Rockets GM Morey Is the Billy Beane of the NBA

By Bethlehem Shoals
It’s funny, I’d totally forgotten that Rockets GM Daryl Morey is a supreme stat geek. Thank you, Toronto Star; this makes it a lot easier to make sense of their success.
[quote="The Toronto Star"]The Rockets have invested millions in everything from the massive computer servers required to store the hours and hours of digital video from which statistical trends are mined, to the analysts who do the prospecting. And if Morey has hit on something revolutionary, nobody is expecting him to share the wealth of proprietary data.[/quote]
[img=http://i.tsn.com/i/photos/20080313/87547.jpg]
Really, I’m not being sarcastic in the least. While I’ve favorably compared them to Adelman’s best Kings teams or last season’s Warriors, the Rockets are missing an important part of that analogy. Namely, the personnel aren’t especially skilled or athletic; those Kings thrived on skill, while the Warriors depended on athleticism. While T-Mac is both, and Landry can dunk hard, most of this team are role players, or limited, or otherwise “eh” to the untrained eye. If they were just winning a lot, we could talk about them like a college team and make a lot of dads happy. But they’re generally destroying opponents. They aren’t just functioning, they’re dominating.
Grit and determination can only get you so far. There’s got to be some higher power at work, some unifying theme that explains this team. And in the absence of any other good candidates, I’m willing to chalk it up to Morey’s wizardry.↵