Jason94 wrote: ↑Thu May 11, 2023 8:22 am
I don't know if anybody on this board read Moneyball or saw the movie. But at this stage of the portal and NIL, I find it quite difficult to believe that every coach understands where value exists, and that it simply is a given that the teams with the most NIL will win the tournament every season. UK flamed out in the 2nd round and there probably aren't 5 programs with more NIL set aside for basketball.
I may be slightly hijacking here, but I think this is a very important point. I suggested something similar about our recruiting a few months ago.
In my post, I mentioned that Vandy has traditionally be a home for great shooters, but I feel like it's been a while, maybe since MFD and LaChance, that we've really had an elite shooter on the team. I guess you could say Nesmith, but he wasn't an elite shooter as a frosh and his sophomore campaign was cut way short. For sure we have recently bemoaned the fact that we haven't been a killer shooting team for several years. I wondered if this was a Moneyball thing - in the '80s/'90s the most prized recruits were elite athletes, and the best shooters, stereotypically, were knocked down several pegs for their athletic limitations and we swooped them up. Nowadays, in the post Steph Curry era, there is no debating the elite value of shooters, and so maybe we can just no longer get the same kind of player we used to.
Like you, I opined, what is the new inefficiency? What is the overlooked skill that elite programs are under-recruiting?
I hadn't yet thought of that in terms of the portal. Do more teams look for frosh transfers that they can keep and mold for 3 years, allowing a 1 year transfer to be easier to recruit? Is there a bias towards players whose teams won in a small conference versus guys who put up big stats against that weaker competition? Whenever one thing becomes prized, something else gets pushed to the side to make room for it.
I'm a long time A's fan ... let me tell you, they have reinvented Moneyball several times. The original revolution was to prize OBP ... then it became a draft strategy of specifically avoiding HS players (especially hitters) as they were to hard to project ... then for a time they built a team based on exceptional team defense ... then they had a team that made the playoffs with almost no everyday players - they platooned at something like 7 positions.
So yeah ... there does have to be something for us to capitalize on.