“Paul Silas, you’re getting all these open 3s because you’ll miss them!”: The Chuckster enlightens Kevin Durant with a great Red Auerbach story illustrating the futility of basketball analytics

Charles Barkley narrates how his Phoenix Suns head coach Paul Silas curbed his 3-point shooting instincts to Kevin Durant’s delight.

My biggest pet peeve as an ardent sports fan is when someone brings up a volume or an efficiency stat without context in a basketball debate. Doing so is basically a cowardly giveaway that you didn’t watch enough film to make your actual point.

And yet, the use of noisy advanced stats such as PER, VORP, WAR, RAPTOR and LEBRON, among others, has skyrocketed. People are relying on these numbers that have been trained on data upto 3 orders of magnitude less than what these models need to be truly accurate.

It’s mind-boggling to see these stat-sheet and box-score watchers hijacking basketball conversations. And Charles Barkley is probably as peeved at these people as I am. The Chuckster never lets go of an opportunity to mock analytics nerds, and he had another one recently.

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Charles Barkley and Kevin Durant deliberate how NBA players should best use analytics

Charles Barkley was recently a guest with KD on the Slim Reaper’s ETCs podcast. The TNT analyst gave us more golden content about how to view analytics in the proper light.

Eddie Gonzalez and Kevin Durant attempted to put into perspective how useful analytics are for the Chuckster. But no matter what case the duo built, Chuck dismantled it with his common sense, logic and rationality:

“My problem with analytics is, when was the last time a team won a championship that didn’t have a bunch of really, really good players? Analytics plays a part, but it’s best to have the best players!”

“You can’t build your team based on analytics because your team’s gonna have a bunch of second-rate players. You can make stats fit any way you want them to fit! I always tell people ‘Yeah, you better have some damn good player to go with those analytics!'”

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Charles Barkley wouldn’t stop the analytics crusade there, not at all. Despite being mightily loved by all types of efficiency stats, Barkley himself believes they’re being used incorrectly in practice:

“We got guys over here that’s shooting 3s, and they’re not supposed to be shooting 3s! That’s what’s driving me crazy. If you’re good at something, then do it.”

“Paul Silas was playing for the Celtics, and Red Auerbach says ‘Paul, why are you shooting the ball all the time?’ He says ‘I’m open’, to which Red says ‘That’s the reason you’re open, cuz you can’t shoot!'”