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Originally Posted by HawaiiVol  you don't have to make assumptions if you watch the games. It's right there in front of you.
And no, I wouldn't be surprised at the number of inane assumptions at all. |
Part of me agrees with what you're saying; but another part of me knows that's not entirely true. I mean unless you're some sort of savant it's basically impossible to fully tally all the various events that occur throughout a season and sift through them at the drop of a hat in order to arrive at accurate and thoroughly founded opinions about how/why a team works or doesn't.
Stats are basically an easily accessible memory that allows us to see correlations and trends and etc, and to ignore them because you 'watch the game' is to make a severe error: it is to think of numbers as somewhat separate from the game itself; it is to think of stats as an alternate story from the one you witness. This is not the case: stats are annotation to the game itself, are addition to what our eyes do see but our mind's can in no way comprehend so thoroughly.
Of course, they leave some things out, definitely, but so does simply viewing. This might be kinda why both watching the game and the cumulative boxscores is a good idea, rather than pitting one v. another.