Please Stop Michael Wilbon

I (very) rarely comment on articles circulating on social media but the recent article on ESPN.com by Michael Wilbon Mission Impossible: African-Americans & analytics was just so egregiously appaulling that I felt moved to respond. The TL;DR is that he argues that Black fans and players are not as interested in the emerging analytics movement in sports as their white counterparts. Trying to be rational about this, I would like to provide some evidence counter to his argument:

Lots of Players Actually Do Use Analytics

At the beginning of his article, Wilbon states:

Log onto any mainstream website or media outlet (certainly any program within the ESPN empire) and 30 seconds cannot pass without extreme statistical analysis, which didn’t exist 20 years ago, hijacking the conversation. But not in “BlackWorld,” where never is heard an advanced analytical word. Not in urban barbershops. Not in text chains during three-hour games. Not around office water coolers. Not even in pressrooms or locker rooms where black folks who make a living in the industry spend all day and half the night talking about the most intimate details of sports.

Ok…Such a blanket generalized statement must be backed with a reams of data or other evidence to support his case. Nope! Just a few quick snippets from two players from the Golden State Warriors. Hardly a representative sample of all the NBA players in the league, much less the entire Black community.

Is there any evidence to counter Wilbon’s claims? Sadly, he needed to only look at the opposing side of the western conference finals match-up, where 2014 NBA MVP Kevin Durant has had a personal analytics consultant (who is Black for the record) work with him for three years! Shane Battier, a two-time NBA champion has had numerous articles (see here and here) about his use of analytics in the development of his game. Even Lebron James, the consensus best player in the league has even admitted to using analytics to improve his game during the playoffs.

2. The analytics movement is likely not hurting Black advancement in NBA front offices

Wilbon also made the point that some Black coaching prospects were being passed over because of their inability to incorporate analytics when he mentioned:

If the larger sports world is moving in the direction of analytics and we aren’t, isn’t that dangerous? Are we then talking about a dearth of black professionals in the talent pool being scoured by the white, analytics-driven executives who run teams, leagues and networks?

Is it a coincidence that Nate McMillan, an old-school, pre-analytics player/coach, who was handpicked by old-school, pre-analytics player/coach Larry Bird in Indiana, is the only black coach hired this offseason?

Again, where is his evidence on this? Perhaps instead of trying to find anecdotal evidence to extrapolate a baseless argument, he need only look at the two teams in the East Conference finals for examples of Black head coaches who are at the forefront of using analytics to improve on-court performance. The Cleveland Cavaliers, who have one of the best analytics departments in the NBA, fired their white head coach mid-season to hire a current coach (who is Black) Tyronn Lue. Lue is a big believer in using analytics in game strategy. When asked about it in a recent interview he said, “I think it means a lot…If you’re shooting 55 percent from the right corner and 31 percent from the left corner, then you should get to the right corner. I do believe in that.”

Numerous reports (see here and here) have been written on Toronto Raptors Head Coach Dwane Casey’s background and use of analytics. While he has (a very healthy) skepticism of some the metrics, he ultimately believes that it needs to part of every coach’s tool belt.“The challenge is using (analytics) in the right way, where it’s not the only tool you’re using…Everybody wants to get their point across. Analytical people want to say, ‘This is the tool to use.’ The scouts want to say, ‘My tool is important.’ The bottom line . . . is winning.”

So again, Wilbon seems to have completely missed the mark.

3. We really don’t know how many fans use analytics to talk about the game

This last assertion by Wilbon is that Black fans may simply appeal to the game in emotion terms, he states in the article:

Without question, the emotional appeal of sports resonates with black people, whether we’re talking about the first end-zone dancers, the first high-five, the guttural releases after dunks and quarterback sacks and even putts made, that simply weren’t a noticeable part of sports before the emergence of the black athlete and legions of black fans who followed.

I could not find survey data on the use of analytics among sports, so I instead use Google Trends to compare the popularity of different sports statistics from 2004-present. Google Trends (GT) is a tool that allows anyone to search for the popularity of particular terms entered into Google’s search engine. For my (very informal) analysis, I compared a popular advance statistic in baseball known as Walks plus hits per inning pitched or WHIP, to a well known “classic” statistic in baseball Run batted-in or RBI, to two popular terms in sports fans lexicon “Home run” and “Touchdown”. I limited the ranking scores provided by GT to the universe of sports related terms to prevent inflation due unrelated usage and focused on searches initiated in the United States only. As you can see from the results below, both of basic sports terms (or emotional to borrow from Wilbon) are immensely more popular in our collective search behavior than the advance and classical stats such as WHIP and RBI.

While I unfortunately cannot break these terms down into racial subgroups. I believe I can safely say there does not seem to be a huge shift in the usage of advanced stats terms among sports fans or split in usage between white and Black fans.

Wrapping up

I am normally a fan of Michael Wilbon. He is often a source of cogent and mild-mannered (by ESPN’s standards) sports commentary. But, I feel this article is tantamount to racial click-bait meant to drive up ratings on a new site looking for viewers. With just a few google searches, I was able to find many pieces of evidence to counter the claims made by the author, so I can’t believe it would have been too hard for an esteemed journalist such as Wilbon to find this information as well.

What frustrates me more is that this article serves to once again dredge up old and debunked arguments about the intellectual capacity of Blacks to understand “complex” or “hard” subjects such as science or math. And, to further stigmatize Blacks who are technically-inclined to feel they are doing something only “white people” do. To use these cultural fault lines to stir up attention to your writing seems to be an abuse of his position as one of the few Blacks in media who have the ability to shape public perception of the Black community. I wished he would have thought more carefully about the impact of this piece before publishing it.