Analyze this
Once, if you wanted to become the general manager of a professional sports team, you had to have been a great athlete. For decades, sports teams were almost exclusively run by former players.Times have changed. Today, an MBA can be a route into the NBA. Take Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who has the height and bearing of a basketball star, but never played professionally. Instead, Morey graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2000, and parlayed his analytical skills into his current job. “All else equal, it is preferable to have played the sport,” Morey said on Saturday, during a panel at the fourth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which he co-founded. But all else is not equal: Sports are awash in misguided conventional wisdom, and scores of former players have blatantly mismanaged franchises. So Morey is in the vanguard of general managers applying the...