At the inaugural League of Legends player draft earlier this month, a very recognizable figure from the traditional sports world joined this momentous occasion in the esports universe.
Among the executives present was Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who likened the occasion to the NBA’s first draft.
“The draft is really important,” Morey told esports reporter Travis Gafford. “Developing talent is really important. We’re in this for the long haul. We really take care of our players, and this is an historic draft. I think everyone here is going to remember we’re here.”
The Rockets are one of four major North American sports organizations to also own entrants in the initial League of Legends franchising with their team Clutch Gaming, so named for the “Clutch City” moniker given to the 1994 Rockets championship team. They are joined by the Cleveland Cavaliers (100 Thieves), the Golden State Warriors (Golden Guardians) and the New York Yankees (Echo Fox), who all own or have invested in these NA LCS teams.
But only Morey attended from that cohort of mainstream executives, showing his interest and involvement in the space. He joined the board of Major League Gaming in 2013 and told ESPN’s basketball podcast, The Hoop Collective, that esports will be “huge” given how much time people under the age of 25 spend on video games, including his 14-year-old son.
“I say it all the time because it’s true: The three dominant sports in the future are going to be soccer, basketball and esports,” Morey told Gafford.
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Morey’s appearance at the League of Legends Scouting Grounds (the second annual combine) and draft is proof as much, not to much his lengthy discussion of his collaboration with Sebastian Park, the Rockets’ director of esports development running Clutch Gaming.
Asked by Gafford about the difference between running an NBA franchise and an esports club — which only debuts next month — Morey replied, “I think we don’t know the difference. Actually it’s frustrating because in the NBA we feel like we’ve got a good handle on ‘do x-y-z and execute this plan and that will win. With esports we’ve done a ton of work — Sebastian and his team have done a ton of work — to develop a model for how we want to run, how we want to use data, how we want to have great coaching, but the reality is we don’t know. We’ve got a great, really informed hypothesis on how we want to run things, and we’re going to have to see how it works.
“I promise you, in a year we’re going to feel like we didn’t know anything right now.”
Excited to announce our new team @ClutchGaming! We plan to bring same winning approach as @HoustonRockets #NALCS #CGWIN
— Daryl Morey (@dmorey) November 20, 2017
A separate Gafford interview with Park a few days prior further highlighted the partnership between the Morey’s Rockets and Clutch Gaming and how the esports operation is fully embedded within the NBA franchise. Park said many of the high-level decisions follow the same philosophy, in terms of an embrace of analytics to marketing, branding, team decision-making and even an ethos of transparency in explaining the thought process.
“What’s the best way to scout players? What’s the best way to coach players? What’s the best way to build a roster?” Park said. “At least on a personnel level, it’s super-interconnected.”
Park added that the data-driven approach for insights will very much follow the work of the Rockets’ GM, who has advocated greater emphasis on three-pointers.
“The big Rockets discovery of Moreyball — with Daryl Morey who advises a lot of the stuff we do — is that three is a larger number than two,” Park said. “We haven’t done anything that simplistically explained yet, but the hope is basically, look, we think that growth and understanding of League of Legends is a step function, which just basically means that nothing happens for a while, and then suddenly a lot of things happen. Similarly, we’re looking at analytics and more different approaches the same way.”
Asked by ESPN about his future ambitions beyond basketball, Morey said he is probably a lifer in the sport — with only one possible exception.
“If there is anything else, it’d probably be esports,” he said, “because I think it’s like 1950s basketball right now where there’s just a ton of opportunity.”