Jason Friedman of the Houston Press has written the article on Houston General Manager Daryl Morey. It's long as hell, but read it all. It'll make you smarter.

Basically, Morey's a very smart and likable guy with diverse interests, who just has a sense of what can be done with quantitative analysis, and what role that analysis can play in sports.

His hiring has been cited as basketball's Moneyball moment -- and Morey is to the NBA as Billy Beane is to MLB.

Old-timers are chapped that longtime Carroll Dawson assistant Dennis Lindsey didn't get the job -- Lindsey has since departed for the Spurs -- but no one things Morey is a fool.

For instance, from a sidebar to Friedman's main article, here's some background into how it is the Rockets  came to trade red-hot prospect Rudy Gay for Shane Battier:

Here's a small glimpse at what they saw: When Battier was on the court, his team

• Scored more
• Rebounded better
• Fouled less
• Allowed fewer points
• Shot better
• Decreased their opponent's shooting percentage

In other words, he was exactly the type of player the numbers said they had to have.

"He definitely stood out in all the methods we use," says Morey. "He's someone who creates a large margin over who he's guarding. In the NBA, it's not how many points you score, it's what you do with each time down the floor. And when Shane uses a possession, it's always a high number of points are scored. And when Shane's guarding someone, not many points are scored when the other team uses the possession on the other end of the floor. When he played versus not over his years in Memphis, the team was about eight points per game better, a very significant margin."

What we're getting from this is that Battier is doing "the little things." Or "playing smart." Or, essentially, doing the things that win basketball games -- whatever they are -- but don't show up in the traditional box score.

Here's the great irony, though: the people who most question putting a "stat guy" at the head of a team are people who are all about those exact things. Because those exact people have been let down by old school stats in the past.

From the main article:

Take, for instance, former Rocket and current NBA analyst Kenny Smith.

"Without question, I'm going to trust my eyes more than the numbers," says Smith. "I never look at the stat sheet. I think stats have value, without question. But it makes me wary if they [the number-crunchers] put value in certain stats that I don't think have value. A player understands this. I could average 17 points a game on a bad team, because in the last eight minutes of the game, the coach leaves me in the game to get my six or seven points against second-string or third-string guys. And when you're on a bad team, guys know how to do that. They know how to get their ­numbers."

"I want to know what happens in winning time. What happens when guys are making plays to win the game, or when a team is making a 10-0 run? Who's the guy who makes the play to make things happen? I know the look. I know the look that separates aggression from passiveness, dominance from lack of dominance over a person. You can't get that on a stat sheet. Statistics should only validate what you think subjectively. It shouldn't create your subjective view."

Perhaps surprisingly, Morey doesn't take issue with Smith's opinions on the subject.

"I think that's fair," he says. "In fact, I describe what we do along those lines all the time. No matter what you think, you should want to use objective evidence to confirm or help you question your beliefs."

"I think often what you'll find when you're getting negative comments (on statistics), they're basing it on what they're used to being available, which is a regular box score. And there's no question that anything in the box score is highly misleading. So if you're basing your opinions on that - the box scores that they hand out at the games - you're going to have an appropriate negative opinion of what you can understand using analytics. I would even have a negative opinion of [statistical analysis] if that's all I'd ever seen."

See? Kenny Smith and Daryl Morey want the same thing: to know what really wins games. In the past, that kind of stuff has been assessed informally, based on who has the killer look in their eyes and all that. And that is not nothing. But now people like Morey and dozens more are showing that statistics can be helpful in that assessment too.

It's early for these statistics. But they're not going away. They're helping already, and they'll be helping more in the future.