FanPost

I love statistics!!!

Hey everyone it's time for a confession. For a long time I'd really tried to resist, as much as I could, the "statistics" argument for me to base my basketball fandom upon. I had tried, foolishly, to articulate that basketball is a sport of narratives and psychology, of human beings on this planet for a short amount of time who have a certain talent for putting a round ball in a hoop, of on-court presence and intangibles. Of fun. Of the poetry of motion (admittedly, this last point has been in short supply).

I now recant all of this. Because I love statistics.

Before my conversion, I would have been right, if it wasn't for the fact that I was dead wrong.

So wrong. So dearly, dearly wrong. You see, the "I hate statistics" post written today was a high watermark of an epiphany for me (you see how that title says the opposite of what it means? That has been statistically proven to generate more interest, and I am imitating this!). It was such a devastating proselytizing tool that math-lovers from the entire Timberwolves fandom--all 14 of us!--lay in wait for the trap to be sprung. And like a tiny little bear cub of the humanities having its paw caught by a steel-sprung, sawtooth jaw of advanced statistics, I was trapped, and cried out in pain, and saw the error of my stupid, stupid ways.

Because, and this is the important part so pay attention, Jerry West's management of a franchise is exactly the same as my watching basketball games a couple of times a week. Yes, I am that important. It really has been a self-empowering process to realize this! It's an extremely important job to watch games. I also post on blogs and share things known as "opinions" to other people who watch games. It took me a while to really think about it, because I am by nature slow-minded, but I then realized that it really gives me a feeling of "control" to quote spider graphs on a regular basis, which is the same feeling of control that Jerry West must have when evaluating a trade.

It's also been very fruitful to have more charts at my disposal! I really can't have enough of them, and this has been personally fulfilling: to have my pasttime mimic my work week in its exactitude, stridency, and dearth of language-based critical thinking skills. I'm sure this will give me an "edge" in my middle management career!

As a corollary to this, people who don't use statistics are not, I repeat, not important, and don't have anything to say whatsoever. This is just logical because how can you really trust the opinions of people who let things go over their heads? And by "things" I mean "numbers." This is just the product of a weak mind.

Of course, people have tried to convert me before, tried to make me smarter. I just wouldn't listen though. I guess I was stubborn. Why, just the other week two nice, clean cut young men in Mark Madsen jerseys came to my door and tried to foist on me pamphlets pulled from "Kendall's Advanced Theory of Statistics:Volume 2A-Classical Inference and the Linear Model". "Get off mah lawn!" I said to them*, before going back to working on my new novel (which I've now given up, naturally).

"One day you will be saved!" one of them said to me, before they got back on their bicycles.

"01010011 01110100 01100101 01110000 01101000 01100101 01101110 00100000 01001000 01100001 01110111 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101", the other one said as they rang their little bells. Oh, the error of my ways!

But I know better now.

I am now a mathlete.

Trust me, if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

*uneducated, humanities-based accent exaggerated for narrative effect.