Alumni Spotlight: Daryl Morey and Swapping Intuition for Analytics
In 2006, when Houston Rockets owner Les Alexander announced that MIT Sloan School of Management MBA, analytics expert, and relative NBA unknown Daryl Morey would eventually serve as general manager of the team, the basketball community was surprised, to say the least. A Hoopsworld headline, at the time, read, “Daryl Morey? Are You Serious?”
Though using quantifiable data to make business and strategic decisions across the majority of professional sports has become the norm, in 2006, it was far from standard practice, especially in the world of basketball. At the time, Michael Lewis’s book, Moneyball, was just three years old, and it only highlighted the use of analytics in baseball; perhaps the most straightforward team sport to quantify.
Now, 11 years into his career as a general manager, Morey’s use of analytics to guide NBA decisions ranging from draft picks, to whether a player should go for a three-point shot or a mid-range jumper (hint: take the three point shot) has made him a sports statistics pioneer.
Early Life and Career
While growing up in Medina, Ohio, Morey developed a love of sports. But, according to a profile in Slate, after reading articles written by alleged authorities making predictions for sports teams’ successes that proved way off base, Morey began to question the effectiveness of these experts. Shortly after this realization, Morey happened upon a book by the original sports statistics advocate, Bill James, author of the seminal 1977 book The Bill James Baseball Abstract. James’s data-based philosophy immediately resonated with Morey as the way to mold winning sports teams.
Though he knew early on that he wanted to devote his life to sports, Morey was uncertain of how to gain access to the exclusive business side of the industry. During his time at Northwestern University, Morey sent scads of letters to pro teams, begging for a shot at even the most low-ranking jobs. Each of these letters went unanswered. “So I decided at that point that I had to be rich. If I was rich I could just buy a team and run it,” Morey said.
It was this line of thinking that led the young midwesterner to apply to MIT’s Sloan School of Management. After earning his MBA from MIT in 2000, Morey pursued a career in consulting. Eventually this led to a job working for the Boston Celtics. It was during this time that Morey began applying a statistical model he had developed to size up amateur players to the actual draft. Just a couple of years later, Morey was approached about a managing position for the Houston Rockets, where he has now served as general manager for eleven seasons and has just signed on for an additional four years.
Philosophy and Contributions
At just 21-years old, Morey adapted Bill James’s Pythagorean Expectation, a formula used to predict how many games a team would win, to basketball. “I would have never guessed that you could adapt the Pythagorean to basketball,” James said.
In basketball, Morey is partially credited with normalizing the use of analytics in player acquisitions, as well as approach to the actual game. Under his leadership, the Rockets acquired franchise cornerstone James Harden in what is, in hindsight, already considered one of the more lopsided trades in basketball history. Morey was also instrumental in starting the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, a forum wherein students and professionals can exchange views on the role of analytics in the sports industry.
When asked about his thought processes in Northwestern Magazine, Morey said, “You don’t fool yourself, you take a lot of chances, you cut your losses quickly. That’s all you can do.”
Like the slow-crawl of acceptance sabermetrics toiled through in Major League Baseball, Morey’s analytical imprint on the NBA has routinely drawn the ire of some of the game’s most notable figures, including Hall of Famer, “golfer,” and Inside The NBA host Charles Barkley. In 2015, Barkley routinely chided `the Rockets’ paltry defensive efforts, noting Morey’s tactics of bringing in players seemed fairly basic.
Just two years later, however, and the Rockets are currently riding a 10-game win streak and sit atop of the vaunted Western Conference, with Harden earning potential MVP praise and point guard Chris Paul commanding one of the league’s best offenses. And Morey’s analytical emphasis on three point shooting and pick and roll sets, dubbed “Moreyball,” has never been more prominent. The Rockets lead the league—by far—in three-point attempts per contest, launching a blistering 43.2 per game. For context, the team with the second most three-point attempts per game, the Brooklyn Nets, take 33.8 per game—nearly 22 percent less than Houston.
Stats via NBA.com/Washington Post
The Rockets’ analytical trend may seem extreme, but the rest of the league is still taking notice. The average three point attempts taken per game, nearly a quarter of the way into the 2017-18 season, is the highest ever at 28.7 attempts per game per team; and those figures have gone up every year since 2012. If Moreyball remains a staple of the NBA offense, expect that figure to be broken again in 2019.
Other Pursuits
Morey has a love of musicals, and even proposed to his now-wife Ellen before a production of Grease. It makes sense then that the man the New York Times called a “wizard in the field of quantitative analysis,” has chosen to devote his time to producing a musical. The show, “Small Ball,” is slated to debut in 2018.
Why Bloomberg Businessweek Is Praising the UGA Terry College of Business
At the top of last month’s annual Bloomberg Businesweek domestic MBA rankings, the normative favorites reigned supreme, with the likes of the Harvard Business School, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the MIT Sloan School of Management sitting at the top of the ranking. A quick glance at the top 20 features more of the same, with Ivy League institutions coming in strong, as well as other large school powerhouses like the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
But the real meat and potatoes of the list, beyond stacking trophy cases for the already trophy-rich schools at the top, are the schools that shoot up the rankings the most, sometimes jumping eight or more spots from the previous year. Among the most lauded institutions that made its way up the rankings is the University of Georgia Terry College of Business, climbing from 65th overall in 2016 to 55th overall this year.
Santanu Chatterjee—the full-time MBA Director and Associate Professor of Economics at the Terry College of Business—recently spoke with MetroMBA, saying that part of the reason the school has earned such high praise is because of the concentrated effort of life after graduation.
The school has “a purposeful and deliberate strategy that connects admissions, student experience, and career management, by focusing on employability at the front end, a high level of customized career services for both students and employers, and a market-driven curriculum that ensures professional success for our students,” according to Chatterjee, who originally joined the Terry College of Business in 2001, just after earning his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington.
Santanu Chatterjee, Terry College of Business Director, Full-Time MBA Program and Associate Professor.
Although the Terry College of Business is part of the University of Georgia, one of the largest state schools in the U.S., its reputation still lags a bit behind some of the other big name brand institutions. As evident in its climb in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, however, its reputation as one of the better, under-the-radar business schools may be soon changing as the result of a plan that has been years in the making.
“Over the past three years, we have focused on making our curriculum more sensitive to the needs of the marketplace,” he says. “Initiatives have included new concentrations in Healthcare Management and Human Resource Management, areas of emphasis in Consulting and Financial Technology (FinTech), and an expanded focus on experiential/project-based learning. Most of our students complete one project with a corporate partner before their summer internships. We have also revamped our Leadership Fellows Program, and set up two new advisory boards, in Atlanta and in the Silicon Valley.”
Part of the wave of program changes over the past few years also comes from newfound partnerships with many of the University of Georgia’s other esteemed colleges, establishing newfound dual degree programs to help facilitate an academic edge many of the country’s smaller schools simply cannot provide.
“While we continue to work on making the MBA curriculum more market-driven, we are also focused on a more interdisciplinary approach to business education,” he says. “Over the past three years, we have worked to develop new dual degree programs with the College of Engineering, Law School, Medical School, and the College of Public Health. New dual programs are currently being developed that include the College of Pharmacy and a one-year STEM MBA for UGA undergraduates in the STEM disciplines. A new one-year Master of Science program in Business Analytics is also awaiting final approval from the University System. These new programs will enable us to significantly expand our corporate relationships and partners, which in turn will help support our curriculum and student support initiatives.”
The use of broader university resources speaks to what Chatterjee believes is becoming a definitive advantage to not only Terry College of Business students, but University of Georgia students as a whole.
“Across the board, the Terry College of Business is focused on student success by providing them with an outstanding academic and experiential learning experience,” he notes. “This philosophy cuts across programs at all levels, from undergraduate to the Masters and Ph.D. [programs]. We have a roster of world-class faculty, excellent facilities, and a dedicated network of more than 70,000 alumni who work tirelessly to improve the quality of education and career success for our students.”
Even with the noted praise Chatterjee eschews for the business school, one program strength he may be overlooking is the welcomed affordability of the Terry full-time MBA, which only costs Georgia-based residents $15,670 per year, compared to several of the more popular MBA programs in the U.S., which often venture into triple digit territory by the end of the program.
For more information on the Terry College of Business and its increasingly praised MBA program, head over to the official Terry College of Business website.
How Boston Business Schools Help Low-Income MBA Applicants
Anyone planning on earning a postgraduate business degree knows that MBA programs cost a lot of money. In the Boston metro, where the cost of living is already high, the annual cost of an MBA program can reach upward of $100,000 … Ouch! Continue reading…
Tactile Takes Top Prize at MIT Pitch Competition
In the first stage of MIT Sloan‘s ongoing $100k Pitch Competition, the early winners earned praise for social awareness.
Twenty teams presented 90-second elevator pitches then fielded questions from judges. The $5,000 top prize went to Tactile, a portable device that converts small text from agendas, printed receipts, and snail mail to braille, co-founded by Grace Li (SB ’17) and Charlene Xia. Li talked of the pressing need for a device like hers. “A lot of printed texts don’t have Braille translation, and there are 39 million visually impaired people.”
Boston’s “strong community for the visually impaired” has proven to be the ideal testing ground for Tactile where Li’s team is currently conducting beta testing. “We’re starting out in the U.S. market working with public institutions like libraries and schools, plus centers like the Carroll Center for the Blind and the Perkins School for the Blind.” According to the Sloan article, Tactile will “use the prize money to refine and streamline the prototype, intending to make the device even smaller.”
The $2,000 technology prize went to aam, a “smart device and app duo [that] reminds its user to take a birth control pill at a specific time and sends reminders to her phone if she forgets.” Co-founded by Aagya Mathur, MBA ’18, aam takes the form of a “birth control pill blister pack inserted into a smart sleeve.”
The second phase of the MIT $100k – dubbed “Accelerate” – pairs teams with mentors to publicly present new prototypes where teams will compete for a $10,000 prize and $3,000 audience choice award.
MIT Sloan Startup LaborX Bridging the Tech Job Divide
There’s a widening rift between employers that need high-end tech employees and a stagnant workforce. Dominican-born, Bronx-raised MIT Sloan MBA ’14 grad Yscaira Jimenez’s soon-to-be-launched LaborX can help wedge the divide.
Getting Paid: Highest MBA Salaries in Boston
“Step up to get your rep up,” goes the old saying. Reputation is important in the business world and that extends to where you matriculate. Perhaps the most pressing question on the minds of the b-school-bound is: “What does the paycheck look like after graduation?” Got another plan in mind for paying off those loans?
