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Daryl Morey did everything but win an NBA title in 13 seasons as general manager of the Rockets. Houston came this closed in 2018 and reached the playoffs 10 times without hitting bottom during Morey’s tenure, which ended with his resignation Thursday. Perhaps more impressive: that he did this while the Rockets were as frugal as they were successful, entering the luxury tax only once in the last decade.
Morey, one of the pioneers of the NBA’s analytical movement, is the basketball version of Billy Beane, the veteran general manager of the Oakland Athletics who became famous for his portrayal in Moneyball. But Beane didn’t become the star of a best-selling book and movie solely because of the way his teams played. It was because they succeeded with one of the lowest payrolls in the major leagues. The same goes for Morey. He innovated because he worked for landlords (Les Alexander and Tilman Fertitta) who gave him no other option.
Unlike his former Lt. Sam Hinkie in Philadelphia, Morey was never allowed to rebuild during the draft. He took over a title contender with two future Hall of Famers (Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady) in 2007, but both suffered career-ending injuries over the next few seasons, devastating blows that should have forced the Rockets to start again. But Alexander never agreed to let Morey try his hand at the Trial, instead forcing a rebuild from the middle of the rankings. Morey’s only goal from 2010 to 2012 was to stay afloat; he won 34 to 43 games in those seasons and then jumped when the Thunder made James Harden available.
Harden and Morey didn’t just change the NBA in eight seasons together. They did it with one hand tied behind their back. Harden went from being part of a Big Three with two other top-five picks in Oklahoma City (Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook) to one with Chandler Parsons (a second-round player) and Jeremy Lin (an undrafted free agent). Houston was never selected in the lottery during Harden’s time there. They won on the margins, constantly shaking their roster and winning enough that other stars (Dwight Howard and Chris Paul) wanted to play for them.
But something was always missing. The Rockets never paired Harden with a frontcourt player who could be the focal point of the offense. Houston was forced to cope with a fairly limited staff for much of the Harden era. Just compare your supporting casts to Steph Curry’s. Harden never had his version of Draymond Green, much less Durant. He didn’t have a pick-and-roll partner who could make the correct reads in four-on-three situations, or draw a double team and kick the ball to him. He mostly played 3 and D players who needed him to scoop open shots.
That’s why Morey had to reinvent the wheel when it came to designing an offense to go for the most efficient shots. He was running a game of shells, using smoke and mirrors to overcome the lack of elite personnel. No team has won an NBA title since the turn of the millennium without at least one player 6 feet 7 inches or taller who averaged more than 18 points or three assists per game. A team starting Clint Capela and PJ Tucker up front shouldn’t have been able to win 65 games. Conventional wisdom about the Rockets confuses causation with correlation. They didn’t fall short in the playoffs because they were doing tricks; Those tricks are the reason they were in the playoffs in the first place.
But getting 90 percent of the production for 50 percent of the price ended up failing once they got there. The Warriors exposed Houston’s lack of versatility, especially when the Rockets missed 27 3-pointers in a row in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals in 2018. Morey was criticized for not having a Plan B when his team went cold from the perimeter. , but he couldn’t. ‘I’ve asked limited offensive players like Ariza and Tucker to take jump shots, break defenses with dribbling, or hit cutters from the high post. Building a team with established veterans who play fundamentally strong basketball at both ends of the court costs a lot of money.
And that was the only thing Morey never had. Based on salary cap numbers at Spotrac, dating back to the 2010-11 season, the Rockets barely passed the luxury tax (just $ 3.65 million more) in their only season (2015-16) as taxpayers. The Warriors spent $ 49.63 million on penalties over the past five seasons, while even the Thunder, a small market, spent $ 33.73 million. Houston had no excuse for not opening the checkbook. This is a franchise located in the fourth largest metropolitan area in the US that has had a superstar in the prime of his career. Alexander sat on his hands as Houston’s rivals went for it, counting on Morey’s ability to use advanced stats to turn water into wine.
This refusal to spend money turned into a sham once Alexander sold the team to Tilman Fertitta in 2017. Fertitta spent so much money ($ 2.2 billion) to buy the Rockets that he may not have had the liquidity to get into numbers. Reds and build a title contender. Houston was the laughingstock of the league for the amount of juggling it had to do to stay under the tax. The best example came at the trade deadline last season, when Morey used a future first-round pick to ditch the salaries of Brandon Knight and Marquese Chriss. There was no basketball reason for the move. It was simply done to cut costs. Not that Knight and Chriss would have helped the Rockets. But there were certainly a lot of better things Morey could have used that pick for.
Houston also spent that season in a strange staring contest with Danuel House Jr. House is the kind of diamond in the rough that Morey routinely discovered in Houston, an undrafted free agent with a two-way deal that would become a holder gauge wing. The problem was, players in those deals can spend only 45 days with the NBA team during the season before their contracts have to be converted. Money in Houston was so tight that Morey had to send House back to the G League when he failed to sign a long-term, below-market deal. He replaced House with two players he signed off the street (Gerald Green and Kenneth Faried) before bringing him back just before the playoffs. It’s not like House is asking for the world. He signed a three-year, $ 11 million deal in the offseason. But even that was more than Morey could offer at the moment.
Houston’s limited financial flexibility became an even bigger problem last season after the Westbrook trade. With the top two players on the team costing a combined $ 76.7 million, Morey found it nearly impossible to complete the roster without paying the luxury tax. Morey and head coach Mike D’Antoni had to conjure up producing players other teams didn’t want. Jeff Green went from being cut by the Jazz to being a crucial piece of the Rockets’ small-ball attack in the playoffs. The same was true for Austin Rivers, who had been on three teams in five seasons before landing in Houston, and Ben McLemore, who had one foot outside the NBA before the Rockets made him a three-point sniper. They were all more valuable in Houston than anywhere else in the league because Morey identified what they could do well and put them in roles that didn’t ask them to do much more.
It is unclear why he resigned when he did. He was nearly fired last October for his tweet in support of pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which fractured the NBA’s relationship with China. But Morey told ESPN’s Tim MacMahon that he left for “personal reasons” and was interested in pursuing alternative careers, even though Zach Lowe later reported that Morey still wants another NBA job.
Either way, his time in Houston was evidently over. Two of his lieutenants, Gersson Rosas and Monte McNair, left to lead their own teams last year, while D’Antoni left the team when his contract expired at the end of the season. The Rockets won’t have much future flexibility after clearing the closet of future assets to acquire Westbrook, and they are running out of time to build around Harden, who turned 31 in August.
It’s hard to believe that Morey’s departure was Fertitta’s decision simply because so few general managers can run a team as well as Morey on such a tight budget. Morey’s ability to keep earning for such a long period without resorting to tax may never be surpassed.
That’s the appeal of analytics in the first place. Owners began looking for people with non-traditional backgrounds to manage their franchises at the turn of the century for the same reason that Fortune 500 companies hire management consultants without much experience in their respective industries. They need some smart people to come up with a formula to justify spending less money. For all their innovation, Morey and Beane were never the losers in the fight against the system. They were the public faces of a system designed to return more money to the people who ran it. A general manager is ultimately a glorified middle manager. Their job is to make it work with the resources they are given. And, unfortunately, there is no greater hero in our society than a middle manager who can squeeze more production out of his workforce without increasing labor costs.
Morey is a brilliant basketball mind who deserves credit for driving the game forward. But he was also in the right place at the right time. If he hadn’t pioneered the analytical movement in the NBA, someone else would have. Conventional wisdom about team building did not value efficiency. And that was never going to work for homeowners looking to spend their money more efficiently. After all, this is how many of them made their fortune in the first place.
No GM can stretch a dollar more than Morey. But you won’t win an NBA title until you work for an owner who doesn’t force you to.
