In a given year there are more than 500,000 American children playing on nearly 20,000 high school basketball teams, and less than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 youngsters are selected by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft a third of those spots went to international players.
The numbers suggest that the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union to the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports. And we used to talk about the game with the reverence that comes with exclusivity. Numbers are how we decide who is an All Star or a Hall of Famer. Numbers are how we determine (or debate) which is the greatest.
Gambling and cheating scandals are not the only threats to sports. Because of the economic gravity of fantasy sports leagues and legal gambling, the numbers most of us hear these days have more to do with bettors making money than players hitting shots.
Bill James, the godfather of baseball analytics, who coined the phrase sabermetrics in the late 1970s, didn't revolutionize the way the sports industry analyzed data so we could have more prop bets. The first fantasy baseball league didn't start in a New York restaurant back in 1980 to beat Las Vegas. Initially, the numbers revolved around the love of the game. But ever since sports media personalities decided to embrace fake debates over ratings (at the expense of pure fandom), fake hot takes have set programming agendas, and numbers that used to tell us something about players are cynically used to win empty arguments. and then States began to legalize sports betting.The athletes went from being the center of attention to being mainstays of the parlays.
That's not to say the game didn't exist before. In fact, while James and others were revolutionizing the way fans (and front offices) evaluated players, the Boston College point deduction scandal was unfolding in the shadows. The ongoing betting scandal surrounding Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, who this week pleaded not guilty to charges alleging a role in a poker fixing scheme, is unprecedented. It's recent.
What is new is how we talk about numbers.
The whole idea of fantasy sports leagues was to let fans be their own GMs, not to make money, but because we care so much about the game. At the risk of sounding more pious than I am: when every game, every half, every quarter, and even every shot is tied to game odds, good old-fashioned storytelling is drowned out. Instead of learning about players and using numbers to describe them, we hear numbers the same way private equity firms view a target's holdings.
Nothing personal, just the data.
The thing about loving sports used to be that was staff. Our favorite players weren't just about results. They were 1 in every 500,000 kids who achieved it. Each one had a backstory, and how they got there was a big part of the connection we felt with them.
This is why the Billups saga hits the NBA community emotionally. Drafted in 1997, the Colorado native played for four teams in his first five years before becoming an All Star and Finals MVP. His numbers aren't what defined him, although those numbers were good enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. It was the resilience and character he showed in trying to get fans to admire him. In their struggles early in their career, they reminded us that making it to the NBA is difficult and that everyone in the league beat the odds. It's something we all know… but when the stations come out of commercial breaks showing the betting lines before the result, it's easy to forget.
Thanksgiving is a big sports weekend and therefore a big game weekend. Go ahead, eat irresponsibly… it's the other vice that worries me.
YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow
