Sports video games are becoming better and better simulations, and now real teams are plugging in to evaluate talent and other teams:
Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey doesn’t play video games for fun or fantasy.Morey uses the EA Sports NBA game for professional reasons. He uses it to help evaluate talent. Morey says he is a statistical junky, an admirer of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and a mathematical nerd. “I’ve always loved numbers,” Morey said. “I don’t play EA Sports as a game. I use it as a tool.”
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“Say if you’re thinking about acquiring Ron Artest,” Morey said from Hawaii, where he was evaluating talent in person at the Maui Classic college tournament.“On the game, you can see how adding Artest can change the dynamic of your team. You can program it to run offensive sets with Artest and any combination of your players.”
Morey said that even this early in the season, there are enough statistics available to evaluate rookies such as Minnesota’s Kevin Love (from UCLA) and Memphis’ O.J. Mayo (from USC)
“For example, you can tell how often, if Love throws an outlet pass, how often his team scores on the possession,” Morey said. “You can tell how often Mayo goes right versus left, how effective the team is with Mayo pulling up and shooting versus when he pulls up and passes instead.”
According to the NBA, about half the teams are using the video game as part of personnel evaluation. In the quiet of his office, Morey said he can see how often a player posts up and gets shots on cuts to the basket as well as about defensive and offensive tendencies.