NBA Veteran Daryl Morey Talks ‘Moreyball’ and the Data Driving Basketball

Daryl Morey, a veteran NBA executive and one of the leaders of the movement toward increased use of analytics in professional basketball, stopped by the Yale School of Management on February 26 to discuss the business of sports.

Morey, president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers, joined Yale SOM Dean Kerwin K. Charles in a wide-ranging talk about Morey’s 20 years in the business and his approach to using analytics, popularly dubbed “Moreyball”—a play on Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, about baseball analytics—to make key decisions.

Tobias Moskowitz, the Dean Takahashi ’80 B.A., ’83 M.P.P.M. Professor of Finance and the co-author of a sports analytics book, introduced Morey, calling him “a pioneer in basketball analytics.” Morey spoke in a packed room, peppering his comments with memories from his career and answering student questions.

Morey, who holds an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, began his National Basketball Association career with the Boston Celtics in 2002. At the time, he remembered, the only data available to the team was the box score, which collects traditional statistics like points, assists, and blocks. “They needed better data,” Morey said, “Having a data edge is one of the only sustainable edges you can get [in sports.]”

The trend toward using growing pools of data to make management and on-court strategy decisions will continue, Morey said, despite complaints that the use of analytics robs the sport of spontaneity and variability.

“Being mad at where data takes the game is sort of like being mad at gravity,” he said, explaining that in a high-tech era, the incursion of more data into the sports business is inevitable.

And the more that qualitative measures of a game or a player’s ability can be turned into measurable quantitative data, the better, Morey said. Data removes the group-think and bias that too often contaminate qualitative thinking.