Where did you get that moronic rumor? These idiots with their made up rumors are getting dumber everyday. .
They just cannot accept the fact that Goran is a good player but a unfaithful son of a gun He just goes where he wants and Houston is not special to him.
Here's how I feel. Morey [A-] - He's proven in every aspect of managing a roster and gets "it". You're either good enough to win a title or you're irrelevant. Compared to his peers, Morey is getting it done in every single category he's responsible for. He cant seem to recruit like a Cuban or Riley but I don't put the lack of playoff success fully on his shoulders. Like I said, you're either good enough to win it all or you don't matter. McHale [C] - Players like him, he can motivate, he's candid (I like that) and he has a good basketball mind. He isn't good with X's and O's or in-game adjustments. It takes the Rockets 2-3 games to adapt when a team like San Antonio can do it during a 15 minute halftime. On one end he seems open-minded (the scheme) but at other times he comes off a bit stubborn and stuck in his ways. Les Alexander [A-] I appreciate his commitment to winning. He's been hiring good people for a long time. Chases star players and coaches but also plucked Daryl Morey out of nowhere to study under CD. He's among the elite owners in all of sports IMO when compared to his peers. He says he'll go over the luxury tax if we ever need to but I'm not sure I buy it. And he butts his head in from time-to-time (moved on from JVG, seems to hold grudges) but mostly stays out of management's way. There are better owners out there, no doubt, but you'd be surprised how few.
I give McHale a lot of guff, because I routinely see the Rockets underperform. Yes, I know they have the fourth best record in the league, but they still have lots of turnovers, they let big leads slip instead of putting the other team's lights out, and they often just don't look like they're playing up to their full potential. To me, that's always the coach's responsibility: to get the highest level of play out of his players. That said, I was happy to hear McHale's press conference after the Clippers' win where he admitted they tried something different on defense in the first half, got Deandre-dunked a bunch, and so they went back to a different, more familiar defensive strategy that worked in the second half. Good for him. I find it hard to doubt most roster moves by Morey, because they so often exceed expectations. I'd love to be a fly on the inside wall of his cranium. That said, if I have any critique of Morey, it's all the threes we take, and we know he's the pusher of that. However, it was recently pointed out in one of the threads here that Moreyball is really in order of priority (1) points at the rim, (2) free throws, (3) open, uncontested threes. The team often skips straight to (3) and they're often contested threes, and that's where you're playing on a knife's edge, where you live and die by the three. Improper implementation of true Moreyball could be the coaching problem. I don't know. I still feel uncomfortable with the number of threes we take, as I often say on here. I'd like to see the team play with as much energy in every game as they played with to beat the Clippers. It wasn't necessarily a pretty game, but they played with a lot of heart and scrappiness and pulled that sucker off. When they don't play hard as a team, that's when I look at their bosses.
and surely don't want him directing defensive assignments... like in the final seconds when an open 3 pointer would knock us out of the playoffs....
Not knowing his x's and o's would make him a terrible assistant coach. In the modern NBA most of the x's and o's come from the assistants. Also, I don't agree that McHale doesn't know his x's and o's. He isn't on par with Carlisle or Larry Brown in his prime, but he has made a number of adjustments on plays and has pointed out things to Finch and Bickerstaff. Not every effective coach is cut from the same mold. Phil Jackson was not a great x's and o's coach, neither was Chuck Daley.... Doc Rivers isn't and there are others.
Morey is great at finding and assessing talent from an analytics perspective and he's great at managing contracts and assets. But to translate that to actual basketball success, it seems that you need more than great talent when it comes to close games or a 7 game series. Because those are more like chess matches. And you need a coach who can mentally win that match. The only thing I don't like about Morey is his philosophy of "just let the players play" and don't run any set plays. Because the players don't have much direction in pressure situations and it becomes a messy free-for-all. I've always wondered what would happen if you combined Moreyball analytics and management with Spurs-ball playing style and game management. Coaches that have spawned from that camp have been extremely successful (Atlanta Hawks - Mike Budenholzer and Golden State Warriors - Steve Kerr)
Obviously McHale. Morey has provded a super talented roster, one of the best benches, 2 top 10 players, one MVP candidate. If McHale can't take this roster to the promised land, he has failed miserably.
No disrespect intended, but your post is a good example of a certain way of thinking. You admit that M&M are successful, but you claim that they are merely lucky, because they don't do what you would do in their position. It might also be that they know more than you.
Personally, I've laid off them both this year where I had traditionally been very pro-Morey and anti-McHale. There comes a certain sample size where you can't just call McHale lucky to have the highest winning percentage in team history. I think that size was easily passed last year, if not earlier. The guy still aggravates me regularly, but that's part of being a fan. If the media hadn't (deservedly) fellated Gregg Popovich for the last 5 years straight I'm sure Spurs fans would write the same kind of things about him in their game threads. McHale has posted winning seasons with and without Harden, improved his winning percentage every season since arriving, and the team is somehow surviving this Howard thing. I'll still curse his decisions occasionally, but there's not much to complain about this year that can't be written off to injuries.
Wait, there are legitimate posters who are anti-Morey? And I thought the rest were either anti-McHale or just put up with McHale haha. Are there those that particularly favor McHale? Seems like two very small minority groups imo...