Lock or merge if necessary. Daryl Morey from Los Angeles: How are you today? Good morning. It's very early. We appreciate your willingness to get up early to share some thoughts with us. At the press conference when you were talking about the process and how long a process it was. Can you give people a sense the amount of time it takes, not only in hours, but how far back it goes, the process of putting together the recruitment of a player like Dwight Howard? It's a multiple-year process just to be ready to have the cap room for someone like Dwight Howard. He took more cap room because he has some special exceptions to the CBA where he can make more money than the maximum contract. We tried to trade for him a few times when he was available twice and obviously when we saw he was going to be an unrestricted free agent, we wanted to put ourselves in position. The recruitment itself really doesn't kick off until July 1 in terms of our ability to talk to him but there is months of prep before that in terms of having the material ready to show him once the gun goes off so you can talk to him. At what point did you yourself know 'We have him'? I really was nervous all the way until his hand was moving on the contract. It's something that so many things can happen in the league, in terms of having the cap room, the different rulings the league has to make but until he made that final sign on the dotted line, I was nervous the whole way. So many teams in the NBA throw away a season or two, in search of putting together cap space to try and lure a big player like this. You managed to do this while putting a competitive team on the court. Can you take us through how you did that? What was the strategy behind not tanking and still opening yourself up to a position where you could bring in a player of this magnitude? We never went below .500, we never got in the top ten of the draft. It was challenging. The road of being terrible and getting a high draft pick has a much better history and probably still is the path with higher probability. We really looked at it and said "We're very competitive people." We did not think, you really need to get in the top five of the draft, we did not think we could be that bad. There are players like, take a Patrick Beverley, who came in when Jeremy Lin got hurt, played great in the playoffs, played great for us down the stretch out of Russia this year, during the year as he becomes available, we have to tell ourselves "We're not gonna add him because that would make us too good and we want to get in the bottom five." It's something that from our owner on down, Coach McHale, myself, we just didn't feel like we could do it. We took a different path. It takes a lot of preparation. It does take good fortune. We do need to have a James Harden come available because of the new CBA. We do need to have some other breaks. It does take a lot of preparation as well from a lot of people. We haven't accomplished anything yet but we were able to get our two all-stars without having to dive low into the draft. How much will Hakeem Olajuwon work with Dwight Howard? As much as possible. I think it's going to be very significant. The issue with Dream working with us in the past, he's very accomplished since his playing career, he spends a lot of time in Jordan with various business interests. We had him work with Yao Ming in the past and some other guys. We had to catch his fancy and Dwight Howard has caught his fancy. He's very excited about where the Rockets are at. We've added him as full time as Hakeem will be. He's gonna be here as much as possible this year and spend a little less time in Jordan and we're excited about it. How do you view the realistic expectations for the Houston Rockets of 2013-2014? We've set pretty high goals. We always set stretch goals in the past when we were rebuilding. We were always trying to make the playoffs in the west, which is challenging. We feel like this year, getting home-court in the west is very important if you're going to get deep in the playoffs. The low seeds in the west have a real poor history of getting far in the playoffs. We want to get home-court and we want to get to the Western Conference Finals. History is, if you can get to the last four teams, you got a real shot to make it the whole way. When you're getting set to woo someone and are preparing for that meeting, do you find out what his favorite foods are and try to serve that at the meeting? Yeah. Absolutely. You do so much background on what foods, video games, past people he's worked with and frankly, I'm sure he's doing research on us. It's a very important decision for him as it is for us. We were excited when we met with him. It went well and found out he did a lot of research on us as well.
