Agreed. I dont doubt Morey is masterful with exacting trades. But its results I want. I kind of think he doesnt mind trading away picks because he has been pretty crap at talent evaluation.
I’ll bet anyone right now that my cousin Justin James becomes a Rocket in the future Thank you Daryl Morey!
I found this tweet from Morey a while back pretty interesting in retrospect: Daryl MoreyVerified account @dmorey Jul 3 10 most comparable players to @JHarden13 according to @FiveThirtyEight @NateSilver538 Solid list.
So the guy who looked at 6th-man Harden and said, "There's a franchise-carrying superstar there" is crap at talent evaluation? Sam Presti, who many think is a great GM, decided keeping Kendrick Perkins over Harden made more sense for his team.
Nah pretty much everyone knew Harden was going to be a great player. That's why Rockets fans were almost universally happy about the trade. It was more OKC ownership not wanting to pay the luxury tax than it was Presti not evaluating Harden correctly. I mean he did draft him #3 overall.
To be fair, I think Morey did admit that Harden exceeded his expectation. He knew (and pretty much everyone knew) that Harden would be a very good player. But I don't think anyone, including Morey, expected him to be an MVP caliber guy.
Sure. But to say Morey sucks as a talent evaluator is myopic, or disingenuous at best. He found Parsons and Capela, both NBA starters, despite never having a top-10 draft pick. It seems like some people's criteria for good draft evaluator is "never misses," when in fact, every GM misses a good percentage of the time.
Nope. If everyone knew he was going to be a great player, teams would have been lined up to get him. James Harden was 22 years old when the Rockets traded for him. Teams HIGHLY value players that young that are going to be super stars.
I get that nobody saw Harden as doing things that hadn't been done in 30 or 40 years, BUT... I don't think many GMs thought, "This guy is absolutely good enough to be the focus of a championship team." Lots of people saw him as a secondary star, a good #2 guy on a title team. Morey saw him as the foundation piece to build around. And he was right, obviously.
Yup, just IMAGINE if Jayson Tatum were to be made publicly available by the Celtics. Can you imagine the kinds of offers they would be getting right now from basically every team in the league??
You want to talk about Kawhi Leonard? Royce's White? The Ray Lewis of Basketball. I can go on and on I promise his draft misses are 99 percent bad.
