He's apparently doing the same thing in Houston. The following is some notes that were typed up by a Rice student who claims to have sat through the a recent Morey lecture, as posted on the APBR message board. Further down the thread folks like Dean Oliver comment. For those interested in the Celtics, the final paragraph has some interest.
The lecture just ended, and I figured I'd give you my update. It was only an hour with questions and all and was not done for a very knowledgeable (basketball-wise) audience, so it wasn’t revelatory or anything. But, he had some interesting things to say.
He said their goal was to be a championship-caliber team, meaning top 4. And his role is getting the right players and then optimizing those players. He talked about how baseball is highly measureable and linear and clean and easy, but basketball is harder because there are more things that are interdependent.
He said in basketball there are essentially four factors that are paramount: shooting percentage differential, free throw attempt differential, rebounding differential and turnover differential, with the shooting being by far the most important. And, he showed some statistics to this end. He also showed stats for teams with a dominant center, which had a heavier focus on percentage and FTA, and made turnovers basically inconsequential. He showed some stats from the championship teams and talked about how great Rudy was at maximizing the scoring percentage differential.
He then did a stacked column graph showing how a roster should be built compared to how the Rockets have been built in the past, ranking each player in importance and efficiency and graphing them on minutes played. One thing I thought was interesting from the ’06 graph was that he had Swift and Hayes higher in the pecking order than Howard (even though Howard had more minutes). In the ’06-’07 graph, they had swapped Yao and McGrady’s spots so that Yao was first. They didn’t list past them and Battier though for privacy’s sake.
He showed us a website he uses – a service called Synergy Sports Extranet – that provides data and video clips by player. We looked as Sebastian Telfair. The website breaks all of each player’s video down by type play, provides data on how good he is at it and provides all the video of each event. He said, knowing the strategy of the coach, you can look at the abilities of a prospective players in those areas where you can expect the coach would ask a lot in. He also pointed out that if you have a style that is uncommon, you can get players cheaper because the skills they have to offer are not in high demand.
To questions, he mentioned that:
• Van Gundy does a very good job of bringing the data they generate to the players and at translating that to what they do on the floor.
• Leadership is very important in basketball (unlike baseball), but it is very hard to quantify.
• Jeff can get above average rebounding with bad rebounders from a good scheme. He also said that the valuable and rare rebounders are the guys who can get the contested balls, and Hayes is very good at that.
• On the business side, most of the profit is made on the appreciation of the team. And, there is also a huge tax write-off in owning a team. Otherwise, owners want to not lose money, but cash flow takes a backseat to winning, generally.
• Winning is a virtuous cycle and losing is a vicious cycle. It is a dangerous game since you have to lose for draft picks, but not so much that you are the Hawks. He mentioned that since the Celtics only had 1 star, they were investing in a number of promising young guys in hopes of being able to package them for the second star next to Pierce. Still hasn’t happened.
Those of us who spent some time speculating about possible Ron Artest, Allen Iverson and Kevin Garnett trades in the last year and have been thinking along these lines. We should all be hoping for monster years from Al Jefferson, Gerald Green, Sebastian Telfair and Kendrick Perkins, since they have the upside to potentially bring back a legitimate All Star talent in a trade.
No comments:
Post a Comment