On principal, I'm wildly in favor of seeing former strategy consultants do well professionally. A buddy of mine who is a Sloan graduate has seen Morey talk several times since he joined the Celtics and has been vaguely impressed by his intelligence and ability to talk about sports while using lots of MBA-jargon.
I can't imagine that a Celtics pedigree is currently helpful in job interviews, but if assuming Daryl lands this job he was persumably as persuasive as he needed to be.
EDIT: Confirmed in the Houston Chronicle. Morey will be an assistant initially and then move up to the GM position in a year.
EDIT 2: I vaguely remembered Morey being mentioned in some dubious posting on the Celtics website this last summer. Here are some quotes:
The growing appetite NBA front offices have for this outsider-generated data has, in turn, created a market for hiring these statheads on staff. They're employed largely as advisers, not decision-makers, but it's not far-fetched to think that they'll be pulling the strings in the near future. Among the most promising from this group is Celtics senior vice president for operations Daryl Morey, 31, who graduated from MIT's Sloan School of Management and considers Bill James, the patron saint of quantitative analysis in sports, to be his role model.
While Morey by no means ignores points per game, rebounds per game and other statistics popularly held up as benchmarks of success, he also recognizes that those numbers can inflate (or deflate) a player's value. Instead he is constantly looking for other, more obscure indicators of success such as turnover ratios, eFG% (a weighted field goal percentage that takes into account the added value of three-pointers) and productivity per possession. Yet all of these apparent abstractions have a clear bottom line. "It's the same principle," says Morey of the comparisons with Moneyball. "Generate wins for less dollars."
Making other players on the floor better is an important but difficult skill that Executive Director of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge looks for when he is evaluating a player. One reason Ainge pursued free agent Brian Scalabrine during the off-season is Scalabrine’s ability to succeed in this area.
While this skill is difficult to isolate statistically, an approach is possible to see if the numbers indicate Scalabrine’s reputation in this area. First, we looked at the group of 4 players who played the most minutes, as a group, with Scalabrine last year: Jason Kidd (538 minutes together), Vince Carter (424 min.), Jason Collins (524 min.), and Nenad Krstic (435 min.). For each of these players, we examined how that player performed when Scalabrine was on the floor vs. when someone else was playing with this lineup.
That has led Morey and the Celtics to such players as Dan Dickau, whom the Celtics acquired in a sign-and-trade this summer from the Hornets for a second-round draft pick. During his first two years in the league, the 6-foot point guard was renowned more for his moppish hair than his skills. After being traded from the Mavericks to the Hornets last season, he was, for the first time in his young career, given a chance to play significant minutes, and he averaged 13.2 points and 5.2 assists. But those statistics told only part of the story. What attracted the Celtics to Dickau were some less-heralded numbers. His ratio of 4.7 assists last season for every bad pass is on par with the 4.8 average of Steve Nash, widely considered to be the game's premier pure point guard. One can reasonably surmise that playing with better players, Dickau would have had a higher ratio. This is not to suggest that Dickau is a Nash-caliber player, only that, at the price of $7.5 million over three years, Dickau might have been undervalued by the market.
If Morey was pushing for Veal and Dickau last summer on the basis of numbers than I hope he has learned to recognize the profound limitations of stats in basketball analysis. Given how painfully bad Dickau was prior to his injury its safe to say that at $7.5M/3yrs he's most certainly not undervalued by the market. He's lucky to have a job in the NBA.
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