No one hates analytics quite as much as Michael Wilbon.
To his credit, Wilbon has been remarkably consistent in that stance. He’s been railing against advanced metrics since at least 2015 — and not just in football. Baseball, basketball, even the occasional hockey hot take — it’s all fair game for Wilbon’s anti-analytics soapbox.
With the NBA Finals nearing their conclusion, Wilbon revisited the topic again. Just one Pardon the Interruption episode after blasting analysts for criticizing Tyrese Haliburton’s decision to play through injury, he used Haliburton’s presence in the Pacers’ locker room to make a larger point about the limits of numbers.
“OKC got knocked out. They got knocked the hell out,” Wilbon told Frank Isola, filling in for Tony Kornheiser on Friday’s PTI. “In a place — you’ve been there. You know what it’s like in Indianapolis with that crowd going into that building. Look, I’m gonna concentrate on something that has no numbers. This gives me a chance to go on my soapbox. Because numbers can’t tell you what a room feels like when Haliburton’s in there before the game, saying whatever he’s saying privately to his teammates. And he might not have to say anything. His teammates can look at him. You know what that’s like. We’ve been in locker rooms.
“So, anybody that wants to tell you about 5-5-5 — and he’s the 14th player in club history — get that garbage out of here. Haliburton is a big story because they looked at him, and he inspired them. He got out on the floor and he could move no matter how pain he was in. I don’t know if a [cortisone] shot, taking one, helps. If he had one, I don’t care if he did. I said yesterday, I admire Haliburton. That’s what sports is about. Not advanced metrics which can’t tell you a damn thing about how a team feels about itself and the guy next to them when they walk on the floor and line it up.”
Wilbon has been beating this drum for years, arguing that games aren’t won on spreadsheets; they’re won on guts, feel, and leadership. And to be fair, he’s not wrong. There is something to a guy like Haliburton gutting it out and lifting his team just by showing up. But that doesn’t mean analytics are useless. You can value Haliburton’s presence while also appreciating what the data says about his actual on-court production.
And yet, Wilbon made it clear he’s not interested in finding that middle ground.
“That is where the Pacers got the best of OKC,” Wilbon continued. “We can go back in history. We can do it with Willis Reed because that was the storyline then, because there was no numbers. People need to put the damn laptops down, their phones down, and look at what happened — look at how the Pacers knocked OKC out of the ring. Knocked them clear out.”
“People need to put the damn laptops down, their phones down and … look at how the Pacers knocked OKC out of the ring.”
Michael Wilbon somehow makes his NBA Finals Game 6 take into yet another rant about analytics 😂 pic.twitter.com/a1p74KolKR
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 20, 2025
Wilbon’s comparison to Willis Reed is telling.
The former Washington Post columnist sees Halibirtoon as a modern version of the gritty competitor whose presence alone uplifted his teammates. It’s the kind of narrative that tends to take over during the postseason. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But framing it as an either-or, where numbers somehow cheapen the emotion, misses the mark. The two ideas aren’t mutually exclusive. Haliburton’s presence clearly meant something, and the stats still have a place in explaining what happened on the floor.
The analytics vs. eye-test debate doesn’t need to be binary. But if you ask Wilbon, it’s not even a debate.
