Should he be fired? No. He's been mediocre based on the results thus far. But if we get bounced out the 1st round this year again then Les needs to fire him. He's definitely on the hotseat
When you start blaming Morey for not having more success with Yao and Tracy and and leave out the fact that they both broke down, your agenda becomes clear.
1) It's not a stretch, it's just illogical. Neither CD nor Morey won any games. They put teams on the floor with coaches, and those people won games. But even if Morey won more meaningful games, that is not a test of his ability as a GM. If you were CD's boss and you were judging him on total number of games or playoff series won, you would be a fool. Les would have to fire you. Because you should be judged on what you build from what you get, minus luck (both good and bad luck). 2) Yes he was given two excellent injury prone stars. The rest of the roster could not compete at the YMCA. After just a little while, he put together a team which essentially beat the higher seeded Dallas Mavericks to the second round, except for the fact that the refs intentionally or unintentionally made a completely erroneous call which gave the Mavs the ticket. That is impressive given he had no cap room to work with AT ALL, he was a super inexperienced GM and we had Ryan freaking Bowen starting a bunch of games. We could not expect more from him, because Yao and T-Mac physically broke down after that. 3) Dwight is in his prime right now, we saw that as the season progressed and we factually know from a number of sources that his diet was a nightmare, his back was weak and his balance was destroyed when we acquired him. He has developed as a post player and still has basically the same defensive impact he has ever had. Dwight vs Portland was as good as any Dwight Howard we've ever seen, and there's no reason to believe that will not continue. He was not hitting shots he can't normally hit, and he was not facing a poor defender. He was locked up for 3 years, you know that. He opts out after his 30's - you can't really ask for a better deal than that players with back problems start having issues in their 30's. Maybe we can even thank our GM for that. In any case we'll be able to re-sign him for whatever when he opts out and he will NOT be at his prime then, which is what makes his bird rights all the more important than when he was with the Lakers. You seem to like talking about the Morey side of things. Do you want to talk about some of the horrifying things CD did? What has Morey done which can compare to signing a player who's value was at that time about $2-$3m per season to a $42m 6 year extension based on a hunch and a few preseason games? Moochie Norris? Matt Maloney? Did you see Yao and T-Mac's supporting cast before he handed the team over to Morey? What about his draft picks? He was given a blank piece of paper. Morey was given two breaking down stars paralyzed by CD's incompetence. Sorry I love CD as a guy as a Rocket and as a big man coach. But he was a terrible GM and essentially steered the Rockets from a championship seeking team to an every other middle of the pack dead end team. Morey is signing players on the basis we will win a championship. The league and the media recognizes that the Houston Rockets is a team that will do so much, almost too much, to win a championship. The entier aura has shifted under Morey and he's spending no more than CD, and he started out in a worse situation. You can't ask for more. You are undervaluing things like what we owe/own in future picks, money. Fairness of the contracts we're giving people. Preparation for draft. Assistance to the coach in terms of data. Finding good players of out nowhere. This is a well run organization. It was not before he got here. Before he got here, we were a semi-big market team making all the same stupid mistakes as the small market teams. Today we're one of the leaders of the revolution which sees teams like NY and LA drop down the standings. Our coaching and management techniques are state of the art, and that's largely driven by Morey. I get that you're sick of not making it past the first round, but look at the big picture. Look at alternatives. Look at context. It is insanely small-minded to just go: CD WIN MORE, CD GOOD, MOREY BAD. Jeez.
I thought I'd add in one more thread (LINK) that asks the fire Morey question, but the results say we'd want him to stay at least until 2017 sometime. Ask me now, and I'd say don't ever fire him! Not unless he has 3-4 misses straight with insufficient background work and effort invested.
lol, you can not make more jokes than this. can you find out any state of the art management and coach who run NBA club for 7 years, which is Morey's whole NBA GM career, and yet archive anything in term of playoff success? anyone in NBA history? Your Morey fans are crazy.
So the people who want Morey fired, do you guys really think we would have a better team and more playoff success if Morey was fired? Is Morey the reason of our failure? Would firing Morey be the move that gives us the biggest push towards our desired destination? Is he the greatest GM, no, but we could do a lot worse.
No he shouldn't because he JUST got a team from mediocre to 2 star playoff team. No matter what happens, you gotta give him props and time to see what he can do now that he's in the championship race. If you ask this question again 2 years from now and we still cannot get past first/second round, then it means even given the right players, he cannot get it close to championship. Only THEN you have a legitimate reason to let him go.
People aren't seriously arguing that CD > or = to Morey right? Nuanced analysis requires you to look at the context, not just the results.
Pretty much. It's almost comical the post you read sometimes. "In Morey we trust" or "He's the best GM in the league". You'd think we'd at the minimum make WCF lol. A team coming off 2 very disappointing 1st round exits with the worst coach in the league, and yet the GM is untouchable? Um, ok My suggestion to you is to utilize your ignore list
Great post. The winning record is important, but only looking at the record is the lazy mans way to determine who is a good gm For the people who think morey is a mediocre gm: please name me 10 gms you think are better than him (since he is average that should be easy) and 3 who are available.
Our organization is state of the art, that's not even arguable. In terms of analytics and in terms of modern management, we continue to do things to which most of the league follows suit shortly after, and we continue to be a leader in the revolutionary analytics movement. There is no other way to put it. If you have any relevant evidence to show that we are not such a team, please feel free to present it. As for your amazement that we have not won consistently in the playoffs despite our management, you must be joking because we are grown ass people and we know that the two things are not perfectly correlated. There are plenty of well run organizations who never win anything, and there are even poorly run organizations who win everything. It's very simple really. We've never been good enough to get past the first round except last season. Last season we were outcoached. That's on McHale, and it's on Morey to hold him accountable to that. But we're talking about losing a close series to a team one seed below us. Our chances of winning that series, to begin with, were barely better than Portland's chances of winning it. I'm personally very interested in how Morey handles the McHale situation and if he doesn't rectify it somehow by next summer, then I'll certainly be supporting the idea that Morey might have to go.
Irrelevant sir Even though I do respect your opinion. This is the REAL reason Morey's followers blindly support him regardless of what the results may be. It's because he's considered a pioneer in the analytics world. He's the first of his kind. But the problem is his system based soley on analytics, hasn't resulted into anything but mediocrity basketball wise. So you have 2 groups of fans, pure basketball fans vs analytics fans who argue over the direction of the team. I'm not completely sold on analytics being the main source of building a contender, nor should I be, watching the Rockets get their azzes handed to them in the 1st round each year. What's frustrating is watching solid veterans who aren't considered "Daryl Morey type players" get passed up for trash like Joey Dorsey. All in all, the fact Morey's a "leader in the analytics world" means nothing to pure basketball followers like myself. Lets get out the 1st round before we declare this guy anything but mediocre
They were still a better team without him. Their best player was better than ours. Their 2nd best player was better than ours and you could go on down the line and OKC was still easily better than us without Westbrook.
He shouldn't get fired, he just needs get off his high horse and his followers need to stfu and not get so butthurt when we mention some flaws because as fans we have natural passion for this. He's a nerd's dream come true with the stat sheet but there's more to it. Basic fundamentals are being overlooked by these one dimensional math tools that Morey has implemented and egoistically reiterates.
