in the bottle.

The way you address any issues is you have to shift the table so that teams and players have to seek out a new optimal move. A new optimal way to play.

It’s an ever-changing organism. If that makes sense.

 

[Professor Emeritus]

I don’t buy that.
Chess was always analytical. It’s the quintessential analytical game.

It’s why every war, every battle, every fight is described as a chess match. It’s a search to make the optimal play and/or seduce your opponent into making a suboptimal play.

Claiming something is poetic and philosophical is a way to romanticize the past.

The first 10 moves of a chess game alone have approximately 169,518,829,100,544,000,000,000,000,000 possible move sequences. No human on Earth can analyze that. And that's just 10 moves, a lot of chess matches don't even start getting interesting until around moves 20-25, and it's quite common for matches to last 60+ or sometimes even 100+ moves. There are more possible chess games than there are atoms in the universe.

The greatest chess players, in the past, were those who went beyond mere calculation of moves to being able to intuitively understand far deeper aspects of position, structure, strategy, etc. Some players could see something six moves in advance, some great grandmasters are said to be able to see 10-15 moves in advance, but they can't possibly calculate and compare all options and know the optimal play, that's not humanly possible. You couldn't even do that 4 moves in advance if you were really being exhaustive. The only way anyone can look that far ahead is if they have a deep intuitive sense for how the game will progress.


Computers have changed all that. Now you can have the computer calculate it for you ahead of time, and the computer can do calculations far, far beyond any mortal. So the computer can tell you, "If you make this move, then there are only five sensible lines of play after that. These are the ideal sequences for each of those lines of play. Memorize those and you'll be home free."

I've heard of chess games where players were still "in their preparation" on move 19 or 20, which means that 20 moves into the game they were still following the exact sequence of computer moves they had memorized. 20 moves into the game and they still hadn't had to make a single analytical or intuitive move on their own, they were following the exact plan the computer had helped them prepare. That's fukking crazy.

 

[Gil Scott-Heroin]

Most people think all teams play the same way. They don’t. People don’t even watch their own home teams games like that in full yet they want to have opinions on what other teams are doing.

@Gil Scott-Heroin bodied this thread

@Rhakim still waiting on you or anyone to explain how any of those teams I listed play alike

@Rhakim the Coward, we're still waiting for your box score watching ass.

 

[Godless Socialist CEO]

What Moneyball-for-Everything Has Done to American Culture

You can make a thing so perfect that it’s ruined.

www.theatlantic.com

Describes in detail how following algorithms and pursuing analytical strategies DOES lead to success but makes it boring as fukk in the process. Basically, you're "solving" the sport so that everyone knows the same optimal strategy and every team looks somewhat the same, rather than the intrigue of different teams with lots of different players trying different things.


Baseball is reduced to home runs, walks, and strikeouts.

Basketball is reduced to three-pointers and shots at the rim.

Blockbuster movies are reduced to the same formulaic remakes, sequels, and superhero flicks.

Hit music is reduced to regurgitating the same genres and artists that produce the same reliable popularity.



All of those are "good decisions" when it comes to winning games or making money, but in the long term they're fukking up whole industries because the actual public is becoming more and more disengaged with the homogenity.

Aka capitalism per usual eveutally ruins everything