Moreyball Arrives in Houston
No single front office pushed the math harder than the Houston Rockets under general manager Daryl Morey, who ran the team from 2007 to 2020. Morey's staff concluded that dunks, layups, free throws, and three-pointers were the only shots worth taking in volume, and that the long two-point jumper, the shot most players had been trained on since childhood, was the least efficient look in basketball. The approach became known around the league as Moreyball, a nod to Michael Lewis's Moneyball and its application of statistical analysis to a sport that had long trusted instinct over data.
The clearest proof came in 2017-18, when the Rockets took 81.8 percent of their shots from either the restricted area or beyond the arc, the highest share any team had ever posted, and became the first team in NBA history to attempt more than half its shots from three-point range in a season. Over Morey's thirteen years running the front office, Houston posted the second-most wins in the league, trailing only the San Antonio Spurs, while running an offense that had almost entirely eliminated the midrange jumper from its playbook.
