I think we are going to find out real soon what the actual market value is for Swift since it doesn't sound like Memphis is planning on keeping him and he doesn't want to return. ...I think the thing to point out here as a previous poster did - the Rockets traded the rights to the 8th pick. West picked Gay with that pick as the Rockets were choosing for him. The Rockets didn't pick Gay to trade him. It's like if I want something you have and you want $8 for it - I could either buy something for $8 and give it to you(good), or give you $8 to spend however you want(better). In essence there was more overall value in the right to choose Gay than Gay himself so any deal the Rockets were entertaining was between teams who wanted the right to choose whomever they wanted with that pick. Obviously Memphis valued that pick the most. which somewhat says something about other team's willingness to take on a project like Gay if they had to give up a rotation player in return. If we had used that draft pic, the odds would have been much better we would have Ronnie Brewer right now. Brewer and Swift are okay, but I would rather have Battier than the two of them....
You are all wrong, my real identify is Stromile Swift. The recent trade was a huge shock to me. I spent days wandering the backwoods of Lousiana and the champagne rooms of gentlemen's clubs. I questioned why they had to throw in Rudy Gay just to get rid of me for Shane Battier. The lap dances barely took away the pain. As I thought about my career, my contemplation opened my eyes to my mediocrity, what a big waste of money I've beeen, and the worthlessness of freakishly atheletic lotto picks compared to guys like Shane Battier. I've always thought Shane was just a fellow role player, but then a dancer named Katie told me to look up 82games.com. What an eye opener! That website made me realize that Shane a real NBA star and American hero. Thanks Katie and 82games.com! Goodbye, fair Houston! It's back to Tennessee for me! (in case you haven't noticed, I am just kidding... no, I'm not Stromile Swift, just a Rockets fan)
It's kind of ironic you're saying that, because in 2005, the A's went after high school pitchers in a big way. There is a long analysis in Baseball Prospectus 2006 (ISBN-10: 0-7611-3995-8, pp 326-330) as to why Billy did that. The biggest is that college baseball players have been gaining in value and therefore aren't the bargain they were in the early 1990s. The other reason, according to Baseball Prospectus, is that if you get the pitchers cheap, then the potential for a "grand slam" winner costs you a lot less, even if there is a high failure rate among high school players. I believe it to be incorrect to say that Billy Beane doesn't value potential, even in the Moneyball book (which was written by Michael Lewis, not Beane). At the time, Paul DePodesta, Beane's stat guru, felt that OBP was the most important stat and undervalued. They looked at all kinds of prospects, rating them by virtue of their ability to get on base. But all the proven college OBP and high school OBP in the world is simply potential for hitting for OBP in the pros. Calling the Battier trade a Moneyball trade misses a lot of points. Battier would have had to be undervalued for this to be a "Moneyball" trade. Trading a #8 draft choice and a former #3 draft choice for Battier seems like an awful lot of value for Battier to me. That's 2 first round draft choices. Hardly undervalued. Hardly a Moneyball trade. David.
Let me guess Katie was a student studing statistics at Rice, but was dancing to pay for tuition. I believe Memphis has a deal for Stromile already in place, but can't announce it until the Rocket trade goes thru. West doesn't want Stromile and Stromile doesn't want to play for West. Also the Rocket's deal is not finalized with Memphis yet, so there could be something else coming our way. Maybe it is depended on the secondary trade of Stromile.
Just my ought two, but the people who use the phrase usually have no clue what they're talking about. They're the same group of people who will tell you that Billy Beane wrote Moneyball (he didn't, Michael Lewis did), or that moneyball is about valuing OBP, period, or college players, period. A closer approximation of the truth is that Moneyball is about finding winning skills in players others haven't properly valued, in order to compete in a market dominated by the finances of a couple large market clubs. The Bob Sura pickup was more a Moneyball "trade" than this Battier deal. David.
Sheeez. Rice girls don't dance at Treasures. HCC girls hoping to transfer to Cougar High, now that I believe.
David, 1. Good point about moneyball being more flexible than most made it out to be.. it is indeed to find undervalued guys, whoever they may be. If one day the OBP champ gets paid $10 mil a year and the homerun leader gets $4 mil... OBP is probably no longer undervalued. 2. Analyzing the Battier trade in terms of the pick number is not the right way to look at it. Swift was actually a #2 overall pick, Rudy an 8th overall... but pick orders are essentially meaningless when we are talking about guys 3-4+ years into their career. Josh Howard, Tony Parker were barely first rounders. Todd Fuller was a lotto pick, Adonal Foyle was 9th overall, Hoff Araujo was 8th overall, Kandi Man was 1st overall.. Stromile, unfortunately, is a 20 mpg guy in the league, not withstanding his high pick. As for Rudy, again, he's another mid lotto pick... objectively, their chance of superstardom is about 4% (for picks 5-10 between 1984-2003). What you have in him is a spin of the roullete wheel without much chance of winning. Battier, on the other hand, is an elite heady defender and fine shooter with a great contract. There are very few of these guys in the league. To me, he's a better guy to have on your squad than the Maggettes and Stephen Jacksons of the world. (In fact, I'm pretty sure West said "No thanks" repeatedly to this kind of offer over the last few eyars.) In the end, the Rockets traded a dollar (Stro) and a $5 lotto ticket (Gay) for $10 (Battier). It's godo value. 3. Since NBA teams do not have A, AA, AAA farm teams and they do have salary caps, stocking up on "potential" guys do make as much sense as it does in baseball. Your 15 roster spots are a precious commodity and your space under the luxury tax limit are a precious commodity. You want each spot to be used for a contributing player. If the Rockets had 3 farm teams to stock up on a ton of guys like Rudy and Stro, it makes sense to stockpile them, because chances are a few of them will pay off. As it stands now, though, you want to ony spend money and roster space on contributing players. So, if Stro can be traded for nothing, it's probably a decent trade considering you gain space under the tax threshold and a roster spot.
As I said in my earlier post, the things that are undervalued and overvalued changes over time, so the things that a Moneyball philosophy team will acquire will have to change with the market. I was speaking in the context of the book which goes up to the 2003 season. Here's a couple of excerpts from the book regarding potential. They probably explain the potential vs proven results idea better than I can. Whatever happened when an older man who failed to become a big league star looks at a younger man with a view to imagining whether he might become a big league star, Billy wanted nothing more to do with it. He'd been on the receiving end of the dreams of older men and he knew what they were worth. Over and over "The guy has a great body," or, "This guy,” the old scouts will say, “maybe the best body in the draft.”. And every time they do, Billy will say, “We're not selling jeans here," and deposit yet another highly touted player, beloved by the scouts, onto his **** list. One after another the players the scouts rated highly vanish from the white board, until it's empty ------------------------------- Billy had his own idea about where to find future major league baseball players: inside Paul's computer. He'd flirted with the idea of firing all the scouts and just drafting the kids straight from Paul's laptop. The Internet now served up just about every statistic you could want about every college player in the country, and Paul knew them all. Paul's laptop didn't have a tiny red bell on top that whirled and whistled whenever a college player's on-base percentage climbed above .450, but it might as well have. From Paul's point of view, that was the great thing about college players: they had meaningful stats. They played a lot more games, against stiffer competition, than high school players. The sample size of their relevant statistics was larger, and therefore a more accurate reflection of some underlying reality. You could project college players with greater certainty than you could project high school players. The statistics enabled you to find your way past all sorts of sight-based scouting prejudices: the scouting dislike of short right-handed pitchers, for instance, or the scouting distrust of skinny little guys who get on base. Or the scouting distaste for fat catchers. That was the source of this conflict. For Billy and Paul and, to a slightly lesser extent, Erik and Chris, a young player is not what he looks like, or what he might become, but what he has done. As elementary as that might sound to someone who knew nothing about professional baseball, it counts as heresy here. The scouts even have a catch phrase for what Billy and Paul are up to: "performance scouting." "Performance scouting," in scouting circles, is an insult. It directly contradicts the baseball man's view that a young player is what you can see him doing in your mind's eye. It argues that most of what's important about a baseball player, maybe even including his character, can be found in his statistics. --------------------------- Bogie brought into the draft room something unique: vast experience to which he had no visceral attachment. He'd been in the game for nearly fifty years. He'd seen a lot, perhaps everything, and he was willing to forget it, if asked. As it happened, one of the things he had seen, back in 1980, was a high school game in San Diego. That was the year that the Mets took Darryl Strawberry with the first overall pick in the draft. But that year there was another high school player, who, in his ability to conjure fantasies in the baseball scouting mind, rivaled Strawberry. Bogie had gone to see him at the behest of the Houston Astros. Great body, plus wheels, plus arm, good instincts, and the ability to hit the ball over light towers. To top it off, he'd scored higher than any other prospect on the psychological tests. Bogie had phoned Houston and told the front office that he had found a better prospect than Darryl Strawberry: Billy Beane. When asked which player, on the Oakland A's draft board, most resembled the young Billy Beane, Bogie said, "****, man. There is no Billy Beane. Not up there." When asked why, he'd said, "Billy was a guy you could dream on," and left it to you to understand that Billy Beane, the general manager, had just systematically eliminated guys "you could dream on," But when asked what became of those still unforgotten dreams, Bogie hesitated. He looked over and met the eye of the grown-up Billy Beane Van Gundier has already addressed this quite well. A players current value has nothing to do with where they were drafted. I could go on and on with all kind of Gilbert Arenas vs Kwame Brown comparisions, but you get the idea. Your value is based on what you can do today and how much it cost to acquire you.
I don't see how I'm placing a higher value on Stro than "many others" when the vast majority of this board hates this trade. It seems more like "a few others" are the ones that are placing a lower value on Swift. As for what Stromile is worth, on a strict one for one scenario, I'd put his value at around guys like Trenton Hassell, Antonio Daniels, and Brent Barry. Guys that are also making MLE money and have been more or less underwhelming after signing their contracts. If we step it up and list guys that might be had for Stro and filler (Sura or Bowen or Deke), then that might get you someone like Boozer, Dunleavy, Hughes (and maybe Maggette if we toss in a draft pick), guys who signed a big deal and has their team regretting it on some level. Or we might be able to peddle Stro in a sign and trade deal for guys like Songaila, Qyntel Woods, Rasual Butler, Kirk Snyder, Stevenson, Flip Murray. These guys could leave their teams with nothing, so they probably wouldn't mind getting Stro as something in return. And for the record, we wouldn't have to give them the full MLE to match salaries. $3.5 million would be within 125% + 100k of Stromile's salary. And you can always add minimum guys to add up to the 3.5 million. So we don't have to overpay a guy whose market value is half the MLE. Like glimmertwins said, we should find out very soon what Stro is worth on the open market because it doesn't look like either party wants him in Memphis. If West gets anything more than a pure salary dump for Stro, then we come out looking like bigger fools than we already do.
this may be the best thread on Clutchfans that i've read in the last 4 years. keep it up, van gundier and m_cable. both of you are touching on some fresh ideas that a lot of us have been thinking to ourselves on an already-stale topic, and it's amounted to some really engaging reading.
That quote is not about potential; that's about how scouts misdiagnose potential. It was about assessing the potential of a baseball player purely by looks, as opposed to a more appropriate set of metrics. Billy had some terrific athletic skills, so many that he emotionally overwhelmed scouts who looked at him, and they missed the quirks in character - his lack of patience, his temper - that made him, at best, a mediocre baseball player. The deal is this: you get no superstars if you consistently misdiagnose potential, you get no trades that go your way if you misdiagnose potential. In fact the As are all about the accurate assessment of potential. If they draft a player, they want better players than their competition. If they trade players, they want more value out of their trades than their opponents know. If a team (say the White Sox) misdiagnose a player (such as Chad Bradford), then they want to take advantage of that misdiagnosis. But consider this: if the As thought potential was worthless, why draft players at all? A little bit of thought can easily convince you that As value potential a great deal, because a large portion of their strategy is to get great players on the cheap, sign them to low cost deals, and when they got too expensive to keep, trade them, if at all possible, for more talent. If they can't trade them, well, do the best they can with compensatory draft picks. If the As didn't value potential, then why did Billy Beane angst so badly over Nick Swisher? Why did Billy constantly try to get Kevin Youklis from Theo Epstein? Why? Youklis had never played a day of major league baseball in his life. David.
Other than the fact that they are both polished, the comparison doesn't stand. Coming out, Battier's ceiling was limited. Everyone knew going in that he would only amount to a glorified glue guy. Roy on the other hand possesses playmaking abilities that set him apart. The reason I can't get behind your argument is that it is too highly optimistic of the Rockets' present state. You downplay the ability of a player to create his own shot and cite the presence of Yao and McGrady but I think that is just unrealistic. Even if we are assuming that McGrady by some miracle stays healthy, history tells us that there will be stretches where Yao will be plagued by foul trouble or fatigue. I just simply do not think the two-star model can make it out of the West in the current Western Conference with the challenge of outgunning the Phoenix's and Dallas'. One might point to defense but a Van Gundy team will always have a plus defense regardless of the individual peices. Another problem I have with your argument is your comparison to baseball in not having a minor league system to develop players and the value of roster space. I completely disagree because it is absolutely essential for a team's future to develop their own young players. Because there is no salary cap in baseball a team can add talent whenever, however in basketball, teams must rebuild through the draft and shrewd managing. If you simply hold the mindset that "this guy isn't going to help us this year so why waste a roster spot on him?" then you have a team of Ryan Bowens with no prospect for the future. Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili didn't grow on trees and become All-Stars overnight - they had to take their lumps along the way. My problem with this trade isn't necessarily giving up Rudy Gay. As m_cable has said, it's the asset management. The pro-trade argument seems overly wreckless in its insistence that "Stromile is of negative value so why waste a roster spot? Use that salary elsewhere." That's reckless. A good GM parlays that value into another asset. If you continuously negate mistakes, you are simply back to square one. Finally, I feel that trading the risky Gay for the solid Battier is too conservative of an approach to take. I am fully sold on Battier's virtues, but this is simply assuming that everything else falls into place. Translation: Yao and McGrady have to be Shaq/Kobe cerca 2000 for this experiment to work. Gay, while riskier, gives you some margin for error. I just feel that it will take an "out of the box" approach to win the West as I do not value our two star players as highly as the pro-trade crowd does. Yao and McGrady, as great as they are, have their warts. Yao will always be slow and foul prone, and McGrady may not ever be the same again. I would much rather try the unorthodox approach of including Gay in the lineup (ala Dallas with Terry at the point and a jump shooting Dirk, Phoenix with Marion etc.) rather than to simply bank on Battier "knocking down open shots" off of 111. It's just too optimistic of Tracy's health.
Part of the anger over this trade is based on the fact we're not a club with tons and tons of lottery picks and when we got one, we trade the pick to one of the most canny talent scouts in creation and throw in Stromile Swift as well. If this trade is ever recognized as a good one for the Rockets, I believe it will be in the following context: Battier is the kind of "team first" player that JVG really covets, and he doesn't have to pick up someone's washed up 37 year old to get him. I'm not sure that over time, we'll be the winners in absolute value here. But if we get 5-8 good years out of Battier, it may not be as horrible as Rocket fandom's visceral first reaction.
m_cable (again), I have really enjoyed this thread and your comments are a big part of it. So I am not arguing with you or anything like that, but I just want to make sure I am clear on what you said. And by the way, thanks for the answer. If you were the GM of the Jazz, and actual current contracts as they are, you would trade Boozer for Swift and one of Deke, Sura or Bowen? Talk about a trade that would get the board riled up.
We're each using using potential in different context. Obviously, anytime you select a player to play at a higher level you are speculating that the player will produce at that level. That's a given, but there's also nothing you can do about that since you can't draft a veteran player in an amateur draft. MLB doesn't allow you to trade draft picks, so Oakland has to draft somebody. What I'm refering to as potential is the idea that a player is going to develop specific skills or traits once they reach the next level. Here's a couple of more moneyball quotes on that subject: "My only question is," says Billy, "if he's that good a hitter why doesn't he hit better?" "The swing needs some work. You have to reinvent him. But he can hit." "Pro baseball's not real good at reinventing guys," says Billy. ------------------------------------- "Who do you like better? " asks Billy. The old scout leans back in his chair and folds his arms. "What about Perry?" he says. "When you see him do something right on a swing, it's impressive. There's some work that needs to be done. He needs to be reworked a bit." "You don't change guys," says Billy. "They are who they are." That's what I'm talking about when I say potential. People like Rudy Gay because of what they think he could become, not because of what they've seen him do in college. Moneyball places emphisis on track records over simply projecting what you think a guy could become (potential).
1. The biggest difference in the opinions here is the one regarding Battier's value. Some fans think he's just a "glorified glue guy" or "solid role player" that can be found relatively easily and cheaply-- a Bob Sura type if you will. Myself and some others think he's one of the top few most effective 2-way impact players out there-- a Tayshaun Prince, perhaps, who isn't as good at creating his own shots. Guys like these are a big notch over the Bob Suras and are very hard to find. Thus, I believe you have to pay good value to trade for of them if you didn't get one via draft or free agency. A big difficulty is figuring out the value of Battier is that there are very few player similar to him in this league. He's hard to categorize. People are accustom to talking about categories such as superstars, stars, and role players. The usual sports conversation sees these categories as a linear difference in quality with Superstars>stars>role players. To me, just like there are distinctions between superstars and stars (TMac vs. Richard Jefferson) there is a distinction between a "super-role player" and a regualr role-player (Battier vs. Sura)-- of course there's the below-average role player (Ryan Bowen, Boniface N'Dong), too. A super role-player is hard to find, and it's hard to tell a super-role player from from another by looking at boxscores. I think that Battier is one of these "super role-players". I also have a hunch (and just a hunch) that many of us might be suprised to hear what offers for Battier Jerry West has turned down in the past. I've consistently read reports about Jerry West saying "no" to Battier trades for years-- not quite sure what's offered, but probably better than most people think. In any case, 8th pick + Stro was not far from another offer that West received and conditionally agreed to (according to Seattle papers): 10th pick + expiring contract of Fortson. 2. About Stro's value: I don't think he's nearly as negative as Jerome James. Rockets would have to throw in another first rounder if they had to include Jerome instead of Stro in the deal. On the other hand, he doesn't have much positive value, either.
