What is Morey's Modus Operandi?

Okay fine I do not disagree with you but your answer describes almost ever GM in the league. I was asking for some specifics. Fiscally responsible doesn't began to tell me the details of Moreys M.O.. ANd saying this methods change with the league. Yeah well that's pretty obvious. With the new foul rules Martin is not as effecient as he was which makes him not as valuable. But there are also some constants about Morey that give a better insight into his method. Certainly you have listened to Morey over the years to be a little more specific than fiscally responsible.

For example part of the way he is fiscally responsible is by finding undervalued players.

One of the ways he does that is by finding players that are being overlooked because they are undersized. Another way is he believes that rookies with star power who sometimes do not develop with their first team on occassion blossom with a second opportunity and are worth taking a fly on.

ANother way he has shown to be fiscally responsible is by finding 2nd rounders with potential and locking them up with 3 year contracts for just above minimum money so if they blow up there first year we own them and if they bust we can release them on the cheap. Rookie Scale Contracts

Another thing he does is look for players still on their rookie contract. He knows players still on their "rookie contracts" are typically some of the most underpaid in the league and he goes out of his way to get them. You need only look at Lowry Lee and Dragic. And even more recently Thabeet Flynn and Hill. Yeah they didn't pan out but if only one of them had panned out it would have been worth it. And even then he used them to obtain a 1st rd pick and Camby.

I show you examples and you may not agree but these methods all came straight from Moreys mouth. I am only showing examples to back them up.

I was hoping this thread would shed some light on some other Morey Methods because I really wanted to understand him better. I find him more and more interesting as our Gm. But it has turned into a joke so I'll let you guys have your fun. Anyway here's one last post here of some stuff on Morey that I found on the net. Some of it may be new to you guys who are slightly interested.

Daryl Morey on Team chemistry and the difference of Moneyball

And of course, of what importance is chemistry? This is the distinction with Billy Beane’s ‘Moneyball’ model of management. Baseball is essentially a game of one on one matchups where independent parts can be interchanged with little effect to their relations to the whole. In our case, cohesion is critical, and of greater relevance, we already know that these players play well together (one could argue that the Rockets have the best chemistry in the league). What value is placed upon that in personnel considerations? This reality of ’synthesis of the whole’ makes it increasingly difficult to assess independent assets for their true value.

Daryl Morey on Better Data, Not Better Analysis

As much as I don't want to admit it, however, the age of the irreplaceable analyst no longer exists, if it ever did. From my vantage point as GM of the Houston Rockets and the co-chair of the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I see a world teeming with really good analysts. Fresh analytical faces are minted each year and sports teams are hiring them in larger numbers. If talented analysts are becoming plentiful, however, then it follows that analysts cannot be the key to creating a consistent winner, as a sustainable competitive edge requires that you have something valuable AND irreplaceable. If better analysts won't create an edge, however, what will?

The answer is better data. Yep, that's right. Raw numbers, not the people and programs that attempt to make sense of them. Many organizations have spent the last few years hiring top analysts based on the belief that they create differentiation. Smart companies such as Google believe they need savants to crunch those numbers and find the connections that regular humans could not. But my experience, and what I'm hearing from more organizations (sports and non), shows that real advantage comes from unique data that no one else has.

Without the context of the entire league, it is very hard to use data in any meaningfully competitive way. Tracking data for the whole league across multiple dimensions is a significant task but very worth it. For obvious reasons, I cannot reveal what data the Houston Rockets track but to track the significant data we gather we use a very large set of temporary labor that helps us develop these data sets that we hope will create an advantage over time. To be sure, you need strong analysts (and we have many) to then work with this data, but the leverage comes not from the analysis but from having the data that others do not.

Daryl Morey on winning while Rebuilding

“We’re trying to put a continuous winner on the floor,’’ he said. “We’d like to get into the next tier of a winner in terms of being a championship contender. The only way is to skew young and skew towards players with upside.

“This is more heart than science. We try to bring some science into it. We don’t know who’s going to pan out, but we try to [use science] to shift the odds in our favor.’’

Daryl Morey on Player Development

"We actually don't know who's going to pan out. We do know how to shift our odds and bring in a lot of high potential prospects, and we bring them in continually Sometimes they pan out (Chandler Parsons) and sometimes they hit bumps in the road, like we brought in Terrance Williams."

"We don't know which of them are going to pan out, and we are going to waive some of them. But the answer is not to bring in castoffs from the Knicks... guys without upside. And it does put a lot of pressure on our coaching staff. Which is why, McHale, I'm so excited about the job he's done and working with him because I always tell him we're adding a degree of difficulty, if you have the end of the bench with a bunch of guys who know their roles it's going to be easier for the coach

"But if you're trying to turn that corner into a Championship contender you gotta bring in young guys, and they're all gonna want to play, and it's going to put a lot of pressure on the coach. They're not going to know how to play defense right away and it adds a whole degree of difficulty to coaching that I don't think people appreciate."

 

Another article by Morey and Hinkie I found interesting.

LINK

This Friday marks the opening of the movie Moneyball, the on again, off again production of the best-selling book by Michael Lewis. Although we've poured the better parts of our lives into the sort of work1 that will appear on the silver screen, we dread it.

We know the storyline well and the original characters from the book. The worry is that the movie will be the touchstone for so many people that it will color their image of what a sports franchise is like that marries the objective analysis with subjective (and valuable) insights. We debated just how much the reach Moneyball the movie would dwarf the reach of the book2 , but settled on this as indicative: Our own parents — with plenty of incentive to have an interest in the subject — were likely 0-for-4 on having read the book, but likely 4-for-4 on the upcoming movie. Eeeh.

Admittedly, neither of us has seen the movie yet. But the trailer alone pushes a typically divisive storyline of us versus them. New versus old. Or worse, some insinuation of smart versus not. We hate that. It doesn't have to be that way, and it's not that way in Houston.

Our scouting staff3 in Houston works incredibly hard scouring the globe for talent. Everyone is constantly on the lookout for differential information that might yield additional predictive power to our player evaluations. No doubt, predictive power is what we're all after. And data helps. But information with real power comes in a variety of forms: both in the stereotypical form that the movie will surely play up of databases and spreadsheets and analysts and predictive models, but also in the form of expertise and experience acquired only via a lifetime of playing and coaching the game. The best organizations4 bring that all together.

The other reason for dread is that (strangely) a 2011 movie released about an A's team from a decade ago will still seem new to some moviegoers. And newness will conjure up trepidation all over again. The A's success since then will be the first place the pundits look for a referendum on this type of thinking, as if that's the only club that has been infiltrated by objective analysis. Using only the A's as the reference point for the utility of the ideas presented in Moneyball is like concluding the bow and arrow doesn't work because Wile E. Coyote tried it once to catch the Road Runner5 .

The examples of successful clubs that have found an added edge in data are myriad, from the sustained excellence of the Patriots, Red Sox, or Eagles to the improbable repeat Cinderellas like the Tampa Bay Rays or the Butler Bulldogs. In truth, sports are actually late to this party of using objective analysis, and it's only those of us who devote too many of our hours to ESPN who were ever surprised by the changes that eventually found their way to team sports. From wildcatters to winemakers, Wall Street investing to brand marketing, decisions once entrusted entirely to Don Draper are now made by today's leaders who decide only after poring over real-time metrics, leaning on statistical analysis, and soliciting the advice of veteran experts.

This is true for consumers, too. If you've given money in the already hot 2012 presidential race, checking the prediction market www.intrade.com might change your mood. If you were in North Carolina's Outer Banks before Hurricane Irene, this image6 of where the nebulous "forecast models" said the storm was likely headed might have tested your disbelief in the power of data.7

And more change is coming. The next wave will hit the previously beyond-reproach milieu of teaching8 and the most venerable of professions — your family doctor. In his commencement address at Harvard Medical School9 , Dr. Atul Gawande practically begged tomorrow's doctors to let go of the notion that they can handle everything (like cowboys) and instead serve on a tightly coordinated team of health professionals that each performs the specialized tasks they are best trained for (like pit crews). Twenty-five miles south on a Foxborough practice field Bill Belichick, in no position to beg, would instead exhort the same message to his tightly coordinated team: "Do your job."

In reality, the referendum on whether using objective analysis improves decision-making is long over. Industries can remain insulated for a time, but the advantage of augmenting decision-making with data is such that adoption becomes near ubiquitous over time. For example, in baseball, what started as a small movement with the Oakland A's has become routine with all 30 teams using analysis to one degree or another. While the storytelling genius of Michael Lewis turned baseball's adoption of analytics into a fascinating yarn, the phenomenon is actually just the mundane manifestation of the march of progress.