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Go Home NBA Players Back Obama, But One Smart Exec Is For Romney

PLANK AUGUST 24, 2012

NBA Players Back Obama, But One Smart Exec Is For Romney

BY MARC TRACY

President Obama is very popular among NBA basketball players. In addition to the basketball-themed fundraiser that he attended on Wednesday in New York featuring Michael Jordan and current Knicks star Carmelo Anthony (who, conservatives have been happy to note, made a risible “Stop Snitchin’” video several years ago), there was also a recent fundraiser hosted by Dallas Maverick Vince Carter and attended by Magic Johnson, Chris Paul, and LeBron James, at $30,000 a plate.

But it's worth noting that support for the President isn't ubiquitous in the National Basketball Association. According to a list of NBA-related donations compiled by the site HoopsHype, Mitt Romney is fairly popular among league owners and executives. And as tempting as it is to think of this as a classic management vs. labor divide between the political parties, it would be foolish to dismiss the analysis of one Romney donor in particular: Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets.

Morey is revered as a pioneer of the statistically savvy approach to basketball—he is roughly the NBA’s equivalent of Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager profiled by Michael Lewis in Moneyball (indeed, Lewis has also written about Morey). Additionally, Morey is an active cultivator of advanced statistical sports analysis, having co-founded the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. And there's some reason to believe that sabermetrics can be a fruitful tool in analyzing politics: One fellow practitioner, after all, is New York Times elections-predictor Nate Silver. 

Morey's technocratic bent would suggest that he ought to support Obama, the level-headed, technocratic, “whether [government] works” president, who as a candidate in 2008 ran a Moneyball-style campaign. So why is he donating to Romney?

Surprisingly, the answer has little to do with Romney’s positions, many of which “I disagree strongly with,” Morey said in an email (one data point: he recently officiated at a same-sex wedding). Unsurprisingly, Morey’s support—and he is no late-bloomer; he gave his first $1,000 in May 2011 and his largest amount, $5,000, in January, when Newt Gingrich was surging—derives from a counterintuitive theory of how people should determine which candidates they support.

“I believe people focus too much on policy when making political decisions and not enough on selecting the best leader for the country,” Morey wrote. A sports analogy? Why not! “I would not select a head coach primarily because I agree with his choices for pick and roll coverage. I would select a coach who I thought would be the best leader of the team. His XO coaching philosophy would be important to the selection but not the most important selection criteria.”

As evidence that Romney would prove the superior leader, Morey cited the “significantly more experience leading effectively” Romney has had, over a “diverse set of organizations.” Mr. Romney: the whole Bain thing has not totally backfired after all.

Meanwhile, partisans of either side won’t find much to brag about among the other NBA donors. NBA commissioner David Stern, whose attitudes toward labor (both the players’ union and, back when he was a lawyer in private practice, other unions) aren’t particularly admirable, attended Carter’s Obama fundraiser. On the other hand, Pat Riley, the evil mastermind behind the Miami Heat’s Big Three (not to mention the Los Angeles Lakers’ copious championships in the ’80s), is a Romney backer. He is joined by Knicks owner James Dolan—the guy who just let Jeremy Lin walk (to Morey’s Rockets)—and hapless Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, who presumably wrote his $4,000 check in Comic Sans font. 

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11 comments

I'm surprised a basketball coach would think Romney was the better leader. Strategic offense is about creating options and strategic defense is about eliminating options. (In basketball, teams where all players can score 10 points do better than teams with a marquee player scoring in the 50's.) Obama's got health care reform, infrastructure, stimulus and education. Romney's only option for the economy is to cut taxes. If he doesn't cut taxes, what's left?

- Nusholtz

August 24, 2012 at 4:19pm

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Plus, Romney p***** people off.

- Sophia

August 24, 2012 at 4:49pm

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Nusholtz's analysis is right, Morey's explanation smacks of bs.

- Pnaut

August 24, 2012 at 5:05pm

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Morey is right in one respect and wrong in another. A sports coach or G.M. has to, above all, gain the respect of his staff and his players as a leader. That makes it easier to run the day-to-day operations and X's and O's. Of course, if he's terrible at management or X's and O's, he'll lose the respect of his staff and players. But then, he's in the wrong business. Morey and Pat Riley are dealing with apples and oranges. Riley gives motivational speeches to business people in the off-season. Morey runs an NBA team. Government is a hundred times more complicated than any business. The president can't fire everyone who disagrees with him, even in his own administration. A businessman can. If Romney wins in November, his presidency will be mess, like that of all other presidents. And, boy is he going to be frustrated and enraged when he finds out that he can't fire a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. And how could Romney be a better leader than Obama, when he's respected even less than Obama is? Silly idea, Morey and Riley.

- magboy47.

August 24, 2012 at 5:59pm

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So Morey is supposedly a statistical wunderkind when it comes to managing a basketball team, yet throws it all out the window when he picks a coach. Genius. Shear genius. I hope his bosses don't wonder why they're paying him so much to essentially guess like everyone else, about who should coach the Rockets.

- jet

August 25, 2012 at 12:23am

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Cutting genius? Eh, make that 'sheer' genius. Oops.

- jet

August 25, 2012 at 2:09am

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Basing your choice of a candidate on leadership and ignoring policy only makes sense if you believe that policy makes little or no difference. That is to say, it's crazy and stupid.

- arock28

August 25, 2012 at 3:09am

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As an ardent Rockets fan, I'm intimately familiar with basically every public statement Daryl Morey has made over the past five years or so. Morey rarely talks politics with sports journalists, but I do remember an interview he gave with the (now defunct) Houstonist blog several years ago in which he said living in Houston had made him change some of his ideas on the merits of total deregulation of the real-estate and development markets (implying that he previously thought total deregulation -- which Houston very nearly has -- was a good thing). Morey is a very smart basketball mind, but it's clear that he's part of a very specific school-of-thought when it comes to economics (a school that lends itself well to sports analysis): a very theoretical, textbook-oriented approach that highlights the "perfection" of the free market. He's a product of America's business-school culture. Is it any surprise that he thinks the epitome of that culture would make a good leader? As for Morey's rationale, I think it makes a great deal of sense, and it's part of what Obama is saying right now, actually: Specific policy issues are fine, but in reality the vast majority of the president's decisions will not be covered in a candidate's policy proposals. You have to look at a candidate's overall record and character. That is, after all, why Obama is focusing so heavily on Romney's failure to release his tax returns, as well as his time at Bain Capital. Regardless of whatever vague, nonsensical proposals Romney makes from now until November, what he has done and what his overall character and commitments tells us he will do is significantly more important. (Beyond this, Morey is likely of the school of thought that coaching is significantly less important than the players on the court -- that is, after all, the leading fan theory on the decision to let Rick Adelman go and hire Kevin McHale: Adelman would not give appropriate playing time to the players Morey acquired, while McHale does. How closely that carries over to the presidency is dubious, however).

- zuludown

August 25, 2012 at 4:30am

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>sabermetrics can be a fruitful tool in analyzing politics Wow. The study of baseball statistics, as practiced by the Society for American Baseball Research, is useful for analyzing politics. How, exactly?

- floydsm8

August 25, 2012 at 7:55pm

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Bullseye, floydsm8. You sunk a shot with nothing but net from half court.

- skahn

August 26, 2012 at 12:22am

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However, David Robinson might be an (ex-)NBA player worth considering for President, or at least a spot in the Cabinet.

- skahn

August 26, 2012 at 12:25am

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