This. Good post. There is just a few words to summarize the arguments on this thread. The empirical proof of the stats intensive position is Morey and his results with the Rockets. Just follow the Rockets under Morey and you'll get the answer to the correct position. So far, the results are not very good. And yes, to accuse us of anti-intellectualism is the height of arrogance. I don't think wallowing in stats and information technology is intellectualism at all. It is more of obsession than actual intellectual pursuit. Anyway, the test of any theory or claims to the operability of a paradigm is its actual success in real life. So far, Morey's "moneyball" has not produced any success for the Rockets, so there.
I beg to disagree, intuition is not looking at the obvious at all. On the contrary, it is more insight stemming from the brain which has, in this case, been honed by being involved with basketball for many years. You don't need intuition to see the obvious, you just need your eyesight for that. Intuition can often be wrong, in fact, but if your intuition is based on knowledge of basketball for many many years, it would be right more often than not.
I don't know why people are so negative about this. Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, the traditional 1 to 5 positioning is out of date. Players should be defined by the ROLES rather arbitrarily assigned POSITIONS that are mostly about sizes.
Right, because teams that lose both of their inherited, max-salary superstars to injuries should be in championship contention within a year. Morey has kept the Rockets decent (as he was ordered to do by the team owner) when they should suck right now. But because the Rockets are a 0.500 team and not contending for a championship, Morey and his very philosophy has failed. That's if you ignore every other team that uses advanced stats as well. BTW, going by your attitude, the "empirical evidence" of the failure of non-stats based management would be any single lousy team out there that hasn't used stats. Of which there are many. Of course, you, some guy on the internet, aren't arrogant for putting down Morey and other GMs who do way more work than you n this field.
too bad there are only 5 players on the court..and they have to fit into the 5 original positions. its important to have a certain skill set (as the 13 SKILL SETS he mentinoed, not position)....but that the same time for that skill set to matter, the player has to fit into a corresponding position for that skill set to be effective.
Why do they have to fit into a corresponding position? Unlike football and baseball, basketball is a fluid game. Any player can do anything on the court as long as his size, speed, and skills allow him. The goal is to have 5 players whose sizes, speeds, and skills have the most effective winning combination. Why does it matter what position each player is labeled? The traditional 5 positions are there because the combination of those 5 are quite effective. But the game has evolved. More and more players have sized, speeds, and skills that are beyond the traditional definition of the 5 positions. Coaches are using more and more different combinations. I personally find the PG, SG, SF, PF, C nomenclature very misleading. The all-star categories of guards, forwards, and centers are even more nonsensical. By those categories, it is possible that you can have a team of 4 wings and a big, or a team of 3 bigs and 2 point guards.
Well that was a colossal waste of time. Nothing he said was new, and several of the things he said were rather laughable.
