LeBron James goes to the basket against forward Kevin Durant during Game 2 of the NBA basketball finals in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, June 14, 2012. Shane Battier gave his then Miami Heat teammate James a tip on how to defend Kevin Durant based on analytics.POOL/Reuters
Shane Battier has dealt with skeptics before.
As quite possibly the first pro athlete to adopt and vouch for analytics while playing in one of North America's major four sports, the charismatic former NBA player ran into the same reactions again and again, to the point he developed a solution.
He simply told teammates what he learned from studying the numbers – and wasn't surprised when they came back to ask how he knew.
The most high-profile example was when Battier gave Miami Heat teammate LeBron James a tip on how to defend Kevin Durant one day early in their time together.
It worked.
"Once he had that little hook – I call it the stat drug – he wanted more," Battier said.
Battier was the star on Day 1 of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference on Friday in Boston, where the snow remains piled high on every sidewalk. Wearing bright green pants and a blue blazer, the 6-foot-8 former Memphis, Houston and Miami star who played on two NBA championship teams with James, and won an NCAA title while at Duke – rocketed to prominence among stats geeks after Moneyball author Michael Lewis profiled him in an unforgettable New York Times piece in 2009. Battier was front and centre here on three major panels espousing the value of analytics in sports.
He even managed to dominate one discussion – titled "Is analytics taking the joy out of sports?" – with anecdotes from not only his playing career, but his fantasy football league. "I was always slow and unathletic and I failed the eye test," he said at one point. "My biggest flaw is I bucked the narrative … . What the analytics have done for me, in a back-door kind of way, is justified my career."
Analytics in sports will always be linked to baseball. Because Bill James, Billy Beane and Moneyball – starring Brad Pitt as Beane – came well before everything else, that will always resonate in popular culture.
What's clear at Sloan, however, is that the other sports are making rapid gains. The sophistication of the analysis is advancing exponentially as leagues take advantage of new technology – adding optical tracking cameras (already in place in the NBA), and radio-frequency identification tagging systems (set to launch next fall in the NHL).
In basketball, in particular, complex statistics such as player-efficiency rating are part of the everyday conversation. In hockey, the NHL is now trumpeting Corsi and PDO on its website.
The vast majority of those speaking at the conference this week are, understandably, converts to the cause, but they're also well aware of the wider debate out there, especially in sports such as football, soccer and hockey, where the Beanes and Battiers have yet to emerge.
For the naysayers, Lewis had a particularly salient point: Analytics may be more difficult to define in the other sports, but that makes them more valuable, not less. Any advantage you gain is more likely to be unique; anything you learn is more likely to be brand new.
"Analytics are the gold standard in baseball," Lewis explained. "It's cleaner. Easier applied. But there is more opportunity in the other sports."
As for taking the joy out of the games, the analysts at Sloan didn't view it that way. That particular panel – with Battier joined by John Anderson and Ben Alamar of ESPN and Brian Burke of AdvancedFootballAnalytics.com – ended up turning into a convincing argument for using data to enlighten media coverage.
They view the numbers as merely adjusting the narrative in the right direction, something that helps to give proper credit to the Battier types who create room for stars such as LeBron James to work their magic.
"Analytics helps us see the real story," Alamar said. "Without them, the myth of [former NFL quarterback] Tim Tebow grows – and he's terrible."
As for the now age-old debate between heart or grit and the numbers – one given new life thanks to Charles Barkley's anti-stat rant earlier this month – one long-time NBA coach had a quick answer. "Here's the thing," Jeff Van Gundy said. "You can do both."
"Every basis point that you can accrue, they all add up," Battier added later in the day. "If you get a team of people accruing those basis points, you end up with a shiny ring at the end."
He would know: He has a few.