Olbermann Rips Charles Barkley for Comments on Basketball Analytics

Keith Olbermann, host of ESPN2’s “Olbermann,” ripped Charles Barkley in his show on Wednesday for saying “basketball analytics don’t work.”

According to Olbermann, Charles Barkley was a good basketball player, but “In terms of understanding the game, forget it.”

“Chuck’s an idiot,” Olbermann declared. “Analytics not only won in the NBA, MLB, NFL and NHL, analytics won so fast that most of the dinosaurs like Chuck don’t even realize the war is over, the asteroid has darkened their sky and their understanding of the games they cover has been dismissed as superstition and faulty memory.”

“Chuck’s an idiot,” he added. “Chuck, you use analytics. You just misremember them. Every statistic is an analytic. For years, baseball refused to recognize RBI or ERA or any of those other fancy, newfangled stats. When the society for baseball research was founded in 1971, its first big push for the adoption of analytics was for a whacky stat called on-base percentage. I still used to fall for the lie of pitchers wins as recently as 2010. Free throw percentage, rebounds, touches, assists; analytics. Chuck, shut up. You lost. You are relying on analytics right now.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

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