Rockets, scouts use legwork hand in hand with analytics
As Rockets guard Patrick Beverley went through his usual routine before Game 3 of last month’s playoff series against the Thunder, Sam Hinkie watched from a courtside seat and found his mind wandering to a gym in Athens four seasons earlier.
So much had changed for both since that scouting trip and the dozens that followed. And things would keep chang- ing in the weeks to come.
But at that moment, Hinkie could not help but think of the Olympiacos guard out of Arkansas he saw playing in Greece that day. Over the years, Rockets scouts and decisionmakers saw Beverley, 6-1, play roughly 30 times in summer league and European games before signing him in January.
But roughly two weeks after Hinkie, then Rockets executive vice president, thought about
that night in Athens, he was named 76ers general manager and there was a new wave of assumptions the Rockets don’t watch players play basketball when they could just run their numbers through Daryl Morey’s Toyota Center math club.
That notion had become so prevalent that before 76ers owner Joshua Harris introduced Hinkie on Tuesday, he felt the need to explain that the new team president does watch people play.
“When we talk about analytics, we’re not talking about going into a back room with a bunch of computers,” Harris said. “We’re talking about adding to a very strong player department and more traditional front office.” Analytics pioneer
Yet, as the combine began the 40-day push to the June 27 NBA draft, the image of Rockets personnel evaluations remains of a room full of Stanford and MIT graduates crunching numbers and never meeting a player.
“It comes with the territory,” Rockets vice president Gersson Rosas said from the NBA combine in Chicago. “Daryl is a pioneer in the analytic movement in basketball. For us, we don’t listen to a lot of that. Our business is about results. It’s not about what people think or people say.”
As long as the expense reports go through, there is little reason to worry about the image. Morey seemed to like the misconception.
“The less people know, the better,” he said.
Around the NBA, teams know of the Rockets’ use of traditional scouting. In addition to evaluating prospects, “the eye test” also shows scouts in Rockets logos in the gyms.
Morey and Rosas estimate their scouting department, including the front office, is among the top six or seven in terms of size and budget, though much of the added expense some teams have is attributed to more expensive travel from one of the coasts than centrally located Houston.
Morey has become the face of the analytics movement, but he spends at least as much time in the arenas doing traditional on-site scouting as any general manager in the NBA. This is largely because Celtics general manager Danny Ainge spends as much time on site as any general manager and Morey modeled his routine after Ainge’s, initially not knowing that many GMs delegate more of the work on the road.
Former Rockets coach Rick Adelman was critical of Morey for not being with the team more after the trade deadline, but Morey considers his on-site evaluations too important to skip.
“There’s nothing like the road,” Rosas said. “There’s nothing like evaluating a prospect live. The beauty of our job comes in that boardroom where you have a group of guys with different backgrounds, different mindsets and different skill sets coming together and discussing basketball. ‘Putting traits together’
“Yeah, analytics are involved. Yeah, basketball (scouting) is involved. At the end of the day, you’re putting traits together to make the best decision for the team. I’d put our group up against anybody because of the different skill sets we have.
“For us, the traditional scouting model is an approach we’ve refined over time, and we’ve made it as concise and thorough as possible. It’s complemented by the fact that we have basketball guys … who also understand and value analytics. And we have an analytic group that works at a very high level but at the same time understands the value of basketball in the process and in the equation. We use both.”
The idea is not to replace on-site scouting with analytics but to replace the stats tradi- tionally used with more in-depth data and then use it in concert with the scouting evaluations.
Ideally, analytics will raise questions that can be answered only on site or confirm conclusions reached after scouting. Scouting reports have been designed to fit with calculations to come. Some scouts work armed with data; others are given no advanced information about what they might see. Different approaches
“I look at it one of two ways,” Morey said. “Some, I don’t want them to see a number ever. I want them to be pure, using their wealth of knowledge in coaching, playing and scouting to get a true, independent look at a player. Others, I want to integrate analysis and augment it by seeing the player. We try to do both here. I’m in the latter category.”
Morey and Rosas will say little about the work of the analytics group or how scouting reports are designed to work with the analysis in Houston.
In Morey’s six drafts as general manager, results have been solid. Most players acquired in the first round and kept (Aaron Brooks, Patrick Patterson) have proved worthy of their draft position but have not greatly exceeded it.
The greatest successes have been players taken in the second round (Carl Landry, Chase Budinger and Chandler Parsons) or undrafted free agents (Beverley, Greg Smith).
Last season’s rookies (Donatas Motiejunas, Terrence Jones and Royce White) have brought mixed reviews. The Rockets have hopes for several other players in Europe (Sergio Llull and Furkan Aldemir).
The Rockets don’t have a pick in the first round of next month’s draft (given up in the deal to get Terrence Williams), but Rosas said they will prepare as they would with a pick. When many assume that included little more than advanced mathematics, he thought about his travel schedule and chuckled.
“In this business, you’re not batting a thousand,” Rosas said. “You want to get more right than wrong, but at the end of the day, the value is being thorough, being prepared and having the knowledge to make the right decisions. Labors of love
“This is what we love. It’s our profession. It’s our craft. At the end of the day, knowing we did everything in our means, knowing we did everything we can to get the most information to make the right decision, what the public thinks or media thinks, as long as we’re one step closer to winning a championship, that’s all that matters.” jonathan.feigen@chron.com twitter.com/jonathan_feigen