If you’re not sure how or why Russell Westbrook’s play is analagous to a presidential preference poll, here’s how.
“There are similarities here, if you’re working on a basketball metric,” Nate Silver said Tuesday, while taping this week’s “Hoops, Adjacent” episode of The Athletic NBA Show. “If you’re like, ‘This metric seems to take an unusual player, like Russell Westbrook is unusual statistically – very high usage rate, low to medium efficiency, but good rebounder, etc. – you shouldn’t tinker with your metric just to get the right result for Russell Westbrook.’ What you should say is, ‘Okay, if this seems to be misvaluing Russell Westbrook, what principles can I draw from that?’ ‘Cause maybe it’s also misvaluing other players who are in a similar vein.”
Silver, the Editor-in-Chief of FiveThirtyEight, the political/sports/science/economics…
