WAB-era Miami could break people's brains
The arguments aren't so simple anymore
Saw a funny post the other day:
I chuckled, I admit, despite the part of me that should be instintively offended. Buzzer spends a lot of time thinking about teams’ strength of schedule, after all, and lots of other numbers, too. Predictive metrics. Resume metrics. Shot quality rankings. Spatial shot chart breakdowns; per-100 rates; percentile ranks. The NET. That meme (like this one) is the modern, funnier, less stuffy version of the “these stats geeks don’t actually watch the games!” trope — the old and long-settled argument that trying to know a lot about a thing somehow means you can’t enjoy the essence of that thing, that you can’t let beauty or emotion wash over you, that you can’t blend the two sides of that coin into one unified understanding, that they are even mutually exclusive “sides” in the first place. That’s obviously silly. It’s exactly what we always try to do.
On the other hand, I don’t agree with the original post at all. Miami’s story is amazing! It’s Feb. 6! The Redhawks still haven’t lost a game! It would be amazing if they had the 36th ranked schedule or, you know, let’s say, the 363rd. Gonzaga just lost to Portland. Being 23-0 is really freaking hard!
On the other other hand, that doesn’t mean Miami’s schedule has been good, or that mentioning this fact as as part of your assessment of the team is wrong, or that this means Miami is way better than their No. 89 spot in KenPom, or that the previous fact suggests, as one reply suggested, there are 75 better at-large candidates out there, or that this post wasn’t also funny …
… which is right about the point that we stopped scrolling the replies, took a beat, and realized just how profoundly weird this whole conversation is already getting — and how much weirder, in the age of WAB, it stands to become.
