Did you know that Les actually petitioned NBA Commissioner Adam Silver for changes to the draft lottery and schedule structure to reduce incentives for losing including a minimum win threshold for top draft picks. This was in 2014 - The Rockets were one of 14 teams who approved of the measures which failed to pass.
Correct…. Because you lack the critical thinking. And now you are moving the goalposts to “ well how could that be true because people are upset at morey”.
Well you are arguing about critical thinking while doing none and providing no counter evidence. You just keep dismissing everything and literally trying to tell folks who were there for these Morey arguments that it didn’t happen.
The norm for you is to act like the supreme lord of basketball knowledge on every basketball topic and then any time your opinion is challenged you deny reality or move goalposts. You don’t come right out and say you are never wrong, your actions repeatedly say “I know what I know and I don’t care what info you have”. Then you think everyone else is the ******* because they can’t stand posters like yourself. So it can only mean 2 things and 2 things only? No possible chance there’s another much simpler explanation? He went to Philly and already had Embiid. He did what every single other GM in basketball history would do….try his best to build around his star by trades and free agency like he did once he landed Harden in Houston. How could anyone blame Morey if he had a mandate not to tank? Simple. He wasn’t perfect even if he was operating under difficult constraints. He made mistakes. I and others think he did an amazing job here, but I don’t think anyone thinks he made every right move.
I don't know where I stand on the subject, it's really complicated and I really think that a minimum win total would hurt small market teams more than anything. Those teams seem to spend a long period out of contention, mainly because they lack star talent and end up overpaying for "close to stars" .... That or they draft an allstar talent and in 4-5 years that guy is wanting to go somewhere else, usually a bigger market or more fashionable destination and they generally get mediocre assets in return. The other thing I don't like is teams moving up from 9 or 10 spots back into the top 4. If they instituted a minimum win total, they also need to cut the lottery in half(ish), and place the other teams, including those who missed the playoffs in reverse order of record. I'd kinda like to see how the apron tiers affect league wide spending before doing anything like that though. But I don't believe that will have any effect upon stars wanting to go to their desired destination.
Gemini AI gives great points in comparing Stone and Morey. I'm not tech savvy so I can't post the response on here.
No you don’t get to play innocent. First you responded to my post with a meme meant to mock and insult which is typical behavior from you constantly arguing against me disrespectfully and constantly bringing up your assumption about how I think Im never wrong. This means you have a personal and petty grudge against me and in your feelings for whatever reason. This is inferior thinking. I could care less about your posts and don’t interact with you ever unless you directly contact me. Secondly when have you ever admitted to anything? When has anyone else on here especially your cronies have admitted to anything? The point of my posts was to spur discussion. If you or anyone here don’t like it then don’t respond. but you did and I treat you like trash because you deserve it. This isn’t even about right or wrong. It was a question I asked so either answer in a civil manner or don’t. But you chose to be a bi +ch. you deserve no respect
But again the question is with people debating Morey’s legacy how can anyone fault him if this is the case?
A GM’s job is to do the best they can within whatever constraints the owner places on them. The more latitude a GM has, the greater the success of the team is their responsibility. What are people even faulting him for? Again, outside of a few fringe haters most people realize he did an incredible job with the rockets.
Yeah I'm not a huge Morey fan at all as I'm sure you can attest to, but I'll never say he was a bad GM. I just don't believe his approach maximises star players or powerhouse style teams outside of when you get a 1 of 1 type like Harden. What I do however think he does better than absolutely anybody else in the league if he has to is the "Moneyball/Moreyball" approach - that is, leveraging cheaper talent with niche skills to build something competitive on a budget (in the Rockets case, a mandate to never tank, but not enough healthy talent to trade for another star) and get the absolute very best of not that impressive players, with the caveat that those players have to have a niche/rare/individual optimised skill or trait he can leverage. He's an absolute master at finding a bunch of average seeming specialist roleplayers and making them more than the sum of their whole. Anybody who denies that never saw it, it was crazy how scrappy some of those perennial 8-9 seed teams were, he had complete scrubs fighting and squeezing every bit of juice out of their games.
Idk, he got Harden to 65 wins and game 7 against the greatest team this sport has ever seen or will ever see. Lebron, the 2nd greatest player ever went 1-8 in the playoffs against them. If i personally had 20 billion and owned the rockets, idk how many people i would take over morey, if any.
By that point though, did he? Or did James and CP3 get us there? I genuinely feel like the Morey part of those runs (27 missed threes...) worked totally against us. By trying to go all in around just James' talent he made us so predictable that the Warriors never feared us, they had no cause to, because they just had to tire Beard out for the win. We had no way to adjust at that point because most of everybody else was used to having very little to do with the game on offense beyond standing around and waiting for their turn for the kick out.
It wasn't possible to build a team talent wise to come close to competing with that version of the warriors. You could only do it with a system. Without Morey, we just win 55 instead of 65 games and lose 4-0 or 4-1 to them. His brilliance is why any of it even happened. There's no adjusting, they were starting 5 HOF, 2 of whom were top 15 guys all time in their primes. It's like if OKC this past offseason added Giannis for free. You say they didn't fear us, and that's fine, but without scott foster putting together one of the all time great playoff performances ever, the mighty warriors lose to a one man show. I'm always more of a process person, the 27 missed 3s is also a myth since one was made in that stretch and 5 or so were clear blatant fouls. Maybe Morey should've called some of those fouls i guess?
Nah this is revisionist history I'm afraid. By the end there was no system, there was just Harden playing ball by himself on one end and everyone else doing most of the work on defense. That's not a system, it's a flawed gameplan. It's not gonna fly, sorry.
Disagree. The system of maxing out efficient shots(3s,FTs,layups) is the exact reason Harden was able to carry teams with much less talent to records that were so good. Harden should get a ton of credit for executing a game plan that not many players would be capable of, but the strategy(that has since almost completely permeated the league) is the reason our teams were able to punch so far up when the talent didn’t match.
