The injuries to Thabo and Korver didn’t help things either. They were 3-1 against the Cavs during the season, then lost in the playoffs with their best defender injured and their best shooter got taken out in game 2 by a dirty play

It also collapsed in the playoffs against teams that could afford better top of the lineup talent.

Which also is true of Moneyball teams. Except the Brewers, I guess.

100%, he started it all with the Shane Battier trade*

The book “Thinking Fast and Slow” highlights that Morey was using a similar approach when building those Rockets teams

Moreyball. Basically one letter difference.

I don’t think it even could be anything else. The only difference was that it was a hyper optimized play style rather than hyper optimized roster management. But it was conceptually the same idea and it took a far more talented Warriors team to the brink.

The shot charts from that team were ridiculous.

We were shooting more 3s than the warriors every season for like 5 years

Usually, they’d pick what many other GMs perceive as role players for cheap prices.

idk to me this is far more Pat Riley. It’s already memed that Heat players suck as soon as they leave Miami, he seems to get the most out of players.

AKA Moreyball.

It’s hoarding draft picks to find cheap young talent.

That’s a 10 year old meta. We are past that, virtually everybody has to shoot. Currently it’s having a very deep rotation with young athletic players that can run the court and play with 100% effort.

There is a fantastic book called Sprawlball which covers this topic. It’s a play on Moneyball and how the game has “sprawled” aka, points are scored at a higher percentage farther from the basket compared to the last.

It’s a little overblown. Thinking Basketball did a deep dive into this and the percentage of jump shots now is roughly the same as it was decades ago, the difference is that now they are being taken from 23 feet away instead of 18

I think that’s what the MCW era Sixers called “Variance”. Basically, our team absolutely sucks so let’s just chuck nothing but threes and every 5th game the stars will align, everyone will get hot, and we’ll steal a game.

I’d actually say the Timberwolves have done this to some degree with Gobert. He’s getting paid and is recognized for his accomplishments but his value add was probably underrated for his pay.

There are a lot of non rookie deals where the player is underpaid relative to their performance.

For a couple Laker references. Thybulle and Zaiare have both played better than their vet min contracts. In 2020 the Lakers won with Rondo, Bradley and Dwight playing key roles, who were considered washed and on their way out of the league.

Bruce Brown helped the Nuggets win on a 1 year deal, then got paid the next season.

At the end of every season there’s players where we look back and say “how did they get him for so cheap?”. The Heat did it for years.

Wolves got a good price for both LaMelo and Ayo

There’s “prices” in terms of the salary cap, and there’s “prices” in terms of the assets/draft picks given up for a great player. Pre-Harden, the Rockets were basically keeping their powder dry and acquiring assets so that if a star player became unexpectedly available they could jump into the market easily. And then Harden became available and they jumped in.

Morey has always been pretty clear that it was a star-driven league and before Harden joined the team he was trying to size up ways to get one.

Id agree the cheap-but-effective players are rarer in the NBA, outside of vet contract buyouts, but it does happen. Very old example, but Shane Battier on the heat comes to mind any time people talk about that sort of player. He was a known positive, but only the nerds among us knew what he really was. More modern, nobody can deny him now, but Alex Caruso fits that archetype.

It’s way more possible to cover weaknesses in basketball than baseball. Most everything in baseball is a 1 on 1 or solo outcome.

Also, max contracts can obviously be good prices.

And in the movie they lost 2 big stars; Giambi / KD and Damon / Harden

The Thunder have the 5th highest salary and are currently supermaxing Shai and maxing Chet and Jalen. That’s the opposite of letting Giambi, Damon, and Isringhausen go

I can see your point as they capitalized on some market inefficiencies. They signed isaiah joe and dort. They also drafted Aaron wiggins with a late second round pick.

I think you can throw the spurs out because they’ve been generationally lucky multiple times. It’s easy to build around David Robinson and Tim Duncan and Wemby and Harper. Robinson and Wemby both got hurt the seasons before they drafted Duncan and Harper.

Meanwhile the Pacers have never had a single #1 pick ever even play for their organization. Id say they make a better argument for generally sustained 30 year success even if they’ve never won a championship.

100% agree. Basically any small market team that has success(which is mostly SA and OKC in recent memory). It’s kind of interesting because it feels like Pop(a coach) is what really drove SA where Presti(a GM) was the driver for OKC.

Yeah but asset management with the end goal of eventually landing in a big expensive fish. For the reason you said there’s no way a team that is built around a sum higher than the parts is gonna have long term success. Eventually you need that top the talent and those kinds of guys don’t stay hidden.

Yeah I think Pacers in their finals season are a great example of this. Obviously won some games that they had no business winning, but they maximized possessions which gave them a chance to win at the buzzer. Chad Buchannan’s roster construction prioritized synergy over individual ability. Definitely an extreme case but we have seen teams try to play the possession game more.

Well, he was booted and they threw away several of those picks. That was mostly just acknowledging that the rookie pay scale is unbalanced with the rewards of top draft picks.

100% people who know moneyball just from the movie and not the book or just watching the early aughts A’s teams have a heavily skewed and basically false impression of what moneyball actually was.

The A’s had the best starting rotation in baseball and all of them were either drafted or acquired by trading vets for highly touted minor leaguers.

The movie completely ignores the existence of their starting pitchers and their literal MVP position players: Jason Giambi, and Miguel Tejada. Tho, I think Giambi had signed with the Yankees already for the year the movie took place. Eric Chavez wasn’t MVP but he was a superstar 3B in his own right.

You can argue the way Morey built the Rockets around Harden (defensive minded players that could shoot 3s) and the way the team played (3s or layups/dunks, nothing in between) was completely stat and analytics driven, which is kind of the moneyball.

I mean, OKC has SGA. The Spurs have/had Duncan/Wemby. Hell, even trading for SGA was possible in the first place because PG came to Oklahoma to play with Westbrook. It’s all superstars in the NBA.

Moneyball is largely misunderstood. Moneyball is finding market inefficiencies that other teams are ignoring and exploiting that, generally using analytics.

Doesn’t need to be small market teams and it actually fits pretty well into a salary cap league because you’re all competing for the same resources. If you can find undervalued resources, you could potentially compete.

The book and movie is very related to obp in baseball. But that’s because as they point out early in the movie, the league was obsessed with average, home runs and stolen bases. They figured out high obp guys with lower averages and mediocre power numbers were cheap but could still replace the total run output of the others.

Unfortunately, that’s hard to do in basketball. Even role players are getting close to the max, so it limits you’re ability to build differently. The NBA equivalent would be to build a roster full of balanced role players who were super deep without a star player and preferably a team that potentially wins with less 3s than most teams. But that’s difficult when all the top 2-3 guys on a roster get a near max deal.