Charles Barkley and Daryl Morey argued about stats, and nobody learned anything

During TNT's broadcast of the Houston Rockets' Tuesday night win over the Phoenix Suns, Charles Barkley called the combatants the two worst defensive teams in the NBA. The Rockets — perhaps taking a cue from their on-court leader — got a bit defensive about their defense:

Chuck said we're one of the 2 worst defenses in the NBA. Def Rating: 5th (tied) Pts allowed: 12th (tied) Opp turnovers: 3rd Blocks: 5th

— Houston Rockets (@HoustonRockets) February 11, 2015

Daryl Morey — the Rockets' Northwestern- and MIT-educated general manager, the chairperson of the annual Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, a frequent and fierce defender of the squad he's put together, and no stranger to talking reckless on Twitter — decided to go a step further in responding to Chuck's comments:

Best part of being at a TNT game live is it is easy to avoid Charles spewing misinformed biased vitriol disguised as entertainment

— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) February 11, 2015

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Not surprisingly, the famously outspoken Hall of Famer responded with both barrels after Houston's 127-118 win:

Quoth Sir Charles:

Of the teams that's going to make the playoffs, [the Rockets are] awful defensively. [...] Just because you've got good stats doesn't mean you're a good team defensively. They're not a good defensive team. They gave up 118 points. No good team gives up 118 points.

I'm not worried about Daryl Morey. He's one of those idiots who believe in analytics. He went out and got James Harden and got Dwight Howard, and gonna tell me that's analytics. Then he went out and got Trevor Ariza, and then he went out and got Josh Smith. So, first of all, I've always believed analytics is crap. And you know I never mention the Rockets as a legitimate contender, because they're not. Listen, I wouldn't know Daryl Morey if he walked in this room right now. [...]

Analytics don't work at all. It's just some crap that some people who are really smart made up to try to get in the game because they had no talent. Because they had no talent to be able to play. So smart guys wanted to be able to fit in, so they made up a term called "analytics." Analytics don't work. What analytics did the Miami Heat have? What analytics did the Chicago Bulls have? What analytics do the [San Antonio] Spurs have? They have the best players. They have coaching staffs who make players better. And like I say, the Rockets for a long time. So they went out and paid James Harden a lot of money — they got better. Then they went out and got Dwight Howard — they got better. They had Chandler Parsons, and now this year, they went out and got Ariza. The NBA is about talent.

All these guys who run these organizations, who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common. They're a bunch of guys who ain't never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game. Come on, man.

[Ernie Johnson tells the viewing audience that he and Charles will appear on a panel Friday at the NBA Tech Summit where the topic will be analytics.]

And Ernie, I said the same thing about analytics last year, I'm gonna say it about it next year, I'm gonna say it about it Friday, and I'm gonna say it about it five years from now. It's just guys who ain't never played basketball. They use that same crap in baseball, and they put these lightweight teams together, and they never win. They're always competitive to a certain degree, and they don't win.

[TNT colleague Kenny Smith asks Charles if he thinks putting Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O'Neal together is "not analytical."]

Hell no! Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, Manu Ginobili and Kawhi Leonard has nothing to do with analytics. And I think when they put Chris Bosh, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James together, it had nothing to do with analytics. Gimme a break.

Before we go any further — yes, Shaq did say, "That was very vitriol of you to say." And no, just like "fit out," that isn't a thing.

You can say this much for Charles — he is, in fact, consistent on the topic of analytics. He said the same stuff in August 2013, when the Philadelphia 76ers hired the analytics-minded Sam Hinkie, Morey's former second-in-command in Houston, to run the show in Philly. He's been crystal-clear in his belief that numbers alone don't benefit anyone, unless those numbers are written on paychecks given to excellent players so that they'll play for your team.

There is, of course, some truth to that — as we say every time this now-tired nerds-vs.-jocks/stats-vs.-eyes debate comes up, relying solely on statistical analysis to make absolute statements or decisions about the NBA would be ludicrous. That's not how things actually work, though. There isn't a team in the NBA, Houston included, that eschews scouting in favor of spreadsheets, and most writers who traffic heavily in stat-driven analysis also watch boatloads of game film, too. It's not an either/or proposition, and it hasn't been for quite a while (if, in fact, it ever was.)

There's certainly been an increase in the number of analytics-conversant types in front offices over the last few years. But as SB Nation's Tom Ziller wrote last year, that's not really a case of "basketball PhDs" being replaced by "nerds who never played the game," as much as it's about the rise of people who have played (often in lower-levels of college or overseas) and/or spent their entire professional lives working in basketball in one form or another, who understand the byzantine structure of the salary cap and collective bargaining agreement (or know enough to hire people who do) and who like the idea of getting as much information as possible to make decisions.

As players have gotten more explosive, the league's talent base has grown, rules have changed and coaches have gotten more tactically ingenious, front offices have had to evolve, too. Everyone's got to be a two-way player these days.

There are lots of ways to poke holes in Barkley's assessment, if you're so inclined. The Spurs, the Heat and the Mavericks all relied heavily on analytics to help figure out the best ways to deploy their talent to win titles. One of the first people to popularize the use of possession-based stats was the late, great Dean Smith, who knew a thing or two about winning.

While it's certainly defensible to chalk the Rockets' turnaround up to paying Harden and Howard, if you're going to do that, you've got to credit Morey, Hinkie and the rest of the Rockets' braintrust for all the work that went into being able to pay those two players — a years-long teardown of the Tracy McGrady/Yao Ming squad that saw Morey, Hinkie and company use all the tools at their disposal, from statistical models to eyeball scouting, to build the sort of cache of assets (stockpiled draft picks, young contributors on inexpensive deals, etc.) that could later get the Oklahoma City Thunder to bite on the Harden deal, which made the Rockets seem like a legitimate destination, which opened the door to bringing Howard on board. (To say nothing of the fact that Barkley disliked the Harden deal when it happened.)

If you're going to say that Houston's been good because they had players like Chandler Parsons, you have to credit Morey and company for identifying him as a player whose size and skill-set made him worth taking a chance on in the second round of the 2011 draft and getting three years of ludicrous bang for his buck out of someone that every team in the league passed on. If you're going to say that Houston's stayed afloat since Parsons left for Dallas because they brought in Ariza, then you've got to credit Morey for targeting Ariza as a replacement who would fit in well on the wing between Harden and Patrick Beverley and provide value even if the career-best long-range shooting numbers he put up last year in Washington didn't carry over (and they haven't).

Parsons, Beverley, Terrence Jones, Donatas Motiejunas, Greg Smith, Troy Daniels ... under Morey, Houston has found these guys, and gotten production that outstrips their paychecks, thanks in large part to the way analytical models inform the front office's decision-making on the types of players they should be targeting. It's not just math, it's math plus scouting, plus talking to people you trust, plus being in gyms all over the world, plus breaking down film, plus being willing to consider different viewpoints as you try to find one of the many different ways out there to win a championship.

There's plenty of stuff to be skeptical about in the world of analytics and advanced stats — the often unexplained differences between models and metrics, whether efforts to measure critical stuff like chemistry are worth anything, whether the reams and reams of data now at analysts' disposal actually helps clarify things or just overloads recipients, whether the push to find new ways of keeping players healthy and on the court has gone too far and crossed over into creepy, Orwellian territory; whether stat-types have found the right language and approach to try to communicate their information to NBA decision-makers, and so on. You don't have to consider beyond-the-box-score stats the end-all/be-all of basketball fandom. In fact, you shouldn't! When we treat it like problem-solving rather than something we're supposed to have fun watching and discussing, we're selling ourselves short.

It's just a bummer that one of the greatest players of my lifetime — seriously, the numbers don't lie! — and the loudest, high-profile voice in the sport decides that just Doug Collins-and-Larry Brown-ing it up isn't enough, and that in the process of being just about entirely wrong while telling people they're wrong, he has to be a sneering high schooler about it, too. The game's always trying to teach us new things, if we're just willing to watch and listen. When we have the same tired-ass conversations about nerds, calculators and insufficiently notched bedposts, though, nobody learns anything.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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