Hoopshabit compares Rockets to the 2000's Oakland A's

by Christopher Jeter

Much like the “Moneyball” A’s, the Houston Rockets’ rigid adherence to analytics has brought them great regular season success and playoff failures.

It’s been two weeks since the Houston Rockets fell to the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference semifinals.

In that time, much of the talking head rhetoric following Houston’s defeat has revolved around James Harden‘s perceived choke job.

However, the most incendiary take didn’t emanate from First Take or Undisputed, but from former All-Star David West‘s Twitter page.



As expected, this drew plenty of head-nodding from former players like Nick Van Exel and Eddie Johnson, along with legions of fans who echo the same resentment towards advanced numbers and their role in basketball strategy that bubbles under the surface of pundits like Charles Barkley, Paul Pierce, or Stephen A. Smith’s analysis.

While ignoring the irony in some of these statements — West had played for analytics-friendly clubs like the Warriors and the San Antonio Spurs, while Van Exel was a member of those early-2000s Dallas Mavericks teams that introduced fragments of today’s pace-and-space game — the theory that a strict adherence to analytics did the Rockets in (or Harden’s lack of a “clutch gene”) is a misleading one.

Sure, the two teams representing the Eastern and Western Conferences in this year’s NBA Finals, the Warriors and the Toronto Raptors, didn’t shoot as many 3s as the Rockets; they ranked ninth and 11th, respectively, in attempts per 100 possessions this year. But given the number of triples the average NBA team takes nowadays, it’s safe to say that this debate has been settled.

Despite West’s flippant, derisive view of advanced stats, his tweet inadvertently raises some legitimate questions about the Rockets’ dogmatic devotion to their style of play. Can they win a championship using a stat-driven, isolation-heavy offense?



The answer is probably yes; if Houston’s shortcomings truly lied in their offensive rigidity, then they would’ve lost in the first round to the Utah Jazz, a team that moves the ball around just as much as the Warriors do.

If fluidity was truly the best policy, then the Denver Nuggets — who ranked seventh in passes per game this year, per NBA.com — would’ve made quick work of the Portland Trail Blazers — who ranked 26th in the same category — in the second round instead of falling in a thrilling seven-game series.



Houston’s current predicament mirrors another pro sports team defined by its relationship to analytics and repeated postseason failures: the early 2000s Oakland Athletics.

If you’ve heard of or read even some of Michael Lewis’ book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game or, at the very least, saw the movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt, then you probably know the gist of the story. The A’s and general manager Billy Beane, hamstrung by owner-mandated salary constraints, built a string of playoff teams by exploiting oft-ignored stats to mine as much value out of otherwise forgotten players.

To be clear, those Oakland teams possessed a wealth of stars — Jermaine Dye, Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, Jason Giambi (who won the American League MVP with the A’s in 2000), Barry Zito, Mark Mulder, and Tim Hudson — but, much like the Rockets and their love affair with 3s, the A’s calling card was their organization-wide mission to draw walks and get as many runners on base as possible.

How determined were they? Well, prior to Beane taking over as GM, his predecessor and mentor, Sandy Alderson, once instructed each of the team’s minor league managers to ensure that their respective clubs were either at or near the top of their league in walks to the point where he threatened to fire one manager if the bases on balls didn’t go up.

The point, of course, was to establish an organizational culture. Considering that Oakland finished no worse than fourth in walks to go along with three top-five rankings in on-base percentage between 2000-03, you could say that the players got the message. Of course, it’s easier to buy in when it leads to wins.

 

However, this reliance on sabermetrics didn’t lead to much postseason success in the Bay Area. In those aforementioned four seasons, Oakland was eliminated in the Division Series. Of those four playoff exits, three of them were administered by MLB’s traditional big spenders: the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees (the other was courtesy of the overachieving Minnesota Twins).


Oakland’s setbacks to Boston and New York could’ve easily been held up as proof of analytics’ limitations in regard to team building. But, if anything, the A’s losses to those teams, who employed similar offensive approaches (for instance, that 2003 Red Sox team led the league in on-base percentage) showed that the issue wasn’t the raw numbers, but the talent putting it to use. The Yankees and the Red Sox had more capital to pursue players who could do the things that the A’s players could (particularly when New York swiped Giambi away from Oakland in 2002) and that proved to be the difference.


Aside from the economic differences between these two teams — Houston is hampered more by the salary cap than a cynical need to stay under MLB’s luxury tax — this same principle applies to the Rockets in their attempts to dethrone the very team that shares a city (for now) with the A’s. Golden State wasn’t some relic from yesteryear that picked apart the Rockets with iso post-ups and long, mid-range 2s.



They were simply better equipped than anyone else to beat Houston at its own game. When you have Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson and Kevin Durant on your roster (even though Durant missed the last two games of the series due to a calf injury), three of the greatest 3-point shooters this league has ever seen, you can do that. Having two of the best defenders in the league in Thompson and Draymond Green to stymie Houston’s offense didn’t hurt, either.


If you want to question whether Houston’s static offensive tendencies aren’t tenable against the Warriors given each team’s roster (though, given how close the games were in this series and the previous year’s Western Conference Finals, even that take is a bit of a stretch), that’s fine. There’s plenty of nuance and context within that debate, especially considering the role it played in Harden and Chris Paul‘s reported spat following Game 6.


But blindly blaming analytics for a team’s shortcomings when just about every team in the league has some sort of analytics department, is inherently silly. You can critique the implementation of these numbers in regards to their effect on keeping front offices and head coaching positions primarily white and male given the history of minorities being persuaded away from advanced math and science. You could even argue how important some stats are compared to others. But clinging to the same tunnel-visioned logic that supposedly plagues the Rockets on the other end of the spectrum obstructs from the larger point.


That point is simple: Elite talent combined with top-notch strategy leads to championships. Bill James, considered to be the godfather of sabermetrics, said it best:


‘‘If you have a metric that never matches up with the eye test, it’s probably wrong. And if it never surprises you, it’s probably useless. But if four out of five times it tells you what you know, and one out of five it surprises you, you might have something.’’


Above all, advanced numbers should verify what you see while watching the actual game. They basically do a more efficient job of contextualizing a player’s production and a team’s success than more accepted metrics like counting and per game stats, no matter the sport.


Oakland’s window eventually closed without them winning the World Series, but there’s still time for the Rockets. As long as Harden puts up otherworldly offensive numbers, they’ll be in the title hunt for the next few seasons. Maybe they’ll eventually break through and bring Houston its third NBA title.


But if the Rockets ultimately suffer the same fate as the A’s, don’t view it as an indictment on analytics. Instead, use those stats along with the game film to reach the very measured conclusion of this team’s weaknesses that these numbers strive to point out.

https://hoopshabit.com/2019/05/27/the-houston-rockets-are-the-nbas-version-2000s-oakland-as/​