How sports analytics have become a real game-changer
As 2,700 people settled into their seats on Friday morning at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, author Michael Lewis surveyed the scene from the dais and reminded everyone of how this massive annual event got started.“This is Daryl’s class,” Lewis said.Daryl, in this case, is Daryl Morey MBA ’00, general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets and the co-founder of the conference. In 2006, when he got the Rockets job, Morey was an executive with the Boston Celtics and a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management — and arranged to create the conference, first held in 2007, as a way of compensating for the fact that he could no longer teach at MIT Sloan. The result is a sprawling conference on a sprawling subject: Sports analytics, which once simply meant reformulating baseball statistics, now draw upon a flood of information, like optical-tracking systems, and are used in...