I posted in a sibling comment to this one about how this argument reminds me of one that happened in hockey. Specifically I claimed that one of the big reasons

I posted in a sibling comment to this one about how this argument reminds me of one that happened in hockey. Specifically I claimed that one of the big reasons that possession became more prized is because of Hockey Canada changing their developmental programs after missing gold at the Winter Olympics three times in a row. Specifically they started to do serious analysis on teams that were winning, both in the NHL and international level teams. I was lucky enough to have parents well off enough that I got to play organized travel team hockey through my entire childhood (age 5 - 18). I'm 27 and I caught the beginning of the shift in thinking near the middle of my developmental "career". You could tell the difference immediately (and it wasn't incredibly kind to a physcally large forward like myself). Even more so, if you went and watched some of the high level younger teams though, the ones that got coaches from away and got taught the latest theory you could see the way the game was re-shaping itself even if at the top current level the stats were just showing that "good teams are performing well". So that's why I think that dismissing theory and statistics as just saying that the other team is "better" in a roundabout way is missing the point. Quantifying which team is better and why allows changes to the developmental programs that produce players. If you look at the kids that came out of the developmental shift you can see the results of the statistical analysis, the 90s and early 00s was not kind to North American international hockey but as the kids that were taught with the new statistically informed program started moving up to the professional level you can see the level of play increasing and now it's Canada and the US that are the dominant teams on the world stage and all of that happened because the people running the programs started to look at the statistics of what actually worked and implementing them into the training and development of the next generation of athletes.