Nice conversation... A trip down memory lane to the 9th seed/14th pick years. Tell me the biggest risk you've taken & what happened next? Morey: So let me set the stage a little bit. I'm in my first year officially as GM of the Houston Rockets. We're having a very solid year on our way to winning mid-50s with Rick Adelman as the coach & it's around the trade deadline. Our strategy at the trade deadline is basically kick every tire. This may not be a good strategy. There's pluses and minuses to it. One deal that came up that trade deadline, I was extraordinarily nervous to do. Our starting PG that year was Rafer Alston. We're playing extremely well, maybe 3 or 4 seed at the time. A player we had our eye on, hoping to draft the year before, maybe two years before was Kyle Lowry. One deal that we were working on was trading Rafer. It ended up being a 3-way. ... Now it sounds like a good deal. At the time, Lowry was the 3rd string PG at the time. We were trading our starting PG with 30 games to go in a strong playoff season for a 3rd string PG. I remember sitting with Rick Adelman in the office & him saying "Are you crazy? We're gonna trade our starting PG when we're doing this well but you got the job, if you vouch for it,... Brett Gunning was instrumental in making Rick comfortable with the move. Doing a move like that in my first year officially was probably the biggest risk I took in my career. A lot of folks didn't know what to think of me, sorta unknown coming from Boston. All the initial moves are extremely magnified as folks like Sam Hinkie found out. That was probably the biggest risk I can remember. If it hadn't gone well, I might not be talking to you. That's the biggest one I can recall. What made you comfortable making the decision? A bunch of factors. We thought Kyle would be better. In his limited time, he did play well in those minutes. This is back when basketball hadn't figured out what pioneers like John Hollinger did. If you play well even in shorter minutes, often you can expand those into a larger role. We were able to take advantage. I felt comfortable there. We also felt comfortable because we had depth at the guard position. Even though Rafer was the starter & if Kyle didn't work out, Aaron Brooks could give us solid minutes. To be fair, if you go back & look at the deal, it was a head-scratcher for the local media. Generally, it's not done where you trade your starting PG in the middle of a 50-win season. The key factors were that, both we felt good about our evaluation & our depth. So what happened next? Kyle went on to be an all-star with Toronto. Major contributor to that team. We lost Yao & Tracy that year in the playoffs. We lost Dikembe as well. The Lakers won the title that year against the Orlando team with Rafer as the starter so the trade worked for Orlando too you can argue. We were the only team to take the Lakers to 7 games that year, the year they won the title, without Yao & McGrady. It worked out amazingly, which is maybe one reason why I'm talking about this story. I can definitely name ones that didn't work out. The next key moment also relates to Kyle Lowry & quite a bit of failure. That team took the Lakers to 7 games in 2009 was actually the peak of Yao & Tracy's career here. Neither played significant minutes in the NBA after that. Yao came back one more year & played like 5 games. Tracy ended up playing in a couple of places but injuries derailed both. We found ourselves in the early 2010-2012 range trying to rebuild with a mandate to not ever actually be bad. To be fair, even though being bad is the best way to do it, we had a team packed with very solid players like Luis Scola, Shane Battier, Kyle Lowry that trying to take the path of a high draft pick was difficult so how will we turn our team around without actually getting really bad? We essentially decided to take tons of very risky bets. We did that with mostly terrible failure. A lot of those moves didn't work out with the exception of another Kyle Lowry trade. I'll first walk through the risky moves we did. We traded a 1st for Terrence Williams. He was picked 12th the year before, flamed out with the Nets & we thought he was better than that. We knew we would never pick high so a pick in the 15-20 range for a guy we thought was maybe the 5th-6th-7th best player in the draft a year prior seemed like a great idea. Worked out really horribly. Never turned the corner. I should have been smarter. Any time a team gives up on a first round pick one year in, they're sitting on way more info than you are but we were desperate to find high upside bets in a strategy where we were never to pick high. We were able to trade our way into 3 first round picks in 2011, maybe 2012. We took three players, all high risks, the most famous being Royce White, who we thought again was a top 5-6-7 talent in the league but had off the court issues that we were willing to bet on. We needed high upside players. We took Royce White & Terrence Jones, both out of the league now. Both did not pan out. We then sign Jeremy Lin to a very large contract, knowing he was playing at a high level on a small sample size. Jeremy worked out incredibly well but it wasn't for us necessarily. Here, he didn't work out for reasons I'll go into in a second, weren't really his fault. Those are the high risks moves we did over & over trying to hit one and basically rolling snake eyes every time. The one that worked was trading Kyle out. (Royce White) What is the calculus in a decision like that? Again, I wish there was more calculus to it than we were desperately chasing anyone who we thought had all-star potential. If you're not picking high, you're buying some risk in a big way. With Terrence Williams, the risk is they're sitting on more information like his work ethic, how he interacts with teammates, things like that. With Jeremy Lin, buying big risk with sample size. With Royce White, buying big risk with off the court issues. With Terrence Jones, we were buying risk in what you heard from the background on him from his coaching staff. You're always buying significant risks when you're chasing talent outside of where they're normally picked(top 10) and it's which problems are you hoping are less than other people anticipate. The market has valued them lower for a reason - which do you think has the best chance of fixing itself? Resolutions with Jeremy Lin & Kyle Lowry? Our biggest hit in this whole period was trading Kyle Lowry to Toronto, who needed a starting PG. We knew we were treading water as a .500 team. They were willing to give us a 1st but insisted it be structured in a unique way that had never been done in the NBA. Most times first round picks are traded, you say I'll give a 1st for the player but if it's in the top 10, we keep it. When we talked Toronto, we structured the pick, instead of it's in the top 10, you don't get it, you only get it if it's in the top 14. It was basically a reverse protected pick that was guaranteed to be a high pick in the draft. We thought it would be useful as a trade piece or as a high pick in the draft. That ended up being the key piece in the James Harden deal. We gave up a lot in the Harden deal but the #1 asset OKC was interested in was the pick. In many ways, my career was essentially made on these two risky bets: trading our starting PG for a 3rd string PG & trading out Lowry for a question mark draft pick that was key in the Harden deal. High roller Morey. We have a great team of people. It's a whole system here. I just happen to be the one they get mad at when it goes bad & sometimes too much credit when it goes well. Surprised you did not bring up the Harden deal. That was not a risk to us. We felt extraordinarily confident on our evaluation of him, that he was going to be a guy we could build around. We did not know he would be this good at all. He'll be a HOF player & probably best player in the league right now. We felt a high probability he could be an all-star. You mentioned the minutes that Lowry had played & no one really discovered you can glean a lot from a small sample size. As your career has gone on, how much of the human element takes over? When you're a team like ours, the locker room type element, the leadership element, the type the media talks about a lot so you don't as a team need to talk about a lot because it's generally overvalued by the market place & media but when you're a very good team like we are, those variables become fairly valued. They become big factors. We're very careful. When we're good, don't add any elements that might mess up what we have going. We didn't make any trades this deadline. When we added Joe & Brandan, it was after a lot of research that these are two guys that will integrate well with our team, coaching staff, style of play, things like that. When you're very good, you take less risks on those things. People perceived like we were not sensitive to those issues. From 2010-2013, we were basically telling fans not to buy a jersey unless it has your name on the back. That would be the only safe one. If you're not a good team, why have stability? The risk is your too complacent in that period. That was early in my career when people said the Rockets just shuffle players in & out. That was true during that period but it was the right plan at the time. Now the right plan is to not make any trades at the deadline.
From 2010-2013, we were basically telling fans not to buy a jersey unless it has your name on the back. That would be the only safe one. If you're not a good team, why have stability? - Da-Real More-Ray This made me chuckle Rocket River
Breaking News: 2018. Nobody is still buying those ugly jerseys. Throwback unis only. Morey, I know you are reading this!!
This was excellent! Thanks for the transcription @J.R. I never thought the Alston gamble was too risky because I never really gave much stock to Alston. Morey cites depth at that position (faith in Brooks) as things that gave him confidence. This would be like trading away Ryan Anderson to me right now. You could even argue trading Ariza. But I feel Ariza's team chemistry angle is a bit more intrenched. Lowry was an excellent gamble at the time because reports were he was beating out Conley at PG there and I think the Grizz wanted to move him out to give Conley the job with no distractions. Morey clearly saw an opening to get value from that situation.
Made me shake my head... We chewed through so many players. The consequence being, it now feels like there are at least two or three ex-Rockets on every other team in the league lol.
"Kick the can down the road" was the smart move. Others might have wanted the Rockets to stay consistent and develop mediocre players that were never going to amount to anything. DDon't you know what I mean?
I agree it would be like trading away Ariza with a Luc taking over the starting position. Rafer was a more important player to the Rockets back then. Trading him for a third string player was a big deal. I don't like the comparison to Anderson. Anderson being a zero on the court doesn't affect the Rockets winning like Rafer did (When Anderson is on Rockets are unstoppable). If Rockets traded Anderson, Houston would have shrugged and moved on.
Money's big mouth is the thing I love and hate most about the guy. So many gm insights you don't normally hear and it's great for a fan of the game. Also love the consideration he puts when talking about his present and past efforts. I like how he doesn't mention how he wrecks up the cba every year. It's either out of being humble or he's got some wicked advantages he doesn't want to spotlight.
That Bill SImmons podcast confirms Morey only talks about this stuff when he knows the League has already caught up to him. He is probably using other secret models he will talk about in 5 years.
In a way, Phoenix Suns were in similar situation few years ago. Nash leaving the Suns was similar to McGrady&Yao leaving the Rockets. Having a perennial 9th place team checks out too - Bledsoe, Dragic, Plumlee, Morris twins New GM - Morey for HOU, McDonough for Suns. And they both come from Boston! McD was trying to build a contender without tanking, same as Morey. He was trying to flip many assets and find undervalued players in search for that mega-deal like Morey did Harden. For example, trading Isiah Thomas for basically nothing. But the mega-deal for McD never came, but not for lack of trying (more on that below). Instead, he was left with toxic enviroment after three-headed Hydra experiment failed and Dragic and IT were shipped out for less than they were brought in. In Dragic's case, you could argue Brooks value was less than Miami's two picks. The one mega-deal McD was trying to get was lure Aldridge. He signed Tyson Chandler who would be a great complementary piece, took him to meeting with Aldridge and LaMarcus almost signed with PHX...but Spurs were more appealing. Since that Aldridge fiasco, they have been tanking and building the #Timeline. So both McD and DM took huge risks. It worked for DM, and it didn't for McD.
Morey took a lot of flak from folks that couldn’t see the forest for the trees during that time. Had a lot of arguments with people that given the situation he was doing about as good as a job that you could do. Le$ Alexander should get more appreciation for leaving this team in a GM like Morey’s hands.
This thread deserves more attention. Also If Carrol Dawson has his jersey retired...... does Morey get a statue?
Morey bullshitted a lot of that. Completely forgot about Brooks...which is hard considering he led us for an entire season and averaged over 20ppg. Second...”Lin worked out really well for us”?!? Admit you ****ed up and we’re trying to go for the market overseas lol. Not mad just surprised he can’t admit it
