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[Excerpt] - Michael Lewis Chapter on Morey/Rockets

Discussion in 'Houston Rockets: Game Action & Roster Moves' started by SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016.

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  1. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    This is just part of it from Lewis' latest book "The Undoing Project" - this chapter is a great read:

    http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/...conomics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html


    That year the Rockets had the 25th pick in the draft and used it to pick a big guy from the University of Memphis named Joey Dorsey. In his job interview, Dorsey had been funny and likable and charming—he’d said when he was done playing basketball he intended to explore a second career as a p*rn star. After he was drafted, Dorsey was sent to Santa Cruz to play in an exhibition game against other newly drafted players. Morey went to go see him. “The first game I watch he looks terrible,” said Morey. “And I’m like, ‘****!!!!’” Joey Dorsey was so bad that Daryl Morey could not believe he was watching the guy he’d drafted. Perhaps, Morey thought, he wasn’t taking the exhibition seriously. “I meet with him. We have a two-hour lunch.” Morey gave Dorsey a long talk about the importance of playing with intensity, and making a good impression, and so on. “I think he’s going to come out the next game with his hair on fire. And he comes out and sucks the next game, too.” Fairly quickly, Morey saw he had a bigger problem than Joey Dorsey. The problem was his model. “Joey Dorsey was a model superstar. The model said that he was like a can’t-miss. His signal was super, super high.”

    That same year, the model had dismissed as unworthy of serious consideration a freshman center at Texas A&M named DeAndre Jordan. Never mind that every other team in the NBA, using more conventional scouting tools, passed him over at least once, or that Jordan wasn’t taken until 35th pick of the draft, by the Los Angeles Clippers. As quickly as Joey Dorsey established himself as a bust, DeAndre Jordan established himself as a dominant NBA center and the second-best player in the entire draft class after Russell Westbrook.

    This sort of thing happened every year to some NBA team, and usually to all of them. Every year there were great players the scouts missed, and every year highly regarded players went bust. Morey didn’t think his model was perfect, but he also couldn’t believe that it could be so drastically wrong. Knowledge was prediction: If you couldn’t predict such a glaringly obvious thing as the failure of Joey Dorsey or the success of DeAndre Jordan, how much did you know? His entire life had been shaped by this single, tantalizing idea: He could use numbers to make better predictions. The plausibility of that idea was now in question. “I’d missed something,” said Morey. “What I missed were the limitations of the model    .”
     
    #1 SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016
    Last edited: Dec 6, 2016
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  2. Air Langhi

    Air Langhi Contributing Member

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    He should have just gone to Fonde rec league. Dorsey had trouble making layups and simple jump hooks.
     
    #2 Air Langhi, Dec 6, 2016
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  3. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    Another good piece:

    For instance, in the 2007 draft there had been a player his model really liked: Marc Gasol. Gasol was twenty-two years old, a seven-foot-one center playing in Europe. The scouts had found a photograph of him shirtless. He was pudgy and baby-faced and had these jiggly pecs. The Rockets staff had given Marc Gasol a nickname: Man Boobs. Man Boobs this and Man Boobs that. “That was my first draft in charge and I wasn’t so brave,” said Morey. He allowed the general ridicule of Marc Gasol’s body to drown out his model’s optimism about Gasol’s basketball future, and so instead of arguing with his staff, he watched the Memphis Grizzlies take Gasol with the 48th pick of the draft. The odds of getting an All-Star with the 48th pick in the draft were well below one in a hundred. The 48th pick of the draft basically never even yielded a useful NBA bench player, but already Marc Gasol was proving to be a giant exception. (Gasol became a two-time All-Star in 2012 and 2015 and, by Houston’s reckoning, the third-best pick made by the entire NBA over the past decade, after Kevin Durant and Blake Griffin.) The label they’d stuck on him clearly had affected how they valued him: names mattered. “I made a new rule right then,” said Morey. “I banned nicknames.”
     
    #3 SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016
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  4. steddinotayto

    steddinotayto Member

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    I can't wait to read about wtf Morey was thinking with Royce White.
     
    #4 steddinotayto, Dec 6, 2016
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  5. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    I was surprised there was no mention of that at all.
     
    #5 SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016
  6. Air Langhi

    Air Langhi Contributing Member

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    I am pretty sure the Lakers took him. So I wonder if the rest of this is true or was it just a research mistake.

    This is my favorite part:

    Before the 2007 NBA draft, he’d flown to Houston, at his agent’s request, to practice his interviewing skills. The agent cut the Rockets a deal: Williams would talk to the Rockets and the Rockets alone, and the Rockets would offer the agent tips about how to make Sean Williams more persuasive in a job interview. It actually went pretty well, until they got onto the topic of mar1juana. “So you got caught smoking weed your freshman and sophomore years,” said the Rockets interviewer. “What happened your junior year?” Williams just shook his head and said, “They stopped testing me. And if you’re not going to test me, I’m gonna smoke!”
     
    #6 Air Langhi, Dec 6, 2016
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  7. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    I advise you not to purchase this book.
     
    #7 SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016
  8. kevC

    kevC Member

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    ? He's right, he was picked by the Lakers and his draft rights were traded as part of the package that got his brother to the Lakers.
     
    #8 kevC, Dec 6, 2016
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  9. finsraider

    finsraider Member

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    I'm a huge Morey fan, but as far misses, nothing will come close to Marcus Morris over Kawhi Leonard. Nothing.
     
    #9 finsraider, Dec 6, 2016
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  10. Fantasma Negro

    Fantasma Negro Member

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    Lakers drafted Marc Gasol and traded him to Memphis for Pau Gasol
     
    #10 Fantasma Negro, Dec 6, 2016
  11. DreamShook

    DreamShook Member

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    Oh boy, TRIGGER WARNING!
     
    #11 DreamShook, Dec 6, 2016
  12. FTW Rockets FTW

    FTW Rockets FTW Member

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    "I don’t know if it’s like the fat kid on the playground or what.”

    Was Maury referring to himself.

    Good read overall. How is Satnam Singh doing these days?
     
    #12 FTW Rockets FTW, Dec 6, 2016
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  13. JayZ750

    JayZ750 Member

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    To be fair, Joey Dorsey over DeAndre Jordan is close if not more of a miss. Morris has at least turned into a capable NBA player. Joey Dorsey I think is in China...

    Same story in 2007 DM's model seemed to work - Brooks, Landry - even though it sounds like he was close to drafting Gasol. Brooks/Landry were serviceable solid NBA players. Sure, you'd much rather have Gasol, and sure you'd much much much rather have Kawhi than Morris...

    But Dorsey is pretty close to the top as a pick that just breaks the model and makes no sense in retrospect.

    Which speaks to the idea of a model nonetheless. Which DM clearly relies too much upon. Not that DM has been bad. We've seen enough Parsons, Brooks, Landrys, Dekkers, Capelas to know his process can and does unearth hidden gems. But seems like it needs tweaking still.

    Morris over Leonard almost certainly came down to Morris' junior year stats being better than Leonards stats at a smaller conference school. Better scoring, with more efficiency, BIg 12 POY (DM likes to draft these conference POY guys). Dorsey over DeAndre... DOrsey had 4 years, better program at that time, better boards, assists, steals, blocks. I guess the model forgot to factor in that Dorsey is a 6'8 center with no offensive skill-set at all in addition to failing on the personality tests...

    The risk for DM is he changes his model and the above average success he has gets worse, as opposed to tweaked for the better.
     
    #13 JayZ750, Dec 6, 2016
  14. MrButtocks

    MrButtocks Member

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    Drafting is more art than science.
     
    #14 MrButtocks, Dec 6, 2016
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  15. jev5555

    jev5555 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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    I'm sure the Pacers feel worse.
     
    #15 jev5555, Dec 6, 2016
  16. Spacemoth

    Spacemoth Member

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    Yeah this was made worse by the eye test telling the majority of fans that Kawhi was a HUGE HUGE steal at pick 14. He was supposed to go at 7 after all IIRC. When Houston came up after Phoenix selected Markieff, I can remember texting back and forth with my friends how excited we were that Kawhi fell to us. And then the inexplicable happened.

    I think this might be a lesson Morey still hasn't learned: you are never as smart as you think you are.
     
    #16 Spacemoth, Dec 6, 2016
  17. dream2clips

    dream2clips Member

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    2 Issues arise:

    1) I wonder how much of Dorsey's model output was driven by the superior hi-end, ball dominant, talent on that Memphis team. The type of talent which really offset Dorsey's short-comings.

    D Rose and CDR both made the league with one obviously becoming - at one time - a top 5 player for a few years. The layman would call it rising tides and the sports-fan would cite superstars "making their teammates better".

    There are some teams, Kentucky for example, where focusing on data pts which exclude top-end talent on the floor would yield a minuscule and irrelevant sample size. But I think on that Memphis team it would be a good exercise because of how top-end D Rose was and how his position (ball handing, setting the offense, finding easy buckets for teammates) offset a great deal of Dorsey's weaknesses.

    2) I wonder how much a few anomalous out-performers in an individual peer-group (Josh Howard: 4 yr player, PoTY in a top conference, late pick, excellent performer adjusted for draft position). I'd love to know the skew or weighting between the input of a Josh Howard vs a Lou Roe for example - who himself played with hi-end talent (Camby).
     
    #17 dream2clips, Dec 6, 2016
  18. heypartner

    heypartner Member

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    Thanks a lot for that link. Great read.

    This part kinda points to Morey really wanting Bogut ... a dirty, cheat player like himself who surely shined on statistical models as well.

    Whatever prejudice a person brought to the business of selecting amateur players he tended to preserve, even when it served him badly, because he was always looking to have that prejudice confirmed. The problem was magnified by the tendency of talent evaluators—Morey included—to favor players who reminded them of their younger selves. “My playing career is so irrelevant to my career,” he said. “And still I like guys who beat the **** out of people and cheat the rules and are nasty. Bill Laimbeer types. Because that’s how I played.” You saw someone who reminded you of you, and then you looked for the reasons why you liked him.​
     
    #18 heypartner, Dec 6, 2016
  19. SamFisher

    SamFisher Member

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    His first mistake, he decided, was to have paid insufficient attention to Joey Dorsey’s age. “He was insanely old,” says Morey. “He was twenty-four years old when we drafted him.” Dorsey’s college career was impressive because he was so much older than the people he played against. He’d been, in effect, beating up on little kids. Raising the weight the model placed on a player’s age flagged Dorsey as a weak NBA prospect; more tellingly, it improved the model’s judgments about nearly all of the players in the database. For that matter, Morey realized, there existed an entire class of college basketball player who played far better against weak opponents than against strong ones. Basketball bullies. The model could account for that, too, by assigning greater weight to games played against strong opponents than against weak ones. That also improved the model.
     
    #19 SamFisher, Dec 6, 2016
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  20. hakeemthagreat

    hakeemthagreat Member

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    Joey Dorsey was one of the 87 undersized 6'7 centers Morey drafted back then. Why take DeAndre Jordan when you can draft someone undersized at center?
     
    #20 hakeemthagreat, Dec 6, 2016
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