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Diane Pucin
November 28, 2008

The EA Sports game is used by about half the franchises to check out what the competition is up to and plan accordingly.

Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey doesn't play video games for fun or fantasy.

Morey uses the EA Sports NBA game for professional reasons. He uses it to help evaluate talent. Morey says he is a statistical junky, an admirer of Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane and a mathematical nerd. "I've always loved numbers," Morey said. "I don't play EA Sports as a game. I use it as a tool."

While the kids plug in NBA 09 to "ooh" and "aah" over how real it looks when Kobe Bryant dunks or LeBron James runs the court and finishes, Morey plugs in for more serious purposes.

"Say if you're thinking about acquiring Ron Artest," Morey said from Hawaii, where he was evaluating talent in person at the Maui Classic college tournament.

"On the game, you can see how adding Artest can change the dynamic of your team. You can program it to run offensive sets with Artest and any combination of your players."

Morey said that even this early in the season, there are enough statistics available to evaluate rookies such as Minnesota's Kevin Love (from UCLA) and Memphis' O.J. Mayo (from USC)

"For example, you can tell how often, if Love throws an outlet pass, how often his team scores on the possession," Morey said. "You can tell how often Mayo goes right versus left, how effective the team is with Mayo pulling up and shooting versus when he pulls up and passes instead."

According to the NBA, about half the teams are using the video game as part of personnel evaluation. In the quiet of his office, Morey said he can see how often a player posts up and gets shots on cuts to the basket as well as about defensive and offensive tendencies.

So what is Morey doing in Maui? Just sipping mai tais on the beach?

"Simulation is great and will have a bigger and bigger place in the process," Morey said. "But at the end of the day you can't simulate a player being out too late the night before or his body language on the bench or how he interacts with teammates. Some things you have to do in person."

Especially if the games are in Maui.

Dawdler

Nov 29 2008, 09:42 PM

THE Ted reading the LA Times?

This is really good for EA they can now point out to all the haters that the NBA uses their game to gather info and scenarios and now they can say our game is realistic even though sometimes it may not be.