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Tilman Fertitta endorses Rockets’ rebuilding strategy, basketball analytics

Ben DuBose
·3 min read
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Even with a historic winning streak of six games, the young Houston Rockets (7-16) still rank third-to-last in the Western Conference. But that doesn’t bother owner Tilman Fertitta, whose team committed to a rebuilding path after superstar guard James Harden’s forced departure.

In a new interview with Chris Baldwin of PaperCity, Fertitta says he is standing by the current plan led by general manager Rafael Stone.

“It’s very hard,” Fertitta told PaperCity Magazine. “Because I like to win. But I understand that this is the process. And the biggest mistake you can make is we could bring in a brunch of veterans with these young guys and win more games. But it’s not the right process.” He continued:

You’ve got to let these guys have the minutes. And you’ve got to let it work. We don’t want to be one of those building programs that are just mediocre for four years or five years. That’s what a lot of teams decide to do. And when you’ve been as good as we were for so many years, yeah we could have had the eighth seed in the playoffs or the ninth seed.”

But it’s better to tear it apart and start over and build up again. It will last for many years to come. …

It was hard for me. But I listened to the process and I studied what other teams have done in the last 30 years in the NBA, and how this works. . . And this is the correct way to do it. You don’t just want to be a mediocre team.

Fertitta also tells Baldwin that he’s become more immersed in basketball analytics since his purchase of the Rockets in 2017.

“It’s analytics you don’t see in the box score. You don’t see in the newspaper. It’s different analytics. It’s at a higher level. You can look at a box score and think, ‘Oh my God, this guy had a triple double, he must be great!’ Where this person really was inefficient and wasn’t very good.”

Fertitta’s comments on analytics and triple-doubles will certainly draw attention, since the most unpopular move of his Rockets tenure — the July 2019 swap of Chris Paul and future draft assets to Oklahoma City for Russell Westbrook — would seem to suggest that a different criteria was used. After all, it’s Westbrook who is known for triple-doubles, while Paul is the clear preference of many analytics-driven models.

Then again, it’s worth noting that Harden had a very heavy hand in the Paul-Westbrook negotiations, so Houston’s front office and ownership may not have had much of a choice. Whatever the case, Fertitta tells Baldwin that he is fully on board with the analytics movement today.

“I enjoy it,” Fertitta concluded. “I sure wasn’t a basketball guru. I thought I knew a lot before I owned the team. I realized how much I didn’t know. There’s just different analytics that you look at in all sports that tell you so much more than you ever thought that you knew.”

The full interview with Fertitta and Baldwin, which also addresses the recent wave of success for the University of Houston athletics program (where Fertitta is chairman of the Board of Regents), can be read here.

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