How Jokic, Makar, and more get lost in today's oceans of data

“Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink”
– most-common bastardization of the most-famous part of…
the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I’ll admit it. I was ready to worship at the shrine of a false god. Whatever the afterlife brings, I’m putting it down in print so I’m on the hook for it. A good two decades ago, I read Moneyball, and decided that I really wanted to spend my career worshipping at the altar of data.

While it’s been a fun and lucrative couple of decades, I overdid it badly in the beginning. Data was the answer. Problems in the world? Just wait until we have all the data. Politics aren’t making sense? Once we have the data, the truth will set us all right. Can’t seem to find the right diet for you? Just wait until we have all the data from mapping the human genome and blah blah data data data data…

Boy, did I have it wrong.

Not about the data. Good lord, we certainly have enough of THAT. We are actually swimming in oceans and oceans of data. If you were to only look at our online consumption, we passed over a billion websites almost a decade ago (though over 80% of them are defunct). This last year, the world produced and consumed well over 100 zettabytes of data. What is a ZETTAbyte? I had to look that one up. Let’s put it in terms of something we can get our arms around better. Like a gigabyte. My not-so-terrible laptop has 500 of those. How many gigabytes in a zettabyte? Carry the five, square root of pi, and…

A trillion. A trillion gigabytes per zetta. Holy bats, byteman.

That means over a hundred trillion gigabytes of data consumed last year by us all, in applications as diverse as politics, poetry, porn, and of course… sweet, sweet sports.

You’ve seen it everywhere these last few years in sports, haven’t you? The application of data to the games we watch and play. The Amazon Web Services “Stat That” commercial series of a couple years back, the NBA’s Second Spectrum data that tracks every basketball player’s last fart, Major League Baseball’s capability to tell you how far outside the strike zone a pitch was before the home plate ump does, or how far a ball traveled for a home run, at what speed, and how many beard hairs moved on the outfielder’s face as he tried to catch it. Data. Sports. Ball. Data.

It’s also bred an unbelievable amount of analysts in every field bending these half-thought data inferences to whatever whim will suit their arguments, and less of us watchers less sure of the truth in our spaces than ever. In sports, those arguments are not only made from a thousand different angles, but with enough analysts coming at it to be an unbelievable percntage of those zettabytes. Sports analytics conferences like the MIT Sloan conference yearly are some of the hottest and toughest-to-land tickets in the industry these days, and that’s just so the teams can learn to apply their own data. Sites like the sports-reference landscape sit on top of these oceans of data and are simply the taste to get you to pick up that stathead subscription. That data can prove your point in an article, or an office discussion, or even help you make a smart decision on a friendly wager or five. Sports data at every layer is simply big, BIG business.

It leaves you wandering the landscape looking for people who seem to be thoughtful, knowledgable, and unbiased in their application, but hopefully creative enough to still then make their output something worth even caring about. It can take years to find someone as good at the slicing and dicing as Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey, or a guy I was lucky enough to work with for a while in Mile High Sport’s Ryan Blackburn. Even when you find these thoughtful savants, you wonder if you’re making the same mistake you see so many others making, simply picking the guys whose data suits the arguments you like to hear. Confirmation bias bites/bytes us all, and like everyone else, I choose to believe it isn’t so. At least not for me. That the math is still somehow setting me free. All of the rest of you who don’t see it my way are the ones not GETTING it.

Roughest of all, in this era where these new services, servers, and mountains of data produce such riveting firsts as “NO MINNESOTA VIKING TIGHT END HAS EVER STEPPED BETWEEN THOSE TWO HASH MARKS WITH HIS LEFT FOOT ON A THURSDAY NIGHT BEFORE!!!”, you have to wonder if we haven’t given into the data hype just a little bit… If the waves of this data ocean haven’t swept us away. Do the never-befores of a Nikola Jokic, Cale Makar, or even a Brenton Doyle get a little lost? At least when the guy who comes off the end of the bench can be shown as some form of never-before as well? That commonality robs a lot of the specialness of the truly unique moments.

Maybe the noise will die back down someday. Maybe we actually will have honest-to-goodness clarity from all our data over the long haul, instead of bickering so acidly over what the “truth” is or who an MVP might be. But for now…

For now we are literally swimming in data, and many of us feeling even further from the truth. The zettabytes of data drops are literally everywhere, but these days it often feels near impossible to know which ones of them to actually drink.