I like him in fake reality TV shows as a actor that butter him up to look like a competent businessman rather than a dude who nutted out of a 413 million dollar penis. Don't like him in positions where he had to make any decisions.
Liking or not liking Biden's decisions is rather irrelevant when referring to a former president who has convinced 35% of our population that our voting system is fake news and that he is still the rightful president. Whatever issues our current president has is a small apples compared to the threat the former president is to our literal democratic system. His own defense secretary (Gen Mattis) Trump hand picked said that he is literally the first president of his lifetime that purposefully tries to divide the country.
Morey took Sam Dekker with a bad back. He did the right thing by picking Trez in the second round. Joey Dorsey over De'Andre Jordan was another big mistake.
You figure drafting is not dissimilar to gambling so there will surely be hits and misses. Another reason to minimize tanking years.
For this season, the team was offensively focused. Silas' philosophy, 5-out, play fast. This is fine except we don't have that many great 3-pt shooters. The play fast thing, worked at times. Young legs and stamina. But against the better defensive teams teams, resulted in lot of TOs especially 1st half of season. I don't blame Silas entirely because I think he also knows our half-court sets were a lot to be desired. (some of this is because of KPJ). Few pet plays do work, so there's good stuff. But... if we growing in the current system: 'solid' not great offense and terrible defense. It feels like we might turn into a Charlotte Hornets, which is not a good thing. Lack of big, bad paint protection, has lot of 'guard' play. Sure when the offense is ON, that team could win some games and out-score other teams. But this kind of style seems not viable in post season. Hornets, is a team that got bounced out of the play-in, two years in a row. By pacers in 2021, and by Hawks in 2022. As far as teams and blueprints, I hope Silas / Stone are not building towards that kind of team. If defense matters to an org like the Raptors or Cavs, they stick their Rookies (Barnes/Mobley) right into it. The "we're bad defensive team because we're young" only goes so far. Good habits start early. If we draft that defensive wing/big, I sincerely hope Silas pivot to defense a lot more this upcoming season. Defense should be part of the winning culture. Let's not aspire to be a poor-man's Hornets.
Actually the reason we don't recognize this is because they get shipped out or we didn't want to pay them.
The seminal article about Morey's approach to drafting is Basketball's Nerd King, reprinted from the Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. It's fascinating to me, because by and large, Morey credits the Dorsey/De'Andre Jordan mistake for sharpening his approach and his analytical player evaluation models. About how numbers aren't everything, and how relative age and off-court intangibles are just as important. Additionally, he mentions how confirmation bias, nicknames, and physical resemblances were massively misleading and detrimental to the process. Incidentally, Morey himself got stuck with the label of "Moneyball" and "Sabermetrics", and his MIT/Sloan background pretty much branded him as a GM who was cold, impersonal, and overly analytical. In the same way that a player can get marked as a choker after an off-performance in the NCAA tournament, I think Morey was marked by the Battier-Gay trade completed while he was the Assistant GM to be a guy who favored non-stats over athleticism. Now, every time he has a failure, it's because of his analytical approach, not that when he's picking in the 20s, he's probably got a less than 10% chance of finding a future starter based on historical record. We always assume that players have a prime somewhere in their late 20s, when they've gained experience and accumulated literally thousands of minutes of playtime in the league. Yet somehow, we never usually expect or allow for general managers to improve over the same time scale. If Jalen becomes an all-star in his 5th year in the league when he turns 25, and becomes MVP in his 11th year, we are not going to care very much about how he played as a rookie, or if he still has occasional lapses on defense off the ball. Morey pulled off the Harden deal in his 5th year as the GM of the Rockets, and won the executive of the year in his 11th year. We shouldn't necessarily expect him to bat 1.000 in the draft and FA every year, just that he absolutely nails the big moves. Morey actually addresses this in the interview/article as well, about how the Rockets had been overvaluing their own players because of familiarity. The change to constantly putting a free-market/draft pick value on their own players, even the ones they weren't looking to move, probably led to the constant feeling of roster churn, and players being treated as assets. Yet it's hard to argue with results, and for all his reputation as a GM who doesn't form personal connections and needs to "win" every deal, the fact that he pulled off the Philly Harden deal (regardless of how well the move will turn out), points much more to how strong his relationships are with other GMs and with many players.
Travis Stockbridge is one of the youngest General Managers in history, and he was a big reason all of this talent was on the Vipers this year. Tilly needs to add Travis Stockbridge to Rockets FO. This guy knows how to build a team.
Impressed by the continued resources being allocated towards analytics. I believe this organization is on the right track after being a skeptic since day 1 of the Tilman era. He went into a situation that was running smoothly and he did too much to shake things up and it blew up in his face. It seems as if he has become more hands off and his son Patrick is overseeing the organization in a thoughtful way that was honestly unexpected. I am always going to question leadership but it seems like for now, they are doing a fine job of investing in building this thing right.
