From Friday 5.15.15 [I'm saying] [LeBron] doesn't make the greatest players on his team better. The guys he helped the most are the lesser guys. Bosh, Wade, Irving & Love are not made appreciably better by LeBron. He makes your team better obviously but is my assessment ridiculous or no? I think it's ridiculous. He makes everyone better. He's pretty amazing. How are you defining that Morey? When you have someone like LeBron or Harden, they open everything up for everyone. James has had an up and down performance but mostly because he's getting the most attention on the floor of any player on either team. You don't believe it would be hard for a great player to play with Harden? Great players want to play with great players because they want to win. That's been proven in Miami. When Bosh is in Toronto - 22 & 10 consistently. He had a year here where he was 16 & 7. Those numbers are appendix. If you ask me how many points and rebounds any of our guys average, I have no idea. I couldn't answer that. What numbers are you using? Our only currency is winning. That's why we were pushing Harden for MVP. If you measure how much does that guy make your team win, by himself or making teammates better, Harden was number one in the league. That's the only currency we use. It's gonna be better for the game when people aren't focused on raw points and things like that. You can't do what you just did to me. You can't say you just use winning. What else are you using? Winning on the floor or you making your team win on both ends. You can't measure it precisely but pretty well. Help me understand. Right now, I'm trying to be careful on Twitter to not do anything crazy. It's basic. Take two things: measure everything that happens on the floor. Usually that's does he score a basket, get a rebound but nowadays it's much more measured. Does he have the hockey assist, did he set a screen to open a guy up, did he close out well? Measure all those things. At the same time, you look at when a guy is playing against who and on the floor, and look at the different combinations of when it happened. Look at it as a mini-game, 10 players play for between 30 seconds and 3 minutes. Who wins those minutes? Take those mini-games throughout the game, who is winning/losing those minutes, who's on the floor, who isn't, triangulate between the event level data you have and the top down. I like that explanation. +/- do you trust it? What I just described is high level +/-. That data from a raw perspective is not useful. Jason Terry is always playing with Harden and Howard so he has a terrific +/-. You can't use raw +/-. Adjust for who you're playing against, when, what kind of combinations and correlate that with what you're actually doing on the floor. Do you make or miss the open look, make or miss the guarded look, do you make the pass to a high percentage shot or are you turning it over? Mush that all up and ...you can see who is creating wins for your team and who isn't. Was that so hard Morey? ... What are you thinking to yourself last night, down 19, and Harden is going to the bench? Just how we planned it. It's the randomness of sports. Our guys didn't want to lose. We had multiple guys who had won titles on the floor. We had a guy who's feeling like this is his best shot in his career in Dwight Howard and there's a big refuse to lose mentality. Sometimes you have the refuse to lose mentality but... you still lose. We got them on their heels. Coach McHale pushed all the right buttons. That's why we all love sports. The original reality TV. You don't know the outcome. It's fun, it's exciting. At any point did you think your season was over? When you're down 19 in the 3rd Q, it's absolutely something that goes through your mind. We never gave up hope. Our guys on the floor battled hard. Corey Brewer has been a guy all year who has stepped up in the times when it looked bleakest. He did it for us again. He won a title in the NBA and twice in college and you can see why. Yes or no, biggest win of Daryl Morey's life last night? Yes.
wow, awesome interview that part where he explains how they measure winning is pure gold The most intangible part of sports is the will to win and that sense of destiny. He just described Howard and Brewer as having it. We've seen how the team reached the next level by being pushed by the Clips against the wall. Our confidence level will be high entering tomorrow's game.
People who believe Morey is ONLY a numbers guy are idiots. I don't know how many times he has to explain that while numbers can help pick up on players' tendencies and weaknesses, that it is only a facet (albeit very important one) of the game. Humans cannot be quantified by numbers. Humans, especially when backed into a corner, can rise above expectations and do ridiculous things to surprise everyone.
When Daryl was making his case for Harden as MVP, he mentioned how he generates the most wins, so I think if there's any readily available "advanced stat" that they value it would be Bill James' win shares. If you look at all the players they've drafted, from Dorsey to Nick Johnson, all of those players were at least top 15 in win shares in the NCAA.
The key is the "mush that all up" part. The ultimate measure of a player's value has to be a deep (or "very high level" as Morey puts it) +/- metric. Measuring all those components aren't difficult, with today's tracking technology. It's how you "mush them up" that determines how accurate your method is. They all use a complicated formula to mush the data into some kind of simple number. How the formula is devised is the problem.
