Daryl Morey: The Most Overrated GM in the NBA

Daryl Morey is a very good GM but he is far from being the analytic savior that many have professed him to be.  The boy genius has done a good job of not making terrible deals that have dealt a death blow to many teams in the NBA, but he has also not landed a superstar for a team that is desperately in need of one.

Success in the NBA, more than any other sport, is dependent upon a team having a superstar.  Simply by the numbers, there are fewer people that play in basketball than in football or baseball, thus each player has a bigger impact on their team.  There is no other sport where a single player can control the fate of a team as much as in the NBA.

Morey was hamstrung by the Yao Ming/ Tracy McGrady health issues for the beginning of his tenure as GM of the Rockets. 

However, the writing was on the wall for both players in 2009. Yao Ming has only recently retired but everyone has known that he was done for at least the last two years.  Morey did not trade Yao as an expiring contract and instead opted to try to use the cap space to sign a free agent. 

Yet there has been no superstar signing.  Supporters of Morey would say that there hasn't been the right player for us to sign yet but Morey should have foreseen which players would be free agents and who he expected he could sign. 

If he addressed both of those issues then he has either failed in his plan or he has decided that there would be a year in which they were not ultimately competitive.

Morey has said on numerous occasions that he thinks that it is better to build a team through the draft and trades than through free agency, so perhaps that would be a better way to judge his tenure as GM.  The Rockets appeared to be a team that was built to be able to fit into a number of trades with players that are young, seemed to be talented and were cheap.  However, Morey has not been able to cash in on any big-time trade.

Morey was able to move McGrady and Carl Landry for Kevin Martin, Jared Jeffries and Jordan Hill.  While Martin is a good player, he is not a superstar and did not come close to replacing McGrady.  Jeffries played as a backup and contributed relatively little to the team and Hill has all of the looks of being another NBA Lottery player that has potential but never truly delivers.  It wasn't a bad trade but it left us without a true superstar. 

At this point players like Chase Budinger, who may have been key pieces of a trade, seem to be limited role players instead of players with untapped potential.  This leaves the Rockets with a team full of players that would be the second or third piece of a blockbuster trade.  They are forced to essentially blow up a large portion of the team to try and pull off a Pau Gasol type of trade. 

We will never know what trades have come across Morey's desk or what trades he has tried to make happen that never came to fruition. 

In the end that doesn't matter. If the trade doesn't go through then it doesn't help the team. 

There has been an avid contingent of people that profess that if there were a good trade to be made that Morey would have made it, but it seems unlikely that there has been zero opportunities for Morey to find a superstar in the last two years.  There have been too many rumors of trades for Danny Granger, etc. or almost-trades a la Pau Gasol to think that there is nothing there.

Even if there is no one that is willing to make a trade with Morey now, that is his own fault.  He has been in charge of this team for five years.  He has had his same philosophy of building a team via trades for that entire time. 

If he has not constructed the roster to be able to make a trade it is because he has misjudged the talent that he has acquired. 

Prime examples of that on this roster are Hasheem Thabeet, who is currently being paid over $5 million dollars, and Johnny Flynn, who is making almost $3.5 million this season.  Those are both part of larger trades but Morey is certainly responsible for eating cap room with dead weight on the roster.

To be fair Morey has not had a lot of money to spend in free agency (but when he has it hasn't been all that good, see: Bonzi Wells or Brent Barry) so he has primarily tried to build through the draft without high first-round draft picks. 

Morey has had 15 draft picks in his time here.  Some have been successful (Aaron Brooks, Carl Landry, Patrick Patterson) some have been anything but (Steve Novack, Brad Newley, Joey Doresey, Marty Leunen, Jermaine Taylor, Sergio Llull) and some are too young to judge. 

The lack of success shoudn't be shocking because the Rockets have not had good draft picks but that is not to say that the Rockets didn't miss on talent that was in the draft after their picks.

The Rockets had two picks in the 2009 draft just before DeJuan Blair was drafted by the Spurs.  Blair isn't the end-all-be-all of draft picks but he certainly would be one of the better picks that Morey has made. 

The same could be said of Sam Young or Jodie Meeks.  The Rockets have also moved around in the draft a considerable amount but have never wound up with exceptional results.

This is not to kill Morey; he has a tough job with limited access to superstars.  However, to effuse "In Morey we trust" is ridiculous because he has failed at the single most important aspect of a GM in the NBA, which is to get a superstar to lead the team. 

There are other aspects in which Morey has done an exceptional job.  He has done a great job of building a deep team with many interchangeable parts that is flexible enough to handle injuries or trades without losing too much of who they are. 

He has also done a good job of working under the constraints of Yao and McGrady. But in the end this is a results-based business and he has not done what the team needs him to do and because of that (as well as other factors), they are a middle-of-the-road team that could be dangerously close to becoming a bad team.