I Will Miss the Sixers Having a Front Office Guy With Personality
AU pays off-court tribute to Daryl Morey, the too-online weirdo who felt a lot like one of us.
So the Sixers have a new GM. I don’t love that his last name already sounds like a nickname — you can just picture the frat bros hollering “GANSEYYYYYY!!!!” as he shows up at the dorm with a case of Miller High Life — and I don’t like that we’re always gonna have to deliberate which moves to attribute to him and which to Team Sorta President Overseer Guy Bob Meyers. But otherwise I don’t have a strong take on his hiring. In four years of Mike Gansey being the Cavs’ GM under Koby Altman, the team made some good moves, some OK moves, and some not-so-good moves. He didn’t do anything particularly spectacular or dumbfounding that I can recall, and they stayed at a very-good-but-not-quite-good-enough level the whole time he was there. I had never given him a second’s thought before his Sixers hiring, and had he not come over, he could’ve been Cleveland’s GM for another decade and I doubt I ever would have. He just sorta seems like a guy.
Most GMs are just sorta guys. It’s hard to remember that as a Sixers fan sometimes, considering there have been like five GMs this century in the NBA who have been notable figures, and the Sixers happen to have employed two of them in the past 15 years. (Three, I guess, if you count Collar Guy.) With Daryl Morey, we not only had a GM (technically team president, I know, I’m still gonna call him the GM) who had played a relatively key part in changing league-wide strategy and discourse for decades, we actually had a guy who was interesting, weird, personable and really kinda funny, for reasons both intentional and less so. And that’s the thing about him that I might find kinda tough to move on from.
I have pretty mixed feelings about the legacy Daryl leaves as our GM and about his dismissal in general. Were it up to me, I probably would’ve kept him on, just because I think GMs are mostly fungible and Daryl’s more smart and good than he isn’t and I’d rather just kinda ride with his strengths and weaknesses, The Devil I Know, etc. The Jared McCain trade still infuriates me for a half-dozen different reasons — and those aren’t even the only reasons available to get infuriated about the Jared McCain trade — but I wasn’t out for blood with Daryl. I still respect him being willing to make a long-view trade that he had to know would make him enormously unpopular in the short term, even though I think his current post-trade unpopularity is pretty well deserved.
Regardless, I also had no problem with him being fired. Strip all the other stuff away, and I look at it like this: He got six seasons to get this team over the hump — a relatively small hump too, considering all we were really asking for was one conference finals appearance — and he didn’t do it. That’s not entirely on him, obviously, and a lot of the stuff that went wrong for this team was out of his control. But some of it was in his control, and he did put himself in the hole both with some of the moves he made and some of the moves he didn’t (or wasn’t able to) make. In some ways, the team is in a better place than where we were we he came on six years ago, and in some ways, it’s in a worse place. After six years, that kind of stasis usually results in you getting fired.
So I was fine with the franchise trying things out with a new GM. But I sorta forgot that getting a new GM means actually getting a new GM. It means letting a new guy into your daily life — one who might be annoying or unpleasant or just kinda eh. I dunno if our boy GANSEYYYYYY is any of those things yet, but regardless, he’s definitely not gonna be like Daryl. No one is like Daryl.
Not that being like Daryl was always a great thing for Daryl. He could be arrogant and dismissive. He could be odd in ways more unnerving than winning. He could be strangely susceptible to AI slop. But he could also be insightful, humorous, even charming in his own way. And his failings were pretty distinctly human, the kind that anyone with genuine personality tends to have to some degree. He was, at all times, a richly drawn character.
And his podcasts with the Ricky were just all-time legendary shit. There will never be an equal for them in any sport or on any media platform. You just won’t have another GM going on a team-affiliated (but not team-run) podcast and feeling much more like a third guy in the booth than an actual team official being interviewed, answering questions with some inevitable degree of spin and truth-massaging but always like a real person, just another Sixers fan who also happened to be the single most important person in shaping the team’s present and future. Mike would yell at Daryl about something like he was responding to a Liberty Ballers blogger trying to write about Arnett Moultrie being the face of the franchise, and then the three of them would move on to the next topic. Like it was normal. It wasn’t. But Daryl being Daryl, it didn’t feel that strange. Which was the strangest thing of all.
Most Philly sports figures try to put their One of Usness over by palling around with the Phanatic and making big deals out of their cheesesteak or Wawa orders or whatever. Daryl did it by genuinely being a super-online sicko who already knew most of the inside jokes and cared way too much about everything. The latter approach is way tougher to sell — and much more likely to get you in trouble — but also just resonates on a much different, much deeper level. There’s a half-decent chance that Daryl is reading this very article at the exact same time that you are, getting furious about some parts of it and silently, begrudgingly nodding at others. That’s not even him being a narcissist, that’s just him doing what any of us would do if someone was writing some bullshit about us on the internet. He wasn’t above it, and he didn’t pretend to be. You had to respect that about him.
Well, I had to respect that, anyway. Maybe you legitimately pined for a more normal, boring GM — one who you didn’t have to have opinions about beyond the trades he made and the contracts he signed. I’d get that. It’ll be a refreshing change of pace to have one of those now, if nothing else. But however GANSEYYYY does in the job, I’m pretty sure I’ll miss Daryl, and I think you probably will too. We’ll never have such an RTRS GM again.
Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the ‘If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders’ section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard.