Hollinger on the Rockets' prospects for this season

Dude you didn't know? Pritchard, Morey, and Presti are considered the biggest moneyball GMS in the league. Pritchard was into the moneyball concept, when he was director of player personnel. They made him GM to take it further. Here is a little google.



Portland used moneyball to pick Aldridge over Morrison. They used to use Protrade, but have moved on from that service and now do all of it in house.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2006/1016/056.html
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-17-22/Moneyball-Statistics-Changing-Basketball.html

http://www.apbr.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=346&sid=76fb086521d24ea00d41f44097f29579

http://www.spurstalk.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-13039.html

Presti was a moneyball intern for the Spurs before he became GM.

 

Ma referenced in the articles above is Jeffrey Ma, a member of the MIT blackjack team.

The main character(Ben Campbell) in the movie 21 was based on Jeffrey Ma.

 

The Celtics used these principles- acquiring young, undervalued talent, assets and flipping them for superstars. That's moneyball if your franchise has resources. The Rockets are not exactly the Oakland A's- they've got an owner willing to make big moves. Morey's one of the best GM's in the business, in my opinion.

 

If moneyball is not signing guys like Wafer for the full MLE, count me as on board.

Seriously, that was an obvious pitfall that I'm glad we've avoided. Wafer came up big for the Rockets last season, but you just don't want to get locked into an expensive contract with a guy who could go up or down.

I don't have many complaints about the way Morey has handled the situation since he got here. It's a ****ty situation, for sure -- losing your two biggest investments.

The way it looks to me, Moneyball got us one game away from the WCF for the first time in a long time, and we didn't even have half of our payroll on the floor. Hell, I'm downright excited about these next couple of years -- what if Morey does manage to land a big time player, who can actually play a full season?

I see no reason to lose faith in Morey at this point.

Also, I like Hollinger, but I think is hilarious how he basically says "oh, you know, maybe they'll win like 30-45 games or so...." Nice. That's how I would handle all of my predictions if I were getting paid for them. Then you can just sit around at the end of the year and go, "See?"