Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.
Thanks for reading, and especially for commenting! I’m not sure we disagree much, but I think the emphasis matters.
For sure you’re right, there were many, many forces at play in the revolution. It’s a book-length story (tempting), and it wouldn’t be able to contain itself to hoops: there’s no Daryl Morey without Billy Beane (and there’s no Beane without Jonah Hill, and there’s no Jonah Hill without Bill James…). Morey says the Rockets owner pitched him they were looking for a Moneyball type, and the owner says it was reading the Lewis book that made him overhaul his organization by injecting analytics (they tried to hire Beane before Morey). Curry is no less a product of his environment than anyone else, and that environment was shaped by these guys from the inside, and by Nate Silver and Benjamin Morris and the rest of the blogosphere from the outside.
And I still want to defend the position that Curry was singularly responsible for inflecting the curve in the mid-2010s.
By the time of Steph’s breakout in 2014⁄15, Morey had been in post long enough to become the face of the nerds (it was his name Barkley was yelling, right before the bit about not getting any girls in high school), and not long enough to have won anything (which isn’t necessarily shade: it takes time to build things, especially when you’re the insurgency and you don’t have a cheat code). Despite eschewing the midrange and shooting more and more threes, his Rockets’ offense topped out at 4th and their net rating at 7th. They shot more threes than anyone else for the first time in 2014, and their offense was 7th. They’d won one playoff series in seven seasons. The reason Barkley could punch down at him was because he hadn’t succeeded rising up.
Steph is different. He could stand out while fitting in: far from being a self-consciously nerd-coded outsider pointing at spreadsheets and telling OGs they don’t know their own business, he’s the son of an NBA shooter out there shimmying the shimmy. And he proved the doubters wrong in terms they couldn’t fail to comprehend: not if you know where to look our offense overperforms its underlying talent level, but you can torch everyone in your path shooting threes and look irresistibly cool doing it.
It’s not just that Steph won over fans. He won over everyone, including all the decision-makers not called Daryl who’d been resisting the revolution. He made it crystal clear that people in positions of power had been looking for edges in the wrong places. That, according to me at least, is why the league-wide curve shoots up from 2015, not from when Morey gets his gig in 2007 or when he trades for Harden in 2012.
I think this matters. EA already has lots of people running the Morey playbook, optimizing their own decisions within their own organizations. What we don’t have are many Stephs, getting out there and performing the new way of thinking so successfully and so joyfully that it changes everyone else’s behaviour.
A couple of things on the local level:
Placing as much emphasis as you do on illegal screens seems kinda wild to me. Not that it wasn’t a thing at all (I don’t really know), and they certainly set a trend in setting so many off-ball screens, but it seems unlikely to me that them moving a bit was more impactful than them being set in the first place, or that they were being set for—and by! - the Splash Brothers. Ben Taylor at Thinking Basketball is great on this.
I agree Steve Kerr is not an analytics guy, but it seems like he is an elite model builder in his own way, and I don’t think it’s any coincidence Steph breaks out in Kerr’s first season. Based on his map of the court, filled in with what he’d learned as a shooter in Phil Jackson’s Triangle, and from taking over as Suns GM towards the end of Seven Seconds or Less, he could see clearly enough to know the best bits of each to borrow and blend to get the most out of Steph, and that wasn’t asking him to be like Jordan or Nash. He knew the power of the open three, and of cutting and screening, and he could imagine an offense not being dependent on the midrange or the pick and roll, and that a superstar with Steph’s gravity could be more effective off the ball. He had the credentials (and the soft skills) to get people to go along with something new. And he was willing to stick his neck out to try it even though he’d look silly if it failed.
Morey and the Rockets contribute to the first league-wide uptick in threes from 2010-15, but Moreyball only takes its extreme final form post-Steph. Maybe they would have got to five-out spacing anyway, without the Death Lineup doing switchy small-ball first, and Harden would have found his way to all the iso stepbacks anyway, and they would have spent a Game 7 missing 27 straight threes anyway, who knows. Their counterfactual trajectory is lost to history because after 2016, every roster-building move and tactical tweak they made was geared towards beating the greatest team ever assembled at their own game.
What a insightful comment! Very well put I appreciate it.