Lewis: Rockets Go Way Beyond 'Moneyball' A's In Terms Of IP

I guarantee Lowry was one of those 7 players and that's why they got him. There is no way he was acquired based on watching him play, because he's terrible.

 

Yep. Joe Dumars passed up on Carmelo Anthony, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh for Darko Milicic. Mistakes are part of the business.

 

Some of this is seriously complaining for the sake of complaining. Are you seriously upset you didn't get a rotation player with a second-round draft pick (Dorsey)? This is the NBA, not the NFL. Once you're out of the top 10 -- top six or seven, in some drafts -- getting a quality rotation player is 50/50 at best. Once you get to the second round... wow, you're talking 20%, maybe. I don't care if it's the greatest GM in the history of sports -- complaining over a second-round NBA pick not having an impact as a rookie is beyond silly.

Likewise, anyone care to take a look at what Francis and Barry were/are making? Morey didn't sign those guys with the intent of them being 25-30 mpg starters (or close to it). They're veteran bench fodder signed for very little on the hopes that maybe they had a little left. High reward, little risk.

At this point, I'm convinced Morey is a superb GM, because every asset he's treated (either by contract, trade value, role, etc.) as if it were a significant rotation piece has panned out well. Is he perfect? No, but no one is, and no one can come close. If you're expecting a second-round NBA draft pick to come in and contribute as a rookie, you have absolutely zero grasp of reality.

I am begging someone to answer this question. Begging. Can anyone, and I mean anyone, provide any evidence -- other than a random SAS video and a Sam Smith column -- that this deal was an option for Daryl Morey? I can write something tomorrow about the Rockets having the opportunity to deal Tracy for LeBron James. Doesn't make it fact. Rumors fly all over the place in this league. Most of them are complete BS, if you haven't figured it out.

(By the way, the fact that the Pistons went on to trade Billups for Iverson basically means nothing. Are Iverson and McGrady comparable players, in terms of position and current value? Probably. But everything in the NBA these days revolves around expiring contracts. Iverson's contract is up now, but McGrady's is not. Not at all a comparable situation.)

 

Til this day I still laugh and say that Darko has a ring by doing absolutely nothing That's something to really laugh about.

 

It's true that the trade 'looks like' a gamble at that time, I just think he has proved to be a good GM not great one yet.

Of course if there's a deal like LA getting Gasol, it's a no brainer. On the other hand, Denver getting Billups for AI can't be deemed as merely good luck. Same goes for Boston getting Garnet, Miami getting Shaq for Odom+fillers...

Last year Tmac was actually not that great as CLUTCH illustrated in a recent thread. His shooting percentage is consistently declining in last few years, and the injury's has already limited his explosiveness significantly. 10 straight wins after yao went down masks his low shooting percentage in those games, and was falsely interpreted as TMac carrying the team instead of the team effort plus TMac's great passing(so called 'true assists').

Basically Morey should be able to conceive Tmac's real value: An injury prone 'true assists' leader with mediocre shooting and lackluster denfense. That's it, and everybody knows Billups is a healthy all-around player maybe right below superstar level and above allstar level with championship experience(Final's MVP) with a few year's gas left. I don't know if Les sticking with TMAC has any impact on Morey's no trade decision. But he should be smart than that.

 

I don't know if there's a trade being offered like that. If not, then forget it.

On the piston's side, sure AI's expiring is worth more.

 

Here's what Jonathan Feigen wrote about it in the comments section of his blog:

[rquoter]
...
Another question is: did the rockets have a chance to get Billups when he was available in Detroit?
Man, if he was a rockets......

(No, they are not changing their starting lineup now. They had a chance to get Billups. There was something in the offer that made it a non-starter to the Rockets and at the time was non-negotiable. I don't know what it was, but there was only a brief conversation and Joe Dumars was not part of the call. -- Jonathan)[/rquoter]

Don't know what the "non-starter" might have been.

 

Gerald Wallace and Mickael Pietrus are guys I think are on that list of being undervalued. Those guys can play on both sides of the court. Grant Hill too.

 

The knock on moneyball as it relates of the A's, is that they never had the fiancial backing to compete with the large markets in a uncaped salary system so they found a way to remain competative and play with the ressources they had. That to me is not a bad way of doing business, beats playing roulette alas Isiah Thomas and the Knicks.

Now the MOREYball is a little different cause there is a salary cap in place in the NBA and teams at the top of payroll list, all have some of the worse contracts ever conceived by a GM. The salary cap doesn't allow one team to hold more than 2 max contracts without facing luxury tax. Rockets are no 7 on the list for this very reason and yet have no bad contracts at all which goes to show how hard it has become for a GM to be fiscally responsible and maintain a competative team every year. Morey has found a system that gives better returns than conventional methods and provides the best oppurtunity to maintain the influx of talent year in, year out that is needed to win in this league. He has taken parts from other GMs' garages and tweaked it and added it to his engine and now it works much more efficiently.

Morey understands that VALUE of a player is always dynamic and can change dramtically over the course of just one season. Superstars can become poisonous contracts and scrubs can have a breakout year and sign huge contracts in simply a season. Most people that watch the game, always identify value or the increase and decrease of, once it has reached a certain threshold that is evident both visibly and statistically. Your production goes up then you get pay raise and vice versa. However many observers fail to account the efficiency of those numbers ie a guy doing 20-10 a night could be playing for a bad team hence he is able to generate those numbers by using 40% of the shots taken by his team.

Again true value can only be understood if you can breakdown a player's entire game and give him a rating for his contribution to every single play whether on offense or defense.

Another aspect of moneyball that is often overlooked is the frugality of the GM. Nope it doesn't mean you are cheap just that you believe all parts are equally replaceable and cost effective to find new ones once a player exceeds that threshold of general consensus of value. Or in Jay-Z's words:

"You know I, thug 'em, **** 'em, love 'em, leave 'em, cause I don't ****ing need 'em"

 

Morey didn't bring yao and tmac here.

 

Not quite what you asked, but I think Carl Landry was considered 'under valued' because he was injured in his senior year, and therefor not on a lot of peoples charts. DM was willing to look at the previous three years and make a decision based on that. Not sure how to chart the bullet wound!

 

Pietrus is a classic example of the type of "undervalued overpaid" kind of player that was being discussed earlier. You DO know he's making around 22 million over 4 years right?

 

My list of undervalued players:

Chris Anderson
Trevor Ariza
Brandon Bass
Shane Battier
Raja Bell
Ronnie Brewer
Caron Butler
Will Bynum
Jose Calderon
Boris Diaw
Marcin Gortat
Udonus Haslem
Spencer Hawes
Chuck Hayes
Andre Iguodala
Al Jefferson
Joe Johnson
David Lee
Kyle Lowry
Paul Milsap
Travis Outlaw
Mikael Pietrus
James Posey
Leon Powe
John Salmons
Luis Scola
Gerald Wallace

I could see Morey targeting six of those guys for his "list"

 

Actually now that I think about it, some of these are paid correctly but just don't get much respect from the media.

 

That's mle money which isn't great by nba standards, shane makes more than that. A undervalued guy is a guy that has outperforrmed his contract. Hedo and salmons signed for mle money.A guy like outlaw is probably undervalued looking at his production and his age vs salary.

 

On Richard Justice's radio show CD gave Dean Cooper the credit for finding Landry for the Rockets.

 

The gap will close quickly enough, and whatever advantage the Rockets have will narrow. In that regard, time is of the essence, and not just because of Yao's age and injuries, but also because other teams are going to start pursuing the same type of players the Rockets are. Perhaps this is why the Rockets want to buy a pick. Maybe they realize that some of the things they see in this draft class will become more understood with each future draft.

 

Again, I feel compelled to remind some of you that the undervalued, in the sense that Morey thinks, isn't particularly tied to the contract. The Rockets' big splash this summer, if they make one, isn't likely to come from the MLE. It would come via trade, and what Morey’s looking at are players that aren’t properly valued by their teams on the floor, and could come at a discount in terms of personnel surrendered in a deal. Lowry, Battier and Scola are examples of this.

 

Cat, that's on point. I can see some guys that are really good players on poor teams that aren't overpaid. Of course you would like to get guys in a rookie contract that's about to explode, but there are guys who are mle guys similar to salmons and hedo. Now, you're not going to get those 2, but there are other guys similar to that. I still think with tracy basically done, they need a impact player. Those impact guys aren't cheap though.

 

I disagree.

First, as Lewis said in that interview, the Rockets are significantly more secretive than the A's. Second, the whole advance stats methods of OBP, WHIP, etc. were already out there in terms of the Bill James-types talking about it. Third, the baseball optimization problem is a lot simpler than the same problem in basketball. Again, as Lewis said, basketball is a true "team" sport where players have to interact, and that makes the whole exercise a lot more complicated.

People tend to think that "Moneyball" means the Rockets' main advantage is that they have the Holy Grail stat that would enable you to rank players from most to least valuable or other "more advanced stats" to measure player perofrmance. If so, it would be fairly easy for teams to catch up. All that stuff is available in public.

That does not seem like the case, however. The Rockets have not only methods they don't share in public, such methods also seem to be rather labor intensive to implement as evidenced by the large number of stats guys that Morey employs. It would seem there is a lot of "grunt work" involved in whatever they are doing.