Letting Luc walk. No reason for that. Ariza we couldn't really match. Hard to replace a guy like Luc on the buyout market. Also signing MCW - that was an experiment guaranteed to fail.
Morey's biggest mistake isn't any of the choices. It simply is him not choosing the right "replacements" with Ariza and Moute departing. But that can be rectified through trade and buy out choices. CP is a huge plus on this team. CP maximizes/augments the Rockets best player, Harden. But to maximize CP......a "3rd PG" needs to be acquired to "#DecreaseTheDrop" as @Codman likes to say.
The CP3 trade was one of the best things he's ever done. That may have been the greatest Rockets team ever if not for injuries. Unfortunately, that trade seemed to come with a handshake agreement about CP3's current contract. It looks bad now for sure. But if we had won it all last year, it would have been worth it. Oh well.
I maybe wrong, but couldn't we sign CP3 as a free-agent and keep M.Harrell, Beverly, LouWill, Dekker, or keep some of them?
CP3 contract was the stupidest and least analytical thing Morey could have ever done. Why would anyone pay top dollar for even a Ferrari if it’s known to have upwards of 100000 miles and known engine trouble? Stupid. Again the romanticized notion that “we just need more All stars” is what seduced Morey into bad decisions. Meanwhile, look at the Clippers! The whole roster there has all the makings of a Morey constructed team. Yeoman roster with that great work spirit we so miss this year plus a good balance of talent. Moral of the Morey story? You don’t pay top dollar for aging super stars. Much less give them four years guaranteed! Especially when ur budget is kept effectively flat. To do so is not intelligent risk taking. It’s gambling. Pure and simple.
I truly believe that if we had 20 Million of real production last year, we could be hoisting a championship last year. It's not the only mistake, but it really proved critical. Given all context, it was the one with more risk and less reward.
Nope, not at all... well, maybe Harrell depending on how much CP3 would have signed for. The reason we traded for CP3 after convincing him to opt-in was to avoid having to gut the entire team to acquire him. By trading, we only had to send out 80% of his salary after CP3 waived the trade kicker. If we were to sign for him, not only would that 80% rule not apply, his first year would be higher than his opt-in last year.
The moving of the Anderson contract has to happen in stages. He has completed stage one which was to turn it into 2 smaller bad contracts. Stage 2 might take awhile longer
Have you seen how effective Luc has been this season? How would his presence have affected the Rockets performance?
This is the decision that I will never forgive Morey for. Kawhi + Harden would have been a dynasty, Morey would have had the assets to swing for a third star. WE WOULD HAVE BEEN WHERE GSW IS...and for a long time. This isn't hindsight. Most of the board wanted Kawhi Leonard at the time...Easily Morey's biggest mistake.
I might be willing to go with letting Ariza walk if someone (ANYone) can show me proof that he came back to Morey after getting the Suns offer and asked if the Rox would match. As far as I know, Trevor got the offer one minute into the signing period and said yes. They were reporting the deal within hours. If he agreed to that offer without giving the Rox a chance to match, then it's not on Morey. Previously, his new agents had let it be known he wanted a 4-5 year contract between $50M-$60M, and Morey would have been insane to agree to that. Luc is still injured (or injured again) months later, and his presence on our bench wouldn't have given us Ws. The only thing that makes me regret the CP3 trade was how well Montrezl has played since then; but if I'm being honest, he never looked THAT good for us and I thought he'd be a lifelong 3rd-stringer. Fun, energetic guy with awesome dunks, but was always making stupid plays. He's improved drastically. I still say Anderson's contract was the worst because Morey assumed the cap projections would hold or go up, and they didn't -- something a money-aware guy like Morey shouldn't have done. That left us little to work with in subsequent years, cap-wise. And Ryno underperformed; not by a giant amount, but he certainly didn't live up to that big contract. Then again, his presence on the roster prevented us from signing Melo when he still had two huge years left on his contract, so Ryno's contract did us some good, too.
It was true with CP3 we probably had a good chance to defeat Golden State, but you cannot help think about CP3 playing to his early demise/to his fullest and the team still barely winning it while GSW was losing without giving close to 100% or 120%. Therein lies the difference. And of course they had some of the refs in their pockets.
Chris Paul is going to handicap the Rockets for years. He’s is still a good player, but what was given up for him and the subsequent contract that he signed will ultimately kill this team and will probably be Morey’s undoing. There isn’t any getting out of this one like he did with Ryan Anderson. Unless he magically figures out a way to stop time and the aging process, I’m afraid that bad contract might look like a franchise killer two years from now.
Surprisingly, the voting system on CF does change my mind a lot. I do think Ryno was a big issue, and costed us a better championship run by being useless in the playoffs. But that's not why we're here today. I think GMs deserve a pass on certain things. I can consider Ryno's deal to be one of those things. If I'm being honest here, if CP would've moved over, said he'd take less to get LBJ on board, we could've been the favorites to win it all. I mean, I get it, friends are friends but they watch their own backs first. But still, how much convincing, wining and dining did you do to try to get LBJ to come here? Did you really want to win a chip? Who spoke the words "We don't need Lebron"? Was that Daryl Morey, CP, or Harden? Either way, Morey did not show desperation. Once touting a great FA destination, now we're not even on the map for the budding stars of the league.
The draft is where he went wrong, most of the top teams in the league big chunks of their rotation and bench were their own draft picks. Morey over the past 3 years traded away 1st and missed on most of his 2nd round picks.
