Philly 76ers president Daryl Morey has one of the most intriguing relationships with arcs of any NBA executive. He co-founded the yearly refuge for stat geeks, the Sloan Analytics Conference at MIT, which opened on Friday. In 2007, he departed the Boston Celtics to join the front office of the Houston Rockets.
The NBA is looking into rule changes that could slow down the offensive explosion that has seen the league record for offensive rating established six times in the last seven seasons, according to an announcement made by NBA Head of Basketball Operations Joe Dumars last week.
The main offender was Morey, who became known as Dork Elvis for his creative take on analytics. “Being mad about analytics is like being mad about gravity,” he thought.
The current NBA began at Morey’s Manhattan Project in the Rio Grande Valley, which is home to the Rockets’ D-League franchise. Although Steph Curry’s skill at shooting from downtown helped him dominate the league, the league was first established long before the Splash Brothers completely destroyed it.
As general manager of the Rockets, Morey enlisted Nick Nurse and snatched Chris Finch from Europe, designating them as the leaders of his D-League project. The Vipers won two D-League titles, led the league in effective field goal % four out of six seasons, and led the league in 3-pointers four straight seasons under Finch, Nurse, and Nurse’s replacement, Nevada Smith. They also led the league in 3-pointers every season between 2010 and 2014.
The 2013–14 campaign served as Morey’s basketball team’s Trinity Test, if the Vipers were its secret hoops lab. Morey’s experiments with the three-point arc were elevated to a new degree by the 2013 Vipers. They attempted 12 more triples than the second-most active club behind the arc and made half as many midrange attempts as the D-League’s last midrange shooting offense. As big as the difference between second and eleventh place was the difference between the Vipers and the next most active three-point-oriented offense.
If Christopher Nolan ever decides to shift his focus from his obsessions with physics to the pioneers of basketball analytics, there is no shortage of material available, from Houston’s Moneyball era to Basketball’s Manhattan Project, James Harden playing MoreyBall, and finally his banishment in Philadelphia where he built a small ball squad around one of the NBA’s premier bigs. It would be helpful to provide some background for Morey’s three-act legacy as another conceited Prometheus who, for better or worse, transformed his area.
Hoops’ E = mc^2 corresponds to eFG%= (FGM + 0.5 * 3PM)/FGA for early users of advanced analytics.
Although I’d like to think it wasn’t rocket science, Morey thought it was. Morey concurrently dubbed Robert Oppenheimer the father of the NBA’s jump shooting era in the 2010s. Though the exact creator of one of the NBA’s most popular formulas is still up for debate among contemporary stat geeks, he was the first general manager to maximize his team’s talent acquisition by applying cutting-edge statistics that prioritized the three-point shot. It achieved astounding success for ten years.
The Rockets’ path was determined by the outcome of Morey’s Rio Grande Valley experiment, which he obtained when he signed James Harden from Oklahoma City. Houston tried 3,000 more three-pointers than the Warriors did between 2014 and 2019, when Golden State was at its best. In their run for the championship in 2014–15, the Rockets made more three-pointers than the Dubs did. After Golden State became the league leader in 3-point attempts for the first time in 2016, Houston responded by signing Eric Gordon, letting Dwight Howard depart, and bringing in Mike D’Antoni.
After 60 years of gritty low post combat that characterized NBA basketball, Howard’s dismissal signaled the league’s official shift to long-distance warfare. It also ignited a Cold War behind the three-point arc that began as a territorial dispute between the Rockets and Warriors and eventually spread to the entire league.
D’Antoni was an improvement because he was an unconventional coach eager to highlight Harden’s advantages. Harden became this offensive era’s top heliocentric guard when D’Antoni activated him. His shortcoming ever since joining the league was his ability with mid-range jump shots. They put together an H-Bomb around their reverse Melo together. Step-back three-pointers and Euro-stepping to the rim were Harden’s favorite moves.
Harden was an H-Bomb when he turned nuclear, destroying defenses at temperatures never thought possible. However, he also possessed more vicious cold streaks than any other league superstar when things got tough. Curry and the Warriors delivered swishes from deep as if it were their biological urge, but Harden and the Rockets played MoreyBall.
The 2016–17 Rockets, who had 600 more three-pointers than any other team in league history, were the product of Morey’s engineering, and they ultimately fell apart in the Conference Finals with a 3–1 lead over Golden State. Live by the three, die by the three isn’t meant to mean that, but in Game 7 of the 2018 Western Conference Semifinals, Houston executed 27 straight three-pointers down the stretch, serving as the ultimate punishment for the Morey era Rockets’ transgressions against nature.
As if it weren’t awful enough, Morey became a victim of his own making due to his admiration for Harden. While Harden is as much a legacy of Houston’s empty MoreyBall era as anyone, having won three straight scoring titles and never making it to the Finals, Morey has never been strong in interpersonal relationships. When they take stepback 30-footers, all those showy hoopers who make casual fans or Mark Jackson complain about Curry’s playground ball effect are really staring at a miniature version of James Hardens. Weekend hoopers and AAU shot chuckers don’t usually run off screens or dive to the rim after give-and-gos as Curry does. Harden is the scourge of all microwave scorers. For better or worse, Morey cultivated his quirky skills after unlocking them.
Despite this, Morey and ESPN’s visual statistics expert Kirk Goldsberry continued to declare Harden to be superior than Michael Jordan in terms of scoring. After leaving the Rockets front office prior to the 2020 campaign, Morey expressed gratitude to the city in a full-page advertisement that featured a bolded segue that acknowledged Harden in particular.
Morey wrote, “James Harden changed my life.” In addition to changing my life, he also changed basketball in a way that very few people have before and still does. James has changed the way the game is played, and young players everywhere are observing and copying his style of play on playgrounds.
A reunion with an older, thicker, slower-twitch version of Harden resulted from Morey’s subsequent action as Philadelphia’s president of basketball operations. Harden was an excellent complement to reigning MVP Joel Embiid for a season and a half.
The story is by now familiar to you. After the season, a normal contract issue turned into a public altercation when Harden declared, “Daryl Morey is a liar and I will never be a part of an organization that he’s a part of,” from a crowded gym in China.
Lewis Strauss’s cosmic kinship with Harden must have been evident when he used Oppenheimer as a prop for his own personal grudge. Harden’s style of play involves taking a savage approach to his teammates and front office. Morey discovered that he is not above criticism when he failed to offer Harden $300 million or acquire him for the Clippers in a single day. Harden destroys relationships, potential championship teams, and even entire in-game possessions when things get bad. He is the team-destroying basketball death. Every creator is ultimately brought down by his own Frankenstein, as Morey found out.
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