Editor’s Note: Welcome to Part IV of our summer series: The Road to Contention. In Part I, Excl gave us a State of the Cap. In Part II, we profiled Sam Hinkie, who made the mantra “tank your way to success” model for team building. In Part III we saw what it would be like if the Cavs took a James Dolan windmill tilt to try to win now with limited assets.
The standard bearer for the more graduated model of team building is Houston’s Daryl Morey. The Rockets built their teams during Morey’s tenure by using analytics to build a player prediction model and making incremental improvements year after year until they finally built a contender.