I had the opportunity to visit the Sloan conference in Boston over the weekend and here are a few Rockets-related reflections. http://rockets.clutchfans.net/10869/sloan-sports-analytics-conference-recap-2018/
The part about Battier is the reason why Big shot Bob has 7 rings. Horry was the best post entry passer of all time.
Rockets EVP of Basketball Operations Gersson Rosas made a relatively rare public appearance alongside a few other NBA front office executives in the panel, “Draft Day Analytics.” He shed light on one Rockets draftee that didn’t work out, Terrence Jones, summarizing that basketball simply wasn’t important enough to Jones and his development suffered as a result. In contrast, Rosas was effusive in his praise for Clint Capela, who went from looking “terrible” at the NBA World Hoops Summit in 2014 to becoming a key part of a #1 ranked team just a few years later
Jus watched the panel with Morey, Nick Wright and Jalen Rose. Dear God Jalen was so unqualified to speak.
You're doing your MBA now? That was a great discussion. I thought it was refreshing to have a player up there who did embrace analytics, so they could ask him which ones he didn't like vs eye test...and I completely agreed with that +/-, and seemed everyone else did as well, except Lowe. That said, Rose got awkwardly off on tangents, and there were times I couldn't follow what he was saying. That Pyramid thing was odd and didn't really address the question.
That wasn't clear, imo. He was definitely correct in talking about reasons why Tyus Jones was an anomaly in RPM. His whole point was you can greatly affect some stats with a story/narrative of matchups in the game, even RPM. Morey definitely agreed with that by offering simple reasons which they clearly discuss when evaluating players, and even Lowe agreed by saying he's not so sure how valuable RPM is ... he called it one of the more troubling stats, right. From the outset, Jalen was presented as being the voice of court experience who also embraced advanced analytics. He wasn't the best at staying on topic and was definitely hard for me to follow, but that +/- and RPM stuff as an answer to the question "Which stats might not be as good as the traditional eye-test" was on target. as an aside: You could tell from the insight Zarren (Celtics asst GM) gave that the main advanced analytics these teams use are not available in boxscores. So Morey and Zarren didn't really engage in the RPM talk, much, as they clearly don't use it. Several times Zarren mentioned stats that you can only know from using the Sports-VU camera data and having custom video analysis algorithms to slice up the game vid into actual plays. Indeed, STATs, LLC, offers custom consulting to NBA teams to create special big data analysis of their SportsVU game feeds specific to the plays the team describes....as well as defensive alignment analysis.
A player's motor is critical. If a player doesn't show signs of growth or wanting to grow, definitely time to move on. Rockets need "hoopers."