Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey does not live in a fantasy world. He knows the Rockets are bad, that they are underachieving, and he takes full responsibility for their transgressions.
From ESPN.com’s Calvin Watkins:
“It’s been a tough year for everybody, not just me but also [Rockets owner Leslie] Mr. Alexander, the coaches, the players all the way down, the fans,” Morey said. “I think that responsibility lies with everyone and it starts with me.
“It has been a very tough year in terms of a lot of the things we were hoping [to] take us to the next level, didn’t and we also took a step back on top of that, so far. The season is not over but to this point we underperformed from what we did from last season.”
Although Daryl Morey also maintained that he thinks the Rockets are capable of making a deep playoff push now, he personally, on some level, has to be more concerned with the offseason.
Dwight Howard will be a free agent and appears to be on his way out of Houston. Terrence Jones and Donatas Motiejunas will be restricted free agents, and it seems unlikely that both will be back in town next season. The Rockets could be working off a sub-.500 season in which they get bounced from the first round of the playoffs or miss the postseason entirely. They will need to hire a new coach and upgrade the roster.
That’s quite the checklist. It’s made easier by the NBA’s salary cap boom, which will give the Rockets, along with most other teams, a ton of flexibility to make high-impact additions to the roster.
But if the Rockets cannot snare two big names, or if they cannot put together a team, led by a coach, that puts adequate distance between them and this season’s letdown, it could be Daryl Morey who becomes collateral damage of Houston’s unexpected descent.
