YouSaid · the spoken record

Daryl Morey

lines on the record: 65
first: 2024-01-16
most recent: 2024-01-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I would probably reference Sam. So Sam Hinke has a very famous letter that he wrote to ownership that he didn't want public, but this is part of his thing and I haven't been able to replicate it, even though I want to. He wrote me a letter when he left Houston to Philadelphia that is still on my safe. Like who puts a letter in their safe? It's still in my safe. It was very kind of him to take the time to do that.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, and he's one of the all-time great inventors. That's maybe the hot one. I'd probably go on to talk to McNamara or Oppenheimer. Well, can I have five? Are you counting me as the four Okay, I ride both, so I'd want to talk to McNamara because he famously maybe used data. They paint him as somebody who used data incorrectly. And I want to find out if that's true. I'd want to like get his take and draw my own conclusion on whether or not he applied data incorrectly or he's just been sort of painted as someone who hit on 11 and got a three. You know what I mean? And then Oppenheimer, I know there's a movie coming out now, but I read the history of the making of the atomic bomb. his ability to mobilize things that are almost unmobilizable i'd want to know how much of that was the will he put into it and how much the signal how much is noise to what he did generated that outcome”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, no, not the distribution, but because he was thought to be one of the smartest people ever lived. So I just want to see if the hype lives up to it. So that would be probably one. I would want to talk to Ben Franklin. His style, at least as far as I've read it in history, fits mine the most, at least as it's evolved. So my style has very much evolved. I tend to hang back a lot. I tend to like let the systems operate and do little nudges to take Richard Thaler nudge sort of paradigm out there. I tend to let things play out when it's part of a system that I think is functioning operating well. And then only get very involved when I see it's heading in the wrong direction or some macro thing is being missed that could lead to a bigger thing. And when you read history, the lores that Ben Franklin was extremely...”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said deal two, we included this player, but we're actually just as fine to include these other three players. If you want to select that and maybe you make the second round pick that you include slightly better because you're going to get a slightly better deal here. Often it's a little hard to do because sometimes our deadlines get in the way once you have a deal at the trade deadline, for example, they won't let you modify it. But if it's a deal done or on the draft, you can do that. But yeah, I would encourage and I've seen this in many industries. People don't do this, that once a deal is done, try to then negotiate a slightly better deal for both sides.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say probably the number one I liked was post negotiation negotiation. So that's after you shake hands deal, often during the negotiation, you have to sort of not be super clear sometimes about your true values of certain things. Once you have a deal, though, and you actually, there's trust on both sides, and that's true in basketball because it's a repeating game. So once there's trust and you've said deal, then you can say like, okay, we have a deal. That deal is always going to happen. But now that we have that deal, I will be more open to how I'm valuing all my things in the deal and other possible ones. If we can come up by working together and now every card's on the table, a better deal, let's see if we can do that. I'll give an example. In our sport in the collective bargaining agreement, there are certain players you have to put in just to match salary. And the proposal we made that you”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good relative to everyone else, or the immune system of that industry is going to reject you. The T cells of the white blood cells are going to come and they're going to make sure you are eliminated from that area unless you are way better than everyone else.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are there, and I started thinking of draft picks. I'm like, do I think this draft pick is worse? I know this is a case. Billy Bean talks about it really well, that he benefited from this. He looked like the perfect draft pick. And he does, even when you see him older, he looks like a guy who could still play. And these heuristics of watching these players, even how they move and how fluid their movements are can really trick you to the point where I use Michael Lewis's principle, which is like, if there's a player who looks completely different succeeding in their area, they're probably even an extra cut above everyone else in that industry because they've had to battle that bias each step and overcome it's like women breaking into many industries or minorities breaking into industries or anyone who looks different breaking into anything you have to be extra”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of truth, and I'll just do that over and over, and I'll be making 10 million a year at some point. You would figure that out instantly. And that whole model felt like it came to politics. Politics used to be there was this tread of we're trying to accomplish something bigger for people in the world and the country. But unfortunately, that got drowned out by the incentives of the structure, which is just winning your primary this all required attention. It was all the attention stuff that sports had innovated first. So anyway, back to that class was a big one was all these evolved biases that if you have to consciously work as a human to overcome these biases, almost for sure no one's doing it because no one likes to do conscious work, especially in certain areas of their life. And that was a big one. Just all these heuristics that we've developed and evolved that you don't even know.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I saw politics turn into like all the craziness around Trump and even a little bit before Trump, it reminded me completely of sports. Everyone says crazy ass stuff because that drives interest, whether it be Steven A. Smith who's like actually a super smart guy knows exactly what he's doing. He's hacked the KPIs of being a top sports caster. It would be the first thing you would do, Patrick, if you were like, okay, now you're going to be one of these ESPN talking head sportscaster, you would absolutely figure out in the first one, two days of studying it, okay, I just have to say the craziest stuff with the slightest shred.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broke things, everyone had different expertise coming in. There are certain things that I like new cold and tried to stay in the background, but then they put us into groups and make you do exercises. And I was like, okay, this is not a good exercise for me. But a lot of them were good. Probably the most valuable one besides defooks course was on the implicit biases we all have, just some really crazy ones. I don't know if you heard like if people's eyes are near their noses, people just naturally discount what they say. And that's been studied heavily. So the point where like everyone's like, are my eyes near my nose? Look, I mean, where these evolved creatures and we see them. We're tribal, which has been the buzzword of the day. But that's very true. It's much easier to create in and out groups and be part of a team to bring our sports analogies.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So is the NBA lockout in 2011? And I was like, how can I make this the most productive thing I can possibly do? I was pretty self-taught in negotiation and I felt like I had read all the books and done enough, but I was like, you know what? Maybe I haven't. Maybe I can pick something up. And that turned out to be absolutely the case that I took a two-week, you literally live in a dorm at Harvard. It's an interesting program that Harvard's put together. You get thrown in with a bunch of people you'd have on your podcast, executives, and you take on negotiations.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go straight to anger or outrage or whatever that drives clicks versus taking a step back. I'll give an example Trump on Twitter. I hated Trump on Twitter so much. I mean, I can't even tell you how miserable my life was that the guy I don't follow on purpose would end up in my timeline all the time with the dumbest stuff ever and the fact that I had to pay attention that he's the president drove me absolutely bonkers but I completely thought it was the wrong thing to have him off Twitter because if you think about the larger principles at stake it's the wrong thing I hated every moment of it but not enough of that kind of thought process happens where people say someday this apparatus that's now conveniently helping me might get turned against me if you don't have these first principles you can get completely lost in those”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really closer actually to a terrible story. Brittany Greiner, who was, I think for a short time, it turned out, thankfully, was put into like one of the worst situations in the world in Russia. And what she had to figure out and think through, I don't know her at all. So I don't know. But yeah, you're kind of right. I always go back to first principles on everything. That's why I'm such a free speech advocate. People are too quick to, and Stephen Covey and Ben Franklin and others had this where you want to always have a gap between stimulus and response in your life. You never want to respond immediately. It's one of the things that makes us the top species on Earth is having that gap and almost every animal doesn't. And I think that happens in social media and all these places where people have eliminated that gap.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would probably call Deepak Mohotroid Harvard Business School negotiation. I've been through some very, very tough times famously that people could Google me. He's got a way of thinking through and solving problems and creativity that's super helpful. And his Rolodex isn't, it's not like he's speedialing Obama or something like that. But I think he would help me think through, okay, you've got to whatever the trope in movies that might be true, he'd be able to tell me you got to beat the crap out of someone immediately, or they're going to take advantage of you or whatever it might be.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, it's all worked out. And it wasn't until I was probably 16 or something that I felt like I even had a friend or two that I could rely on. So people tend to hire like and that I try to control for that because it can be a bad thing, a very bad thing. Obviously my kids are going to have everything and do have everything and they're older now. I find that I can't help them much because they have not had to struggle on certain aspects the way that you or I did. Everyone is going to have a different journey and struggle set. And mine is so different from theirs that I actually often have trouble giving them any sort of meaningful guidance at times.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, that's 100% it. And when I tell my kids, my struggles as a youth, they don't really believe me, I think they only know me.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hear something that could be, I'm looking for how to adopt it. I'm looking for, just like in an operating system, there's a file system away files are manager, a way that you retrieve data using your data structures. As soon as I hear a better one, I'm going to see maybe that one I can replace with the one that I'm using now. You'd be surprised. People don't even realize that they can take a step back and change the personal brand or their personal way that they're operating.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the way I do things when I go to parties, I'm not the one who's obsequious to go talk to there because that's what other people do. I'm not that person. They develop their own brand image in their head, and I'm sure there's better psychology terms for these things. And the thing I try to help young people realize is that you don't have to keep that same script. You can become inconsistent to your past. just because you are always the guy who did X and that's become part of your brand and you feel like that's almost part of your ego not ego in the negative sense but you like the thing that you are as a person you can replace those things over time the reason I started with that is that I'm constantly and generally the people I like to hire they're constantly saying here's how I operate here's my mental model for how this business works or how this works but as soon as I”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one thing that I tell, especially younger folks now, and that's to not accept the operating system that you've been handed. So, of course, I have to think about it in a computer science way. I happen to, in my opinion, be born without a lot of the basic instincts that other people were born with for whatever reason that might be. I wasn't very natural getting to know other kids. I wasn't very good as a child. Just again, common sense type stuff weren't common to me. And so I learned at a young age that I had to like learn all these things on my own. I was always constantly replacing the thing I was doing with something better. It became very natural to me and it took me a while to realize other people maybe don't do this. So this is why it's become maybe reasonable advice for people. They tend to do things when they're younger where they're like, this.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was talking to Ben Thompson about this. I was reading, and then he told me, oh, I started the podcast and it's just me reading the thing I write. And I was like, people do that. And then I started doing it. I was like, this is great. I can do it on my way to the coffee shop. And on the way to work, so it's actually better for the times when my years aren't occupied and I'm just having to drive to work.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen firsthand they're like, hey, buddy, can you buy boxes of this book? And I know the New York Times tries to adjust for it, but it's buy versus spy now on who gets up on the bestseller list. And then who reads a book anymore anyway? I know there's been some famous tweet threads about this, but like does someone have good data on who's actually reading books anymore? It has to be vanishingly small.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the first album someone releases, they've had to run the Iron Man triathlon, unless they have like a famous parent or something like that. They've had to drag themselves through the muck of playing in small clubs and fine-tuning their own music while they play cover songs most likely at points. And they've had to work their whole lives refining the first thing that they come out with. And then after it hits, they're asked to like turn around and do the same thing in one tenth the amount of time. It just sets everyone up to fail. Is my feeling on this. So this is why I got into business book summaries when I was younger because I was like, these business books are awful. The condensed version is way better than the 300-page version that they're required to do so they can get on the speaking circuit and get paid and all that kind of stuff.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't figure out how to do this right, but if a sport could come up with a good comeback mechanism, that would be huge. So the one I've thought of in the NBA is that if you're behind, you make a line near the half court line. And if you shoot it, you cut the difference in half. Unfortunately, what that would evolve into is a lot of half court shots, which might not be all that interesting. But when an NBA team's up 30 or a college team has just happened, is up by, I don't know, 40 or whatever it was in the second quarter or whatever it ended up being, you want some comeback mechanism. So the poor announcers are like, oh, there's still plenty of time left. And everyone's like, what? There's not plenty of time left? The announcers get completely screwed because these games will be out of hand and we're supposed to pretend that it's still interesting to tune in. It's frustrating.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clearly, a good strategy. So I just get so bothered by some of the counter arguments from the soccer folks when I talk to them. The rules need to be fixed. It would make your sport way better. I love the sport as it is, but it could be way, way better.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a really healthy debate between getting back on transition offensive rebounding, and generally the bias, if you look at the data, is more offensive rebounding, but it's not simple. But a lot of the aspect that people have said is that, oh, well, all these great teams over the years did offensive rebound. So therefore, it's the wrong thing. I'm like, okay, well, in 2002, that same data would have said, don't shoot three pointers because all the good teams that won the title didn't shoot three pointers. And we know that was wrong. The easiest way I describe correlation to causation in the NBA is that if you took the top teams in the league this year, Boston, us, I think, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Denver, and you said, okay, the first possession of every game, throw the ball out of bounds. That's going to be the first play of every game. Well, guess what? We'd still win most of our games. And it would say 100% of the good teams throw the ball out of the bounce to start the game. We should all be doing that.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They misconstrue correlation to causation is a huge problem, so they'll do a few things. popular sport in the world, so the rules must be okay. No, those don't follow. Those two things don't follow. It's the most popular sport because it's actually a really good sport. I love you only use your feed. It's been around forever. There's a lot of amazing things to do with soccer, but the rules is not the thing that makes it famous. Second, they'll take the top teams to your point on resources. The top teams in soccer are like 5x, 10x, some of their opponents at times. So sometimes even 100x, they'll be in like an FA cup and some of these things. Like you'll see these resource differentials and they'll be like, this team, the way they play is optimal. No, no, it's not optimal. They have way better players. So no, you cannot use that. The analogy I use is, for example, offensive rebound is a big thing in the NBA right now.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“even they know that the sport has too many players on the field and it requires you to create a cludge rule called offside then you have the penalties so penalties just like in the justice system the punishment should match the crime the punishments in soccer are either completely meaningless like oh we just restart almost totally meaningless doesn't change the win probability at all or holy cow the whole game is determined those are your only two options for your penalties hockey has some easy ones five minutes out where you're down a man there are all these options they could come to so penalties are terrible they have just dumb stuff like the clock counts the wrong way i mean just like honestly they came up with a set of rules in 1610 or whatever and they haven't changed them and they're just poorly constructed”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, soccer's the one that's my buggaboo. People want to say that it has good rules and it has the worst rules of any major sport by far. So first off, offsides is impossible for casual viewers to understand poorly written. You can get offsides when it's not creating an advantage, which is dumb. And then just fundamentally, if you have a sport where stationing a player on the other end of the field so that they're out of the play completely is optimal, such that you have to write a rule to stop it. That means you have too many players. 11 players is just wrong. Whoever just randomly chose 11 on 11 chose wrong. I would fix that. In fact, they've already talked about fixing it the overtime they're going to reduce players. You notice that when they're talking about fixing their rules for overtime and try to make it so they don't have to go to penalty kicks, they don't talk about adding players. They talk about taking players away. Well, that's a hint that”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more interesting to watch. There's a good trade off between certain things, and that tends to get everyone mad at me when I try to modify the rules of other people's sports.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's probably what I love the most, which is why I love the MIT conference. So when I get there, it brings from every sport. And just because of my track record and being into board games and being into games since I was a little kid and I was the first video game generation and playing video games on the Vic20 and the Commodore 64 and things like that, that I do love like, hey, show me this sport like cricket recently. I got more into cricket. I was just watching in England. They have this new hundreds format. And I was watching, I was like, boy, they're doing this definitely suboptimally. And I felt good because I reached out to someone who had come to the conference and I was like, this new format they've created, it appears no one's adjusted to. And he's like, oh, 100%. So give us sport, figure out the key drivers. And then the other one I'm big on is just the rules. I'm always trying to tune the rules of support so that.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Step back for the little period I did and said, like, I do love basketball and I do love what I do. I like the people I get to work with. I get to work with great people. But you're right. I mean, I think if you've lived through the internet when it's heyday, it's probably hard for some of the folks to start the next business that's, oh, another vertical, another vertical, this site. You know, really, I'm going to work on that. So it's probably similar to that a little bit.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a question I struggle with. I just stay in basketball because I love it. I had a recent opportunity where I might have left and I thought I was going to be out of the game for at least a year when I left Houston. And I was like, oh, this will be fun. I'll sit on the sidelines and think through all these things. And then the Philadelphia thing came up very quickly. And it was right before the draft. So they needed someone rapidly. So I never got to do that. The answer to your question is basketball is getting, the edges are getting smaller and smaller. Baseball's facing this as well. And that's frustrating, especially for someone who's lived through the huge innovations, shooting optimization was worth a max contract. You could add essentially a near all-star just through strategy. Now the advantages we're trying to eke out are like a half win to a win to a win and a half at most. And so that's not as much fun. I did take a”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard, but they're known. We don't have the Rum of Unknown Unknowns, like some startup in stealth mode that might emerge. That's why academics have done more and more papers about sports, because if you're trying to isolate how to make good decisions, sports is a really ripe area to do that in, including a recent Harvard paper on why with a three-point line was introduced like 40 years ago. I forget the exact amount, 50 years ago maybe. And it took teams so long to realize that this was an OP strategy for the game. Why did that happen? So like there's been quite a few papers written about that, which is interesting.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The use of briar scores and things like that gives you a good sense over time. So we're like a pure play. It's the lifeblood of our business. Whereas, you know, in other businesses, I would say execution probably matters a lot more. In all aspects, including coaching, a well-executed, slightly suboptimal strategy generally will be the best strategy poorly executed. I mean, you know that. That's generally true in basketball as well. But I would say in our realm of decision making, it's really almost a pure decision making thing. This draft pick beats that draft pick. This free agent for $5 million beats that free agent for $5 million. It's more of a pure play. Sports is actually way simpler than most of the people you talk to. Way simpler. Our sport, it changes, but not much. Our data is pretty good. Our competitors aren't coming out with new products. Our competitive dynamics are known.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Record of good draft texts, good free agent decisions, good trade is an interesting thing because it's hard to be consistently good over time. So we get in the room and it's like, hey, what are you seeing? The group was lower here, but maybe they're missing a piece of info because you want to distinguish between you're higher on a decision because you have taken the same inputs and come to a different conclusion. That's a very different thing than like maybe they're seeing something different in the data that everyone else is missing. So those are two different things. The good judgment project is interesting, super forecasting. I don't know if you've”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have constraints with the collective bargaining agreement that makes using dollars not very congruent. So we tend to use draft pick equivalents as much as we can. And then everyone does that voting before you get in the room. And then when we get in the room, it'll basically spit out things like who has the strongest feeling and I'll let them talk first and make sure they're talking first. You'd be surprised people, if you're in a room, a group of people how bad that info is unless you have some of these prompts. I can tell you we have quiet people in that group, but they're very comfortable voting on their own when they sit there and think through they have some pride in being right because we can go back and check who's looked at this. Now, it doesn't mean that person's better. Like you can just be lucky and right. That happens a lot too, but your track record over time, just like our track record, the NBA, we're the fourth best winning of all time among executives. So an executive has a long track.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we live in this NBA world, it's sort of like a sewing circle. It's a really tight world. Everyone's sort of talks about the same things within that world. So we can't really fool ourselves. There's a couple methods. So to your point of voting methods, there's a mix between systems that minimize ability to manipulate and there's systems that use the strength of feeling. Those are polar opposites. The ones that are hardest to manipulate but eliminate strength of feeling are like condorcet methods or Yule methods. And then the ones that implement strength of feeling, those are pretty simple. Those are just compare what we're doing. Each sort of asset in that, compare them to a draft pick, almost like you put a valuation on something. If a company was doing it, they'd put like a dollar valuation on each one. We use draft pick equivalents because our money is messed up.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spend a lot of time on this obviously. We have three tools draft free agency and trade. To your point, humans are pretty bad at decisions. I'm pretty confident in that, including you have to put the mirror to yourself and realize your own biases. And those are famous we've been written about and thinking fast and slow in a lot of different books. So what we do currently, I have like a game of thrones small council, which is right now seven key people. In fact, we're meeting right after this podcast. We always do a vote before we meet. That vote is always informed with data. The same data is available to everyone on that council. One of the council members is remote to try and fight groupthink. Groupthink is still real even with all these safeguards that I'm putting in basically.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Long term deal that was probably the trick, but then everyone sort of copied that trick. Then I would say our two new veins of finding people were finding the really smart kids who go to basketball schools, so whether that be Duke, the best woman I ever hired came out of Duke, Stanford, obviously. So some of these schools that have a pretty good to very good basketball program and the students might have selected the school based on that a little bit and they're also super smart. So that's been a nice vein. And all of its outreach, I've had some luck just tweeting, hey, we have a job and I've had some pretty good success with that. But I'd say that hit rate's really, really, really low, as you might expect.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, some of them are turning long time. That was a predictive modeling person in statistics. They're finding completely new insights. But anyway, long story short, early on, I would find the people who are doing in their spare time what they want to do now. And that's, I think, a little harder to do in other industries, although I think with podcasting and blogging and Twitter, you can now find those people. But if they're in their spare time, if they're like the best analyst in the NBA, I think, is still in Houston. And he was blogging in 2005 to 2007 area. And we hired him to, I still feel guilty about this, to like a four-year intern contract, which I think was maybe unconstitutional or something. I don't know. But I got annoyed. A lot of our interns left. So I was like, this one seems good. We're going to hire him and lock him up.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the best leader spent a lot of time on getting the right people. And then I just feel like I'm failing all the time. Like I should be doing an even better job. I think we have like five or six GMs and five or six coaches who have come through. We've worked together both in Houston, Boston, and now here I spent a lot of time on it. In fact, we're hiring right now. So if anyone wants to reach out, I'm on Twitter. I'm fairly easy to find. I'm a bit in a panic that we're getting behind on some of the latest techniques in machine learning and things like that. We have good internal people, but there's been recent innovations that I'm sure you're on top of that are turning”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hard in every industry, but ours happens to be on the front page of the newspaper and the top trends on Twitter and things like that.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is why Sam Hanky's venture capitalist right now. And I even understand the fan's perspective. Their old thing is like, I want to see a championship. I want to go to meaningful playoff games. And the other thing is with the media environment, obviously it's a good thing. It's why people are excited about our sport and come. If we didn't have media, we'd be in real trouble. But the media environment has always been tough, but I feel like it's gotten more tough in that they will posit and ponder and you should do this. You should do that. You should do this. And I like it because I learned from it. But when they make a mistake, best case, they'll just write a column like, oh, one time I thought this, but I was wrong. Oh, yeah. If the team did that, they would be out 100 million. But for me, it's just a little note in a column. But that's in the best case. And most of the time, they never go back and talk about the things they said that were completely wrong. So, you know, look, decision making is hard.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've added major changes that have all helped the game over the years, and we'll continue to do that. And the one that's out of black right now is three-pointers. They're worth too much. Being worth 50% more than two is too much. So those are probably the two things I would change right now.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really three or four that only have a chance to win. So I hate that about it. And then the three point are absolutely out of black. So I love the NBA will always change its rules. Like most of these sports, like soccer's completely hosed. They have a whole bunch of things they need to fix and they have a game that's been around since I don't know if you talk to England 13, 12. Baseball's finally getting there. I used to make fun of baseball. They formed a committee. They studied it for three years, and they came out with one rule change. You can go to first base quickly on an intentional lock. Whereas, yeah, I'll give credit to the NBA League office and Adam. We've tweaked our rules a lot over the years, whether it be adding the shot clock, which was a huge innovator, or the three-pointer was a huge innovation.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No longer can turn left shoulder, right hand hook shot. That is like an order of magnitude different. Everything is messed. And then if you're a team, which we were before we traded for James Harden in Houston, and then if you're a team without one of those superstars, acquiring them, and this is why you see some of these what appear to be crazy trades NBA, you can basically say you should trade everything not bolted down. You're adding up pennies to try and add up to $100 bill. You could trade everything at an organization that doesn't have a superstar to try and get one. There's really almost no crazy trade that doesn't justify. You're either in the game or you're not. You go into the season, there's only nine, eight, something like that, even in a good year that have a chance to win. This year is a good year quite a few teams have a chance to win. Most years go in.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a few things that I don't love about basketball. It is that the superstars matter so, so much that the value they bring is asymptotic in that it messes with the math completely, even though we're trying to optimize the Shane Badiers and D'Anthony Meltons to come in and help our team. And you've heard all those ways I lacked poetic, but they get wiped out instantly in a season where Yao Ming's toe gets hurt. So he”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the game, I believe you can debate probably top three. And playing with a big man is actually more historic, even though a lot of the trends of basketball, the three-pointers, things like that all point to playing the spread offenses, switch every ball screen. Bigs aren't as important. That now actually in some ways makes Joell and B more potent, more valuable because he faces these teams that don't have an ability to handle him. And I think that's a lot of what's happening with some of these teams playing that way, struggling, that as they face more traditional teams playing a more traditional way, they struggle even though they might be doing all the right things in an optimal way. You're not only just finding undervalued players like Anthony Milton, I believe was and just playing well for us, you're finding undervalued players that inside your system are even more undervalued.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is part of the art of basketball that I love again to compare to baseball, I just do because they're the gold standard for using data in sports. Generally, there isn't really a system that changes. But where there is a hard problem, which is you're 100% right that how players perform in different systems is pretty variant, but that also creates opportunity. It's not just find undervalued asset, which is famously Moneyball and written by Michael Lewis. It's about finding undervalued assets in your system and structure. Basically, it allows you to zigger zag. The way the league is going, the way everyone is going is five out offense, switch every ball screen, basically the way the Celts play, and the way the Clippers are going right now is the direction that everyone believes is the best way to play modern basketball. And it might be, but within that, there's a ton of opportunity for us. We have the best big man.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to do that first. I met with some key soccer bill, I won't say the Premier League team in the mid 2000s who are looking to do advanced things. And I was like, okay, well, your first thing, we know gold differential is all that matters, but you have very few goal events. So you have to then first break down every shot into sort of an expected points that you're going to get from that goal. At the time, were claiming to be very advanced and they didn't have an answer to that. And I was like, well, you guys have nothing. You have no way of knowing anything until you get that. So they do have that infrastructure now and now they're working on the secondary and tertiary problem. So you need to like know what are your KPIs and then what are the key drivers of those.”
2024-01-16 · Invest Like the Best · Daryl Morey - Systems Thinking in Sports - [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source