Daily News | Daryl Morey knows how it looks, but don’t call his Sixers the ‘Northeast Rockets’
When the 76ers’ executives gathered for their annual offseason postmortem, president of basketball operations Daryl Morey recognized that the way it unfolded was “very weird.”
“If you have had a player, whether it be with [coach Doc Rivers] or myself, it can lower the risk,” Morey told The Inquirer last week. “Because you don’t really know a player until you’ve worked directly with them on your team. So I do think there’s an information advantage when you’ve worked with them before. …
Morey first signed Tucker with the Rockets in 2017, five seasons after Tucker cracked the NBA following a lengthy overseas career. “He can tell [teammates from Houston] now, ‘OK, you’re the better player, but this is how you win,’” Rivers said. “And they can’t say, ‘I know.’ So that gives P.J. instant credibility.”
“As [Grizzlies general manager Zach Kleiman] would know, since that time, I’ve been trying to acquire him,” Morey said of Melton. After House was kicked out of the 2020 NBA restart bubble for having an unauthorized guest in his hotel room and later waived by the Rockets early last season, he eventually parlayed three 10-day contracts with the Utah Jazz during the omicron COVID-19 surge into a deal for the rest of the season.