The preseason, employee turnover, and Daryl

I write this to provide some insight on the team this year. I will not respond to posts here nor divulge my sauces (queue the Chris Broussard face), but if you find this information to be incomplete or untrustworthy, don't consume it.

I would like to see someone bring this up at a press conference personally - as I am amazed it hasn't surfaced with all the out of shape and overweight talk lately. Ask yourself: why did it seem the ENTIRE TEAM was out of shape to start the season? I'll give the information I've heard...


Daryl fired a talented guy by the name of Joe Rogowski over the summer as strength and conditioning coach and brought in someone by the name of Javair Gillett. This Javair guy is a huge proponent of using stats, "athletic skill conditioning" (AKA off-the-court drills that *should* provide on-the-court conditioning) and metrics as a gauge of fitness level, so naturally Daryl latched on to him. It is unclear to most people why Rogowski was let go from I've been told.

Javair came in and convinced Daryl and the training staff that the team does not need to run two-a-days during camp, that they do not need to be traditionally conditioned on the court playing basketball and running sprints, and that the semi-injured personnel can get ready for the year mainly on exercise bikes and treadmills (and it would actually be better because guys wouldn’t get injured as much).

When coaches would gripe at Daryl and co. about how out of shape the team was in preseason, they would hook a guy up to a machine (like a respiratory cart), get a printout of their VO2max, RQ, FiO2 etc. and show them that the guys were all at an “elite” level of fitness and on par when compared to other NBA players based on these metrics.

Anyone who played the game can see pretty quickly when guys are out of shape, and Daryl doesn’t have that personal experience - so it seems he relied on a computer printout to tell him his million dollar athletes were ready for the season. This illustrates to me that Daryl is so blind in his defense of analytics that he does not have the ability to sparse the meaning of these print outs vs. reality (AKA the good old "eye test").

From what I understand, the coaches were pissed off and fighting this new conditioning regiment, but they were basically told that this was the way it is and the training staff would hold guys out of practice if they bucked the system too hard. If it was me, I’d like to think I'd of gone down swinging, but I understand how much easier that is to say than do, especially when it’s your employer telling you what to do with essentially your job on the line.

I was told that this also fostered an environment where the players felt like they had a blanket of protection from the coaching staff in the form of the front office and training staff. I believe it would be logical to then say that this enabled some of the bad, lazy habits we have seen this year from some of the players. It also may have helped along the "losing of the locker room" that we saw early in the season.

It's easy to see why we were 4 to 6 weeks away from really being in playing shape and clicking at the start of the season - and there is more Beard (oops, meant info) on that story from what I've been told - but I believe the above is the biggest mistake made by Morey as a GM. Keith Jones still being head trainer may be his 2nd biggest mistake, but that's up for debate.