Houston Rockets: Four reasons why Moreyball analytics work for this team

Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey has started an epidemic of arguably the most intuitive way of building a sports team.  Here are four ways analytics has made this team better than ever.

Houston Rockets fans — You may have heard the word “analytics” at some point.

But what in the hell is it?

When people refer to analytics, the first thing that usually comes up to a common man’s mind is numbers. The numbers then lead to the idea of statistics, which is a field of mathematics that is defined as the following…

“A branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data”- Merriam-Webster

To simplify the above definition, statistics is basically taking a numerical measure or measures in order to inference a possible trend or to make a conclusion about the data. A conclusion can range from many forms such as “the probability of….” to “I fail to reject the null hypothesis..”

The main two types of statistics are Descriptive Statistics and Inferential Statistics. Descriptive statistics is used to analyze numerical numbers such as standard-deviation or that mean, median, and mode stuff you learned and thought to be pointless.