Assistant General Manager Daryl Morey to Speak at Rice University

Are you in day, evening, or weekend? I'm there in the evening program. I'll try to attend this lecture, though I'll have to skip work to do it.

 

Landy and Juan - I am thinking about doing the MBA at Rice and am curious as to each of your experiences thus far. I am looking into either the full time option of the evening option. Any advice or comments?

I think I am going to try and catch this lecture, granted I will have to miss some work as well. Is there any kind of cap on the number of people attending?

Thanks for the info!

 

Damn......I have to teach a class that day.

Will somebody please give a recap in this thread after the seminar? Thanks in advance...

 

The lecture just ended, and I figured I'd give you my update. Was anyone else there? It was only an hour with questions and all and was not done for a very knowledgeable (basketball-wise) audience, so it wasn’t revelatory or anything. But, he had some interesting things to say.

He said their goal was to be a championship-caliber team, meaning top 4. And his role is getting the right players and then optimizing those players. He talked about how baseball is highly measureable and linear and clean and easy, but basketball is harder because there are more things that are interdependent.

He said in basketball there are essentially four factors that are paramount: shooting percentage differential, free throw attempt differential, rebounding differential and turnover differential, with the shooting being by far the most important. And, he showed some statistics to this end. He also showed stats for teams with a dominant center, which had a heavier focus on percentage and FTA, and made turnovers basically inconsequential. He showed some stats from the championship teams and talked about how great Rudy was at maximizing the scoring percentage differential.

He then did a stacked column graph showing how a roster should be built compared to how the Rockets have been built in the past, ranking each player in importance and efficiency and graphing them on minutes played. One thing I thought was interesting from the ’06 graph was that he had Swift and Hayes higher in the pecking order than Howard (even though Howard had more minutes). In the ’06-’07 graph, they had swapped Yao and McGrady’s spots so that Yao was first. They didn’t list past them and Battier though for privacy’s sake.

He showed us a website he uses – a service called Synergy Sports Extranet – that provides data and video clips by player. We looked as Sebastian Telfair. The website breaks all of each player’s video down by type play, provides data on how good he is at it and provides all the video of each event. He said, knowing the strategy of the coach, you can look at the abilities of a prospective players in those areas where you can expect the coach would ask a lot in. He also pointed out that if you have a style that is uncommon, you can get players cheaper because the skills they have to offer are not in high demand.

To questions, he mentioned that:
• Van Gundy does a very good job of bringing the data they generate to the players and at translating that to what they do on the floor.
• Leadership is very important in basketball (unlike baseball), but it is very hard to quantify.
• Jeff can get above average rebounding with bad rebounders from a good scheme. He also said that the valuable and rare rebounders are the guys who can get the contested balls, and Hayes is very good at that.
• On the business side, most of the profit is made on the appreciation of the team. And, there is also a huge tax write-off in owning a team. Otherwise, owners want to not lose money, but cash flow takes a backseat to winning, generally.
• Winning is a virtuous cycle and losing is a vicious cycle. It is a dangerous game since you have to lose for draft picks, but not so much that you are the Hawks. He mentioned that since the Celtics only had 1 star, they were investing in a number of promising young guys in hopes of being able to package them for the second star next to Pierce. Still hasn’t happened.

 

Thanks JV. I think some of us knew Stro ranked higher than JHo last year in recordable worth. Stro's deficiencies don't translate well in straight up stats.

 

Nice post, thanks. I read it 3 times before reply. Lots of information, very interesting.

 

Wow good stuff JV, thanks.

 

All those stats are all fine and dandy but does he know talent when he sees it? I guess we'll find out when he takes over full time.

 

Define "talent"

 

Pretty interesting, thanks for the post.

 

Awesome recap JV. You must have taken some extensive notes. Much appreciated.

About "Synergy Sports Extranet", they're getting ready to release that to the general public later this season (they had the service as a free trial during last year's playoffs, and it's pretty impressive). From their last update, they're waiting for the final go-ahead from the league and will hopefully be up and running by November or December. I'm pretty excited about it. It's a great service.

 

Great recap JV! Thanks a bunch!

 

I was there. It was a good talk, there's no surprise JVG"s accumulated stats were 2nd to last(behind our 05-06 season).

I loved their synergy search, I wish somebody would've asked to see Kobe instead of Telfair though.

 

It really is. It analyzes players perfectly and it even includes a few minute video clip of that specific action in the process from that player.

 

i wonder if he got paid for that speaking engagment

 

Thank you for the recap Juan Valdez

 

You dont need fancy schwancy graphs to tell you Juwon Howard sucks!

Just watch a few Rocket games.