Morey is gonna be doing damage control all summer so Tilman doesn't feel cheap and Chris Paul doesn't feel like a whiny kid.
DP: Houston is a wonderful regular season team. In a 7-game series, you can prepare for it. ... That's why Houston probably won't win a championship. In a 7-game series, you can see the faults in that system. In the regular season, Houston is passing through. It's Cleveland then Orlando then New Orleans. Houston, I wonder what they're going to do. Chris Paul is never happy but he's not happy with James Harden. Did it just dawn on him that Harden has all this success, therefore he's probably not gonna go "I won my MVP, maybe it's time to start distributing. Maybe less iso here." That's not the way it works. You get selfish. You get greedy & think you're the reason why you're gonna win a championship. Houston the last 2 years could have been a champion. Now I wonder, this is a team, you're fully assembled. Everyone else has changed or is in the process of changing their roster. If I'm Houston, I don't want Chris Paul, that contract. He's on the downside. I have to have him understand his role, who he is. If I can trade him, I won't get dollar for dollar but I want to save a whole lot of dollars. Then if you can get someone else in there. They still need a mid-range jump shooter.
Daryl Morey, Fall of 1995 3-on-3 league 7 games | 12.9 PPG | 52.9 FG% | 40 REB | 14 AST | 8 BLK | 3 STL Is there a different math used during the regular season as opposed to the postseason? A little bit. It's not as dramatically different as people think. Foul calls go down per foul, defenses get tighter(a lot of that is related to the foul calls), rotations shrink. Most players get a little worse because competition goes up. A few get better, guys like James Harden get better. Reaction to AD deal? One more contender. They're very strong. We were confident going into next season. Most contenders are scrambling to keep their starting five. We have our five that were the best team in the league down the stretch. We'll add a mid level that will get us to six. That's worst case. We're chasing one of these top free agents right now. Does your philosophy change after Golden State's injuries? A little bit. In the past, we knew 90%+ we had to beat Golden State to win the title. Golden State does force you to play differently. Fives have trouble against Golden State. Some of that is Draymond, some of that is off-ball switching. Very hard for fives. Who do you consider the best player in the game? James Harden but I'm not allowed to answer anyone else. James Harden is the best. I like my money. In this case, it's actually true. Do you want to change your team? We're very aggressive. I actually called Woj after his story came out & said "Really, is this news?" It was news apparently. We've generated a lot of clicks in the last few weeks for some reason. Everyone is available? What does aggressive mean? We're going after one of these top free agents. Because of that, it'll probably have to be a trade. If you're in our position and if you want a free agent, it has to be through sign-&-trade so that requires a trade at some point. That's why there's a potential trade out there. Is everyone available? No. Who's not available? Chris & James. I was just wondering if Lakers called & asked if Chris is available? We were the best team down the stretch. We've spent a lot of time putting together two superstars. We're trying to add a 3rd. Going back from that doesn't make sense for us. How do you recruit a free agent? We wait until the required moment by the NBA. What are you selling him on? That's easy. Winning is number one by far. There's some great sides. We're #1 team in China. You can become a global icon. Income tax advantage. 2nd best team over the last 25 years so you know you're joining a winner. Stable organization. I could go on but those are the main points. Let's say I like to score. How do you convince me as the 2nd or 3rd option? I would talk about Kevin McHale. When McHale was here. we met with a lot of free agents & he talked about 'Hey, if I'm on a team, we have two Hall of Famers, why wouldn't you want to play with three? He talked about how easy it makes it. How the game gets more fun. It's a positive to have multiple Hall of Famers, not a negative. People make too much of that in my opinion. Do you shoot too many threes? No. All we're doing is shooting same number of jumpers people shot in the past but stepping back a few feet. Why is it fine to miss 18 footers but a problem to miss further out? I never understood the focus on it. Golden State isn't shooting as many threes. They are shooting less. Chris is elite mid-range but so are multiple guys on the Warriors. Best thing a coach can do is use his personnel. We're just trying to come down the floor & score the most points possible, often it's from three. Most often it's getting to the line. Sometimes it's the open mid range later in the clock. Is Raptors style a style that can be emulated? That's a tough one. Masai did an unbelievable job with aggressive trades, similar to what we're talking about. Unbelievable job with bench depth. Need some good fortune. Gotta have a great team & little bit of things go your way. Toronto had both. One thing I love is Toronto turned around a lot of narratives. There was a key player labeled a playoff choker. I knew he wasn't because I knew him. He had a massive playoff run. Generally narratives is look at the results, find out what happens & write their story after and make it seem everyone knew before. D'Antoni extension? I focus on the big picture. He'll be back next year. He'll likely be our coach for the long term. We'll work it out now or after the season. I'm not worried about it. Mike isn't worried about it. Mike was in the office yesterday. Mike's a great coach & he will be here. Turmoil & tension between Harden & Paul? Do you agree & if so, what do you attribute it to? I don't know how to label things. We have extremely high level competitors. None of us are happy with where we're at, getting eliminated when we had a good chance to win the last couple years. When you do it multiple times in a row, it'll create some angst. How do we take that last step? We won't always agree but come together & win a lot of games. We know what we do works. We want to get it to work all the way through the Finals. That last step & how we do it is maybe creating some of that right now. Felt like you needed a mid-range jump shooter. Personally I wouldn't agree. We can use an elite player that plays on three levels. One free agent we're hoping to chase is like that. That's not the focus. Only one team wins. There's a lot of different ways to lose. For some reason, some ways of losing is fine. If you play traditionally & lose, you're fine. Just because we play different,...everyone said Golden State couldn't win until they did. Your buddy Charles was vocal about that. As soon as we win, everyone will say it's fine. If you win 60 games, you can win a title. We won 60. We're on a 60-win pace. We feel we're favorites in the West. That should be the story. #1 pick in the draft, who would you take? Consensus #1 guy is the #1 guy. That's not a hard one. Can RJ Barrett be a better pro than Zion? Yes but odds are pretty low. ... Key will be what impact can he make at whatever position he's defending primarily? You can't be all offense. You have to be at least average defensively. I think he will be.
At some point he has to kick, stretch, slap, toss Chris Paul out of there.....I dun see him doing anything else if they stick to the ISO plays. 'We are no 1 in China' that is like Macgrady saying he is helluva famous....in China. Morey is clever, he doesn't say anything negative, tru PR guy.
I love Daryl, i'm possibly his biggest fan and agree with everything he said here, aside for "We were the best team down the stretch."...that sounds kinda ridiculous, unless he means "We were the best team down the stretch (aside for when it mattered most, against OKC in the last game of the season and against the Warriors when Durant got injured)."
I know I'm a broken record with this, but this is the stupidest and laziest take... and it's so frustrating that media personalities with enormous reach like Patrick will spread stuff like this without doing any homework. Because it takes less than 10 seconds of research to completely debunk that. In the entire Harden era, they've literally lost one time to a team with a lesser regular season record. That was 2018, of course... and even in that one, there were pretty obvious reasons why that was an exception to the rule. The biggest one is the Chris Paul injury (up 3-2 before that), and there's also the reality we all recognize that the Warriors don't feel they have to try as much in the regular season, relative to everyone else. The Warriors were better than the Rockets in the playoffs this year... and they were also better in the regular season. By four games. Not saying MDA or Harden is perfect, because they're far from it... but generally speaking, what they do in a given regular season translates extremely well to the postseason. Whatever the problems are, they don't just suddenly appear in April and May. And it takes just a few seconds of research to figure all of that out. So frustrating.
He's probably just reiterating after the Allstar break, but you're right... When it actually mattered the Rockets didn't win.
Has to throw this **** in every interview of his. Congrats I guess. Have gone from being the 3rd most winningest team in the regular season over the past 10 years to 2nd best over 25 years with ZERO titles to show.
I'm seeing more and more evidence that the teams calculus changed after the KD/Klay injuries. Its becoming more and more clear now that they probably were shopping CP3 until Klay got injured. Now they are trying to pull that back now, and play damage control to keep those two locked in another year now that the West is much more wide open at the moment.
Exactly, and def agree with you on your points. I'd rather them have just won when it mattered too. There's no awards for what we got to witness
