He isn't the one signing the checks and it isn't his bank account. You want to blame anyone. Blame Les and now Landry's Fertitta.
As the number 1 Morey Stan I can objectively tell you that Morey is definitely the Best GM...in all of sports. Not even close really.
Are you poking fun at Morey's self deprecation? Or do you actually believe this nonsense? Morey is the guy who got us Harden in the first place. And he has put a championship team around him... but injuries and Scott Fosters always got in the way. It takes more than great players, and especially more than a great GM to win a title. It takes a healthy dose of luck.
Forgot to mention that Morey also turned lead into gold in the Yao era a few times. He built a couple championship-caliber teams that also fell short because of injuries... 2008 and 2009 being the ones that hurt the most.
imagine being ranked 2 with 0 final appearances in the last 15 years. And who the **** are the staff members of the ringer?
his glaring mistake was he gave up two guards pbev and slou for cp3 but never got that 2nd guard back
What if Presti's discarded player was Westbrook and not Harden, would Daryl be as revered around this board? I refuse to give all the glory to one guy and put all the blame on the same one guy too. It's a 2 way street, folks. I believe every GM has a team, peeps in the war room that do not get mentioned enough and still contribute to the whole. I was confident that some GMs do not want to trade or deal with Morey. I believe in balance so Morley's radical approach is something I doubt I can get 100% behind.
That is a very strange what-if... What makes you think someone as focused on analytics as Morey would want to trade for Westbrook instead of Harden? He only got Westbrook now because it seems his hand was forced. And who said anything about giving Morey all the glory? He's not perfect, but he's about as good of a GM as one can reasonably ask for. As I said above, it seems his hand was most likely forced in this trade.
True, point is if Harden wasn't available, he would have traded for someone else..... and that someone else might have other traits. Terrence Williams and Royce White came to my mind when he was desperate for any talent pre-Harden.
That's true. A GM is only as good as other GMs are stupid. The NBA is a close and head to head competitive system. If every GM was as smart as Morey, he would not have been able to pull some of those amazing trades. But that's no shame. It's just the nature of things. You are the champion. It doesn't matter how good you are. You just have to be better than all the other guys. I believe Morey's analytics approach is overall very effective. He is now losing the edge because most the other teams are catching up. His edge now is his understanding and ability to maneuver the cap. That is also losing ground because the new owner is cheap. Morey's biggest weakness has always been the human element. I am not saying that he is not a people person. In all appearances, he is. What he lacks is that instinct on basketball talent. That's why he has no edge in the draft. Knowing the potential of a young player is more an art than a science. Analytics can only take you so far. Morey is smart enough to recognize this weakness and he has never relied on the draft to build. Draft picks and young undeveloped players for him are just trade assets. And he doesn't seem to understand or value chemistry. I am sure he knows chemistry is important. He just doesn't seem to know how it works in real players. So just like the draft, he leaves it aside in his team building calculation. All these weaknesses are probably because he has never played competitive basketball in his life. He doesn't know what it's like to be a player, what makes them tick, what bonds them, what makes a good player into a great winning player. (In that sense, he was lucky with Harden. He admitted that he did not anticipate Harden to be this good.) What he's been doing looks quite similar to what fantasy league people do. You just try to increase your talent or asset level and hope the odds of winning go up. And he is very, very good at that. But real players aren't just fantasy numbers. That's how the experiments of Dwight Howard, Ty Lawson, Ryan Anderson, and Melo Anthony failed. (I know mine is a minority view here. But I still believe the Chris Paul experiment failed too. CP3 was an incredible talent even at his advanced age. But his style and personality wouldn't fit Harden. And his injury tendency was a huge gamble in light of that subsequent monster contract attached to the trade.) Having said all that, I hope he will stay for a long time. He is one of the top GMs in the league. His strengths out weigh his weaknesses by a mile.
