Today, Henry Abbott has statistics on the brain:

When people say things belittling statistics, quietly, inside, my inner counselor gets cranked up: “It’s OK. You can admit you don’t understand them. I don’t understand a lot of them either.” Because there is not a person on the face of the planet who both understands the sophisticated analysis of basketball and thinks it’s a fad. It’s here to stay, and the sooner you’ll embrace that reality, the faster you’ll be able to gain useful insight from it.

Now, read carefully. What I am NOT saying, and really just about nobody is saying, is that new statistics are anywhere close to good enough to replace being a knowledgeable observer of basketball, and watching yourself. What new statistics are plenty good enough to do, however, is to replace the old statistics.

I agree. And I wouldn’t really need to add anything, but I have a semi-interesting anecdote.

Yesterday, I was interviewing CBS’ Seth Davis about his new book for The Dagger. Seth is a nice dude. I said “um” a lot, and at one point my Skype connection died. In any case, I asked Davis whether he used advanced basketball stats — tempo-free stuff, for example — in his analysis. He said he thought he could do a better job of that, and that he occasionally checked KenPom’s efficiency numbers to get an idea of what was going on. Fair enough.

But then he also said something that you hear far too often from analysts, even ones as thoughtful and intelligent as Davis is. He said he “worried that sometimes you can get too bogged down in the numbers,” and that his strategy for learning about the game was by watching basketball day and night. He said he preferred to record games and watch them on the treadmill, which I would totally do if I didn’t hate treadmills. He said a bunch more stuff, too, but I don’t want to give it away because I haven’t posted the interview on The Dagger yet.

The point of this brief note is that, Davis, whether willingly or not, set up a false dichotomy for basketball stats. It just doesn’t work that way. There might be some people who are too “bogged down,” but most of the time the people who do the best analysis are statheads that spend their waking hours watching basketball. New numbers don’t replace the joy of the game. They don’t do so in baseball, and baseball is an almost completely finite game. If baseball statheads really wanted to, they could ignore the live game. They don’t. One informs the other. For a sport like basketball, where so much of the game is slippery and infinite, stats will never replace the knowledge — not to mention happiness — you can get from merely watching the game.*

*The downside to all this joyful observation is the dreaded observation bias, but come on. This is just one blog post. Another time, maybe.

So take it easy, luddites. The precious, organic, beautiful game we call basketball isn’t going anywhere. We’re just going to understand it a bit better. Doesn’t that sound exciting?