Let's Prep For Misleading Political Graph Season By Arguing The NBA All Star Game Actually Improved In This Key Year-Over-Year Defensive Metric
Justin Casterline. Getty Images.I'm not a big political hardo for any side of the aisle in the Lunatic Opera House of politics but as a stats guy I would absolutely love thinking of the most ridiculous way to spin zone a stat to make it look good or bad. If you ever see a list of "Sad Stats" scroll down your screen on a particular candidate you'll know I made a career pivot. Until then, I thought I'd challenge myself to find a way to argue the NBA All Star Game was actually not as bad as it's being made out to be. If not for the personal challenge, then to prep you for a similar technique you'll probably be seeing on graphs in commercials with scary royalty-free music playing in the background.
Here we go.
You might have heard the 2024 All Star Game was a big huge heaping pile of doodoo on a stick because no one played defense. Because I mean, you certainly didn't WATCH it. But theres a lot of dismisinformation out there to watch out for:
(red dashed line = start of Adam Silver era)
(shout out 1953 All Star Game)
OK - here's my best bad idea on how to spin zone this.
Why go off what people say and the graphs above when you can consider this totally relatable graph that doesn't look at all like it's obfuscating anything?
It's pretty easy to see from this graph that All Star Game points in 2024 were actually down* (*well, the percent increase in points scored in 2024 over last year's (2023) percent increase in points from 2022 are down which is ridiculously confusing in such a way that hides the fact that points were up even from last year when points were also up from the year before that - but I'm counting on you no longer reading this byline at this point)
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So while you (who didn't watch the NBA All Star Game) were told how bad it was by your friends (who also did not watch the NBA All Star Game) because no one tried on defense, the graph above proves that there is an angle to spin anything. If you think you're not about to see some similar sort of statisticular gymnastics in the coming months from either side then I got something to tell you.
GET READY TO LEARN MISLEADING GRAPHS BUDDY!