{"id":412814,"date":"2025-11-29T12:20:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-29T12:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/412814\/"},"modified":"2025-11-29T12:20:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-29T12:20:20","slug":"column-do-the-numbers-in-sports-tell-a-story-or-just-settle-a-bet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/412814\/","title":{"rendered":"Column: Do the numbers in sports tell a story, or just settle a bet?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys<\/a> playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft<\/a> a third of those spots went to international players.<\/p>\n

The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports. And we used to talk about the game with the reverence that exclusivity implies. The numbers are how we decide who is an All Star or a Hall of Famer. The numbers are how we determine \u2014 or debate \u2014 the greatest.<\/p>\n

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 about these days have more to do with bettors making money than with players making shots.<\/p>\n

Bill James \u2014 the godfather of baseball analytics, who coined the phrase sabermetric in the late 1970s \u2014 did not revolutionize the way the sports industry looked at data so we could have more prop bets. The first fantasy baseball league was not started in a New York restaurant back in 1980 to beat Las Vegas. The numbers were initially about the love of the game. But ever since sports media personalities decided to embrace faux debates for ratings \u2014 at the expense of pure fandom \u2014 disingenuous hot takes have set programming agendas, and the numbers that used to tell us something about players are cynically used to win vacuous arguments. And after states began to legalize sports betting<\/a>, athletes went from being the focus to being props for parlays.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say gambling wasn\u2019t there before. In fact, while James and others were revolutionizing the way fans \u2014 and front offices \u2014 evaluated players, the Boston College point-shaving scandal was unfolding in the shadows. The current gambling scandal surrounding Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, who this week pleaded not guilty<\/a> to charges alleging a role in a poker-fixing scheme, is not unprecedented. It\u2019s just recent.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s new is how we talk about the numbers.<\/p>\n

The whole idea of fantasy sports leagues was to enable fans to be their own general managers \u2014 not to make money, but because we cared about the game so much. At the risk of sounding more pious than I am: When every game, every half, every quarter and even every shot is attached to gambling odds, good old-fashioned storytelling gets choked out. Instead of learning about players and using numbers to describe them, we hear numbers the way private equity firms see a target\u2019s holdings.<\/p>\n

Nothing personal, just the data.<\/p>\n

The whole point about loving sports used to be that it was personal. Our favorite players weren\u2019t just about outcomes. They were 1 out of 500,000 guys who made it. Each had a backstory, and the way they got there was a big part of the connection we felt with them.<\/p>\n

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 a Finals MVP. His numbers aren\u2019t what defined him \u2014 even though those numbers were good enough to get him into the Hall of Fame. It was the resilience and character he demonstrated while trying to make it that fans admired. In his early-career struggles, we were reminded that making it in the NBA is hard and that everyone in the league beat the odds. It\u2019s something we all know \u2026 but when broadcasters come out of commercial breaks showing the betting lines before the score, it\u2019s easy to forget.<\/p>\n

Thanksgiving is a big sports weekend and thus gambling weekend. Go ahead, eat irresponsibly \u2026 it\u2019s the other vice that worries me.<\/p>\n

YouTube: @LZGrandersonShow<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":412815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[22380,193959,1582,276,12920,193960,16759,1910,13821,2961,224,5337,6459,1260,13009,9323,51069,554,1926,193958],"class_list":{"0":"post-412814","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-all-star","9":"tag-bill-james","10":"tag-ca","11":"tag-california","12":"tag-datum","13":"tag-fantasy-sport-league","14":"tag-gambling","15":"tag-game","16":"tag-hall","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-money","21":"tag-nba","22":"tag-number","23":"tag-player","24":"tag-scandal","25":"tag-shot","26":"tag-sport","27":"tag-way-fan"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115632958720557612","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}