The TNT commentator’s claim that Dillon Brooks had scored twenty or more points in eight straight games seemed plausible to me, given the unreasonable burden that has been placed on me as the internetubes’ sole provider of Dillon Brooks highlight videos, but I also thought I would remember a streak like that, so I went and checked out the venerable basketball-reference to verify the claim.
I don’t know what kind of wonky bootleg statsheet that dude was looking at, but Brooks has definitely NOT scored 20+ in eight straight games. Just three games ago he scored seven points against the Warriors. Three games before that, he had nineteen against the Suns, which is almost twenty but definitely isn’t twenty. While the commentator was just trying to point out that Brooks has been a surprisingly potent scorer for the ‘Zlies this season, the way he did it was a disservice to all casual fans viewing the broadcast.
These are the kind of fake stats that can propagate in a hurry despite being blatantly false and easily checkable. Everybody was up in arms about “fake news” a while back, well, how about the outrage over “fake stats” (and we’re not talking about Russell Westbrook’s MVP seasons here)? In fact, how do you know that I don’t make up fake stats in my video descriptions all the time? I often will state that I got a certain fact from basketball-reference, or the official NBA stats website, but often the statistics I cite are uncredited. Maybe I just make up numbers to fit my narrative and nobody ever questions it because I’m the guy who’s supposed to know what he’s talking about.