Not concerned. Tilman has an empire of fried food experts to draw from, and Rafael Stone likely knows a lot of lawyers. Those are two ingredients to winning sports.
We had a Top 5-10 roster talent wise, yet were able to somehow able to manufacture the best record in the league with Moreyball. People said "The Rockets choked" blah blah in the playoffs, but the reality is that had no business being on the same court as GSW. The Morey and D'antoni system gave us a competitive edge and a fighting chance against a superior team. Fast forward to two years later, half the teams are now copying the heliocentric offense and shooting 3's and avoiding the mid range like the plague. All those years everyone was making fun of us, they're now doing the exact same thing. How ironic. Except for us, our players are exiting their primes and everyone has lost a step. So not only is our system not fundamentally advantageous versus the overwhelming majority of our opponents, our talent has also declined. We could hypothetically go from a Top 2 team in the league in 2018, to a Top 10-15 team in 2021, while still having largely the same roster and overall talent on paper.
Did any of those folks go off and lead a championship team as GM? I don't think that they have. I don't think analytics can help you win a championship, it'll help you go far, but not far enough for me. You still have to be able to look at a guy like Rajon Rondo who can't shoot and believe in him. You still have to see a guy like Draymond Green in college and think ehh.. he'll do. That was what was missing from Morey: Seeing potential in non-traditional places because your gut tells you they still have something special. I hope we go back to a couple of gut reaction maneuvers per year. Keep analytics, but lower its value within the org.
This is all Morey has done while in Houston, find and extract more value out of players than most thought was there. Battier, Brooks, Lowry, Parsons, Harden, Tucker, CC and a whole slew of minimum guys. We just witnessed Ben McLemore be our best shooter for a year and watched Jeff Green be nearly our 2nd best player in a playoff run.
AWESOME POST... I particularly liked that you brought up Draymond... he cant shoot but he was a part of the best team of all times and rockets fans and coaches consider unplayable whoever cant shoot and that is ridiculous
People still don't understand analytics is what kept the rockets competitive with teams that largely outweighed them in talent. It's purpose was to bridge that tremendous gap in talent. You want to lower the value of analytics, get better players capable of doing more things. Until that happens these players that are one dimensional surrounding harden are going to have to stick with what they do best. That's playing the game with a high iq and not trying to do things you suck at. And if you think that gets thrown out the window now with the same roster as is, boy is it gonna be even uglier than it already is.
I’m aware. Are you aware that I said Morey gets us close but not all the way? I’d bet you ignored a good bit of what I said because you love Morey more than the team. Respond to what I said please. Not to what you wanted me to have said. You too @YOLO
i mean considering when he had the most collective talent that was certainly capable of going all the way in 17-18, I'd say he was doing just fine. every other year you look at the rockets roster and the talent disparity was just lopsided and yet they were still one of the better teams in the league, especially in the GS dynasty era. And even in 17-18 season, GS was ridiculously stacked in talent. no one else was even close. I wonder why? because analytics was being used to find a bridge in the gap because you certainty weren't getting over the hump with talent like mcw, ennis, melo, shump, house, chriss, sewer, etc. what's funny is the best teams in the league have adopted the analytics model and are continuing to play more and more like what the rockets have done. but that just happens to get conveniently ignored.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/23762871/rockets-spurs-celtics-most-analytical-draft-teams-nba It’s gotten teams all the way. I ignored nothing. You are just like so many others who believe the Rockets are out here on an island doing things no one else is doing. You have this narrow mind set....Rockets use analytics,...Rockets haven’t won a title...Analytics can’t win it all You Ignore the use of analytics by others. Ignore money spent on other rosters. Ignore simple math. And assume that we slavishly reduce all our decision making to whatever the magical computer tells us without considering any other input and that other teams are doing the opposite. Something that should statistically happen 60% of the time WONT happen 40% of the time. Some of you will take the results of 1 event and project that to be the same result achieved had that event been played out 100 times and not just 1. If we played that Game 7 against the Warriors, even with the Paul injury, say 10 times, do we lose them all?
We lose CP3 and our team falls apart. The Warriors lose Kevin Durant and beat us. Another time they lost Steph Curry and beat us. Taking probability long shots(which that’s Morey’s game) doesn’t play nice in a 7 game series designed to take luck out of the equation. We were great one year, but not great enough to overcome the adversity of a two game injury. We needed more depth and our style of play was suited to 2 out of our 12 players. It was time to change. Stats lost because it was fallible. We’re the Houston Rockets. The whole world hates us, the fans, the media, the refs... we don’t have room to play cute analytics games with long odds. We need to build depth that can run a system on both ends. Morey never did that. Attempting to retool and try the same thing over and over is what it is.
I would never call Morey stupid, but he wasn’t playing a game that allowed him to win it. Houston has to win with talent, effort and brilliant coaching. Instead we tried to win with salary cap tricks and statistical long shots. Missing 27 threes is crazy long odds to happen. Fine. But what is taking 7 more threes after missing 20 straight? I know the answer isn’t: smart. Limiting offense to threes and layups was a longshot that kept getting exploited in 7 game series. Why keep denying that fact? Bc it beat Utah? Come on! Wake up
houston never had the talent to outweigh the opponent to win a ship. so what's the next alternative. finding other ways to be competitive and once again bridging the gap, which he definitely did. but but but analytics cf's cries and doesn't understand that simple concept of why it's in place in the first place So what. Those same 27 3s got them to that point. It's obviously unfortunate but those are the results you live with. what about all the other games they threw up boat loads of 3s and won. oh those don't count huh. You know why because it isn't convenient for you. You wanna talk about being exploited. Can't want for the last 3 years of harden if he makes it that far. The amount of being exploited is gonna be even more comical than it already is What's their to wake up to? The garbage status this rockets organization is currently in? Nah I'm good. I'll continue to voice the trash displeasure of what a dumbass owner put this team in
One team was paying the money to afford to lose a superstar from their roster. One team was not and never did. If you can not spend the essential amount to acquire talent necessary there is generally going to be a ceiling. And when you are taking about what the Warriors had with Durant, money spent alone probably wouldn’t even be enough. You’d need to match them dollar for dollar AND hope they also had injuries to take them out. And it is pretty much exactly how things played out during their run. Honestly this is veering off from the topic I initially addressed of yours. That Morey somehow blinded himself to talent because of his slavish devotion to the numbers. When he clearly identified and acquired a ton of gems a lot of whom weren’t eye ball test darlings. A tiny lightning bug shooter in AB, a pudgy potato who couldn’t really shoot in Lowry, identified a 6th man had the possibility/probability of being so much more. Constantly identified certified scrubs that if thrown into our system could far outperform their salary. Its just not an accurate claim. He spent his entire time here year after year finding market inefficiencies because his owners spending appetite required it. Our style has gone from extreme outlier to league norm and the one element our system has lacked throughout is the talent. We had it one year and we almost did it. That’s not exactly unusual. Only 1 team can win and their are generally more than 1 team every year that realistically was good enough. But **** happens. Especially when you only get 1 honest go at it.
but analytics has been used forever it's just math and stats what was the analytics for Dream? Jordan ? Magic ? Bird? Russell? Kareem?
Trends are your friend...until they aren't. Just because they missed 20 threes in a row doesn't imply that they will miss the next 7. If the quality of looks is bad, that's one thing. But if the shots generated are solid, then you stick to the strategy that got you 65 wins in the regular season and a 3-2 lead vs. the most talented team of all-time. Suddenly veering course after a couple quarters of bad luck is a textbook "sell low" mentality.
