Daryl Morey can’t live up to his own hype

The Rockets GM isn’t bad at his job, but he hasn’t done anything to prove how great he is either.

Jul 21, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

Bob Levey

The week after Chandler Parsons left Houston for Dallas was filled with two things: gleeful schadenfreude at Rockets' general manager Daryl Morey's failure and empassioned defenses of Morey's tenure. (There were also opinions from the middle.)

After all the sturm und drang, the only thing that’s clear is that no one inspires thinkpieces quite like Darryl Morey.

A little backstory is necessary to understand why. Morey was hired in 2007 as the league’s purported first math whiz GM. Two years later, a Michael Lewis profile of Shane Battier ensured every NBA fan had heard of Morey. He was also the driving force behind the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which has gained huge amounts of attention, plenty of which has rubbed off on Morey.

Not all of it is good attention. There is a decently-sized Basketball Internet subculture built around anti-Morey sentiments. Some of this is an anti-analytic sentiment, some of this is a judgment that the Morey types act more intellectual than they actually are. But the biggest, most serious critique of Morey is that the GM treat players like assets to be flipped instead of people, moreso than even other GMs.

Morey certainly offers plenty of grist for the mill. He's the most active GM in the NBA, and has developed an impressive set of truly annoying cap management tools. For instance, in the recent Omer Asik trade, Morey received a New Orleans draft pick that only moves to Houston if it falls between pick Nos. 4 and 20.

The Rockets have done this a few times, tweaking the standard NBA formula that only adds conditions at the very top of the draft, not the bottom. It’s arcane and weird, frankly. But more than that, it’s a sign of a know-it-all, a man who believes himself smarter than everyone else in the room and isn’t afraid to declare it.

Another example would be the poisonous offer sheets issued to Asik and Jeremy Lin in 2012. And now, a moment of candor: I'm still not sure I understand a couple details of those contracts. This always helps clear the clouds, but it's pretty telling that even dedicated basketball wonks are still twisted in knots trying to explain what Morey did.

Morey and his crew found a few wrinkles in the one-year-old collective bargaining agreement to create Lin and Asik contracts that would be unbelievably difficult for their incumbent teams (Knicks and Bulls, respectively) to match. This took the idea of causing mayhem in restricted free agency to a new level. It also certainly annoyed the hell out of other GMs, especially the two victimized by the ploy. Morey singlehandedly made the salary cap language less attainable for everyday fans by twisting it in unnatural ways.

Of course, Morey's just doing his job. He didn't write up the Lin and Asik deals to show off. He did it to ensure he landed players who he felt would help his team. (He's since moved both.) He doesn't add ceiling protections on picks to look smart. He does it because he's neurotic enough to want to guard against the slim possibility of the Pelicans becoming a top-10 team. All of this is done in the service of his employer and no one should fault him for that. The Rockets have clearly had success under Morey's stewardship.

Still, there’s a nagging question: just how good is he?

Photo credit: Harry How, Getty Images

The Rockets have won exactly one playoff series in Morey’s seven seasons in charge. They have three 50-win seasons in that span, trailing two division rivals (Dallas with four, San Antonio with, uh, seven). After a much-heralded offseason, which included signing future Hall of Famer Dwight Howard in his apparent prime, the Rockets ended up winning the No. 4 seed on a tiebreaker.

Morey has stockpiled draft picks and sold low on several of them, like Royce White and Marcus Morris. And then this summer, in a wondrous tour de impuissance, Morey aimed to land Chris Bosh and keep Chandler Parsons and ended up with neither. That anti-Morey Basketball Internet subculture? Now they have more cannonballs than a 10-year-old's swim party.

The backlash to the schadenfreude is interesting. Some of it is the normal, “well actually” reaction to any statement made on the internet ever. There is someone out there to disagree with every statement, no matter how factual. (Witness.)

The problem is that he's been mythologized before he's done anything worth heralding.

But there’s also an odd incidence of metric-sympathetic writers defending the most notoriously math-sympathetic GM. It’s as if some believe that any critique of Morey, the Merriwether Lewis of unathletic (though not unsporting) geeks in basketball, is a critique on all geeks in basketball. There’s a messianic quality to the importance many attach to Morey, a quality that is frankly undeserved. (I’d be more apt to bow to Dean Oliver.)

The problem with Daryl Morey isn’t that he’s a bad GM -- he’s objectively not. The problem is that he’s been mythologized before he’s done anything worth heralding. He’s not R.C. Buford. He’s not Pat Riley. But he gets as much play as those guys because of Sloan, because of the Michael Lewis profile, because of all of his patented salary cap tricks. Morey brings plenty of the attention on himself and he pays for it when his plans go sideways. That doesn’t mean he deserves to be dismissed as an executive; his performance still ranks highly. His failures just get magnified.

Morey said it himself in a self-deprecating interview with Howard Beck this week: sometimes you swing for the fences and it doesn’t work out. Guess what? When you leak your huge plans to the media, when you find yourself center stage among your peers, when you swing for the fences even when you’re behind the count and fail? Those tomatoes are coming, and they are deserved.

Morey seems to accept that, to some degree. His most ardent fans ought to take a cue.