There’s this phenomenon where experts sound like oblivious morons. It’s a side effect of tunneling too deeply into a subject, to the point that you lose track of where it is in relation to anything else. Think financial sector doofs so versed in the arcane specifics of moving numbers around that when someone asks them about actual people losing their jobs and houses due to a dip in the markets, they blink like a degaussing CRT monitor and launch into a few bloodless paragraphs about trendlines and wealth generation. Think NPR-voiced book critics word-logged from decades of plowing through novels to hit a review deadline, talking like concussed Frasier Cranes, and possessing a surreal gentility that suggests they experience their own humanity with a reader’s remove. 

And think NBA whizzes who claim not to know why people care about Russell Westbrook achieving a season-long triple-double, excoriating the concept of base-ten math, rending their cargos over the idea that some folks might not misunderstand Westbrook’s greatness so much as appreciate it incorrectly. As a matter of epistemology, there’s a wrong way to arrive at the conclusion that Russ is having one of the most absurdly prolific seasons in league history. Or that’s their stance, anyway. 

If we wanted to be sympathetic, we surmise that too much Synergy and Basketball Reference rots the mind, but it takes heroic good faith to read triple-double agnosticism as anything other than performative self-flattery. Let’s not be willfully dense, here: we count by tens and so when a number is in the double-digits rather than the single-digits, we take notice. Any three-year-old who’s learning how to count can tell you that ten seems like a lot bigger number than nine, and the AP Style Guide deems that ten should be written in numerical form and nine should be spelled out. We can know that this is arbitrary and that we could easily count by sixes or thirteens while also acknowledging that counting by tens informs our perception of reality, and that that’s not a bad thing. There’s no good reason Americans use the right side of the street either, but it doesn’t make us morons to watch traffic in a British movie and get the sense for a moment that something isn’t quite right. We’re products of the systems we’re habituated to.

By the same token, we have long measured basketball players by the three basic categories of points, rebounds, and assists. It’s a useful construction in the sense that if a guy posts a statline of, say, 34 points, 13 rebounds, and 10 assists, it can safely be said that he put in an excellent all-around performance. He knocked down a bunch of shots, created buckets for others, and worked hard around the rim. The points-rebounds-assists construction lacks many descriptive elements—what do the player’s efficiency numbers look like? how many turnovers did he have? did he defend well or devote most of his energy to the other side of the ball?—but what it lacks in nuance it makes up for with a kind of beautifully crude legibility. If someone asks you how LeBron played last night and you throw just three numbers at them—34, 13, and 10—they know what you mean.

You grasp all of this because you’re alive on this earth, but the simplest things can be laborious to explain. It’s a special supercilious dweeb who makes you do this, who makes you give a gloss on the history of modern courtship before they’ll bring a toaster to a wedding. The I don’t get triple-doubles front is the most recent form this peevishness has taken. Last year, it was foks being mock-exasperated that we anthropomorphize years. Why is everybody blaming 2016 for all the awful stuff that happened between two dates? Because, don’t be insufferable: we organize time by the rotation and orbit of the planet and use it to keep track of when this or that happened. A year is a unit we find helpful. It’s a long time and it’s not. You don’t need to know that you’re 37 years old or that Thriller came out in 1982, but it gives your mental temporal map a few markers with which you can orient yourself. We like this, for some reason. Or some of us don’t. They must be more highly evolved, I guess, is the conclusion they want us to draw. 

Russell Westbrook is going to end his season averaging 32 points, 11 rebounds, and 10 assists per game. The how and the why of the remarkability of this feat is self-evident. Round numbers, stats we’ve used forever, etc. Having to argue for it is a chore that’s doubly aggravating because Westbrook's six-month immolation of the rest of the league has primarily been about the joy and terror it has produced; the ritual, biblical breaking of himself that he performs each night; the giddy barroom discussions of some murderous look he shot Steven Adams after he fumbled an easy dunk out of bounds. Numbers—even sophisticated ones—don’t track any of that. They’re curiosities. We line them up against each other, use them to compare players and eras and hash out MVP debates and for no reason at all: just to marvel. They can be arresting by themselves, even if they illuminate only some of the truth. In the end, Westbrook averaging a triple-double isn’t anything more than novel and neat, but it’s certainly that. No one’s done it since 1962, which is something. It’s 55 years, in fact, if you can be bothered to count.