We had another round of old-school sports vs. new-fangled technology last night, and — as usual — nobody won. This time it was in the NBA, a pleasant diversion at least from the typical stats war in baseball. It started when Rockets GM Daryl Morey — a proponent of using analytics and advanced stats to help inform roster decisions and other critical organizational matters — ripped TNT's Charles Barkley on Twitter for "spewing misinformed biased vitriol disguised as entertainment."

Barkley then upped the ante with a rant that, depending on which side you're on, could be construed as just that.

He lit into Morey and the whole analytics side of the NBA, which has been quite prominent in the league for a while now and has been used by several teams — including the model franchise Spurs, who were at the forefront. The money quote was straight out of the "get these young guys off my lawn" playbook.

Said Barkley: "The NBA is about talent. All these guys who run these organizations who talk about analytics, they have one thing in common — they're a bunch of guys who have never played the game, and they never got the girls in high school, and they just want to get in the game."

At the heart of the matter, as usual, are two things: fear and a power struggle. Those with ideas that break from conventional wisdom (such as the increased use of an evolving number of advanced metrics in sports) tend to feel the need to shout to be heard over the din of the skeptical masses. They are also a smart bunch, and often they come off as downright haughty.

The old guard, like Barkley, want to diminish things that don't fit into their narrative and often find tired arguments to beat down the "nerds" who dare see their game in a different way.

The sad part, as usual, is that the truth does not rest at the extremes. A good statistical tool/model in basketball — to us, at least — should help confirm what you see with the naked eye … or make you re-evaluate what you think you see. It does not replace the actual sweat, talent, execution or playing of games, but rather hopes to explain or project in order to gain even the slimmest of edges in player evaluation and on-court execution.

But merely trusting a data set is just as dangerous as merely trusting the eye test. The synergy of the two is where the real power lies, as the Spurs — and others — have demonstrated year after year.

Morey probably knows this; maybe Barkley, in spite of all the bluster, knows it as well. Ego, though, is a difficult thing to check. In a power struggle like this one, meeting in the middle is often both the hardest and smartest thing.