Heart of a Champion - RMJH4's Dynasty

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RMJH4's Dynasty Blog

Heart of a Champion

Posted on June 17, 2016 at 10:03 AM.

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Houston Rockets name Ronnie Michaels as GM

Assistant GM Alex Smith - Left, GM Ronnie Michaels - Right.

In the wake of the Mike D'Antoni hire, GM Daryl Morey resigned his post. Everyone and their dog knows its because he strongly disagreed with hiring D'Antoni as coach. With Les Alexander then looking to save face, who does he turn to?

Ronnie Michaels who has been putting in long hours as a part of the basketball operations team in Houston for the last 4 years. Widely regarded as a streetwise executive, Michaels was a player and coach in Europe. He understands the game in a way that Morey and his analytics couldn't.

Since Daryl Morey came to Houston, the team won three playoff series in nine years. They missed the playoffs three times in that stretch. Their .500 record last season was the worst in Morey's tenure, and a sign that the advantage he initially gained by being the first NBA GM to wholly adopt the analytics revolution is gone. Maybe Moreys resignation may be a blessing in disguise for the Rockets.

Everyone has analytics now. Even troglodyte teams like the Lakers have advanced-stats guys on staff, and the NBA straight-up mandated that all 30 teams adopt SportVU cameras to take away any competitive imbalances that came from smarter teams figuring out how to use them first. The league has become about the intangibles and unmeasurables again. You could argue, based on the performance of the 2008 Celtics, that it was always about that, and that's why Houston never won anything and why Philly was as bad as they were for as long as they were.

Players don't like playing for the cold-hearted brain types. If you know you're just a cog in a corporate machine, it has a tendency to strip you of your motivation to make the people around you better. James Harden just set the league record for turnovers in a season, a record that dated back to the first year that stat was officially counted. He has also been awarded the Shaqtin' the Fool MVP for this season. Not a great award. When asked about this Michaels responded " Well at least we won something this year!"

Dwight Howard might just end up playing pro ball in Spain if the rest of the league figures out that he's a coach-killer who hasn't been a major offensive force since he still played in Orlando.

Charles Barkley tore the team apart on Inside The NBA last week (check out the recap on NBA.com) but it will be good to hear about the hiring of Michaels and D'Antoni this week.

Next year's Rockets team will be probably be without Dwight Howard, as he signs elsewhere rather than play for Mike D'Antoni. Harden, with even fewer options available to him, will run into the same problem Paul George has in Indiana, where he finds out what happens when defenses only have one scoring threat to worry about, and eventually the refs will stop calling those garbage fouls where players jump into their opponent on a shot to draw a call (seriously, NBA, change the rules to make this an offensive foul. It's a trash way to play the game. Call it the Harden Rule.)

Houston was about to face a very dark age, and if they're going to truly rebuild their franchise, they need smart basketball people like Michaels, not some MBA whose "skills" do not qualify him to flip burgers. So for once well done Rockets Owner for picking a basketball person in Michaels.