Last February I was fortunate enough to attend the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (mostly due to the excellent work of the ever-amazing Ryan Stimson). One of the marquee events was a panel titled “Moneymind: Overcoming Cognitive Bias“, which featured 4 of the best known “Money[sport]” GMs (Daryl Morey, Sam Hinkie, Farhan Zaidi, and Billy Beane) talking about how they make decisions and what makes their  respective management styles different from most executives in their sports.

While the whole panel was endlessly informative and extremely entertaining, one thing Daryl Morey said about the Rockets approach to implementing strategies really stuck with me:

“One thing I think all of us have done is more take the lessons that are sort of obvious that everyone has agreed to and taken them to the logical conclusion. Which is, for example us, it’s better to make 3 than 2 on a shot…genius, right…taking it to it’s logical conclusion, which is shoot 50 of them a night.”

Basically what Morey was saying is that if all the work you’ve done has shown that a strategy is beneficial, don’t hedge your bets and only go half-in on it. It’s this idea that’s been floating around in my head for the last 2 days since I wrote about optimizing contract structure – if GMs could theoretically save cap space by setting up contracts to pay more money to players upfront, how much total cap room could they create simply by structuring their contracts in the most efficient way possible?

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