Why Chris Broussard was wrong about Daryl Morey’s Rockets tenure

FS1’s Chris Broussard stated that Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey’s tenure in Houston was a failure, which was wrong for several reasons.

During Daryl Morey’s stint with the Houston Rockets, he pioneered the analytics movement, which the league is predominantly utilizing now. Morey caught a ton of criticism from those who were skeptical of his style, stating that he was ruining basketball by prioritizing the 3-point shot over the mid-range shot, which was part of what made Moreyball thrive.

The Rockets had 13 consecutive seasons in which they went .500 or better under Morey, while also bringing the MVP award to James Harden, the Coach of the Year award to Mike D’Antoni, the Sixth Man of the Year award to Eric Gordon, and the Executive of the Year award to Morey himself. The Rockets finished the 2017-18 season with the best record in the NBA and came within a Chris Paul hamstring of advancing to the NBA Finals, although there are those who believe they wouldn’t have defeated the LeBron James-led Cleveland Cavaliers.

In spite of everything the Rockets accomplished under Morey, FS1’s Chris Broussard cited Morey’s tenure as a failure, which he explained on FS1’s First Things First.

Why Broussard is wrong about Morey’s stint with the Houston Rockets

“It was ultimately a failure. You were there for 13 years, you got to two Conference Finals’, never got to the NBA Finals, let alone won a championship. That was the charge.

All of the money they spent, all of the superstars they brought in. Two Conference Finals? If this was Washington or Charlotte, that would be acceptable.

Houston has always been a stellar franchise, they’ve never been a joke. They’ve had some of the best players in NBA history, they’ve made four Finals’, and won two of them before Daryl Morey got there.

So just making them relevant, cute, sexy, and in the playoffs for eight straight years, that’s not enough in Houston. It was a failure. Do they have a ring? Did they even get to the Finals? They never even got to the Finals.”

Broussard’s points reveal everything that’s wrong with the “title-or-nothing” way of assessing sports, and basketball in particular. His argument would be null and void were it not for Chris Paul getting injured, which isn’t Morey’s fault.

It’s also unfair to view Morey’s tenure as a failure when they consistently ran up against a Golden State Warriors team that rolled out a minimum of four Hall of Famers in Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, and Andre Iguodala, not to mention 2013-14 MVP Kevin Durant.

But Broussard is entitled to his opinion, whether his argument is flawed or not.