I'm Not Angry, Just Concerned
MOC on why -- despite what Daryl Morey might believe -- he doesn't feel driven by rage as a Sixers fan (at least not this season).
I was particularly surprised by Daryl Morey’s comments at Sloan last week, including his remark that “anger is all that drives Sixers fans” and his confusion over why the 2023 loss to the Celtics generated more outrage than their 2024 loss to the Knicks.
His half-serious remark about anger being the sole motivation of Sixers fans was particularly surprising to me because, despite being in the midst of a disastrous season, I’m not angry at all. I realize that saying “I’m not angry” is exactly what someone who’s angry would say, but really, I’m not. Any emotions I have about it are much more mild than anger.
The reality is that this season was over before it ever began — it stood no chance from the second that Jonathan Kuminga fell on Joel Embiid’s knee back in January of 2024. For this team, contending for a title is really that binary. No healthy Joel Embiid, no title contention. It’s as simple as that.
Whatever else happened this year that I could potentially get mad at – Paul George’s terrible play, Maxey’s up-and-down year, Nick Nurse’s coaching, several underperforming vets – all ultimately just turned a mediocre team to a bad one, which honestly, is somewhat of a blessing in disguise; I’d rather everything go bad at once so that the Sixers can possibly get a high draft pick than have everything but Embiid’s health break perfectly so that the Sixers can sneak into the play-in.
Really, anger is not what dominates my mind when I think about the Sixers these days. Even when Morey expressed his confusion at why fans were more upset about their 2023 loss to the Celtics than their 2024 loss to the Knicks, I became more concerned than angry; I’m not furious at Daryl, I’m worried that he just doesn’t get it.
Morey’s inability to grasp the scale of the calamity that occurred in that series is jarring. The 2023 collapse against the Celtics was so brazenly awful – so incredibly damning of everyone involved – that you would truly have to be willfully ignorant in order to not relate to the anger that fans felt. The anger was not just about the fact that they lost, but how they lost; and what’s concerning to me about Morey’s quote here is not so much that he doesn’t understand the fans’ perspective, but rather that he might just not understand why they lost. I don’t need him to empathize with the fans’ anger, I just need him to see the glaring flaws in the teams that he’s built so that he can build better teams moving forward.
I’m not going to do a deep dive back into that Celtics series, because I don’t really have to. Their two best players no-showed the most important game in two decades, then shrugged it off and cordially joked around with the media immediately afterwards. To regard that series as anything other than a humiliating, infuriating failure would require us to simplify the series to numbers and percentages in a way that any reasonable person who witnessed it should be unwilling to do. We were there. We felt it. We saw it. All of it.
Even in Morey’s emotionally barren world that judges the outcome of any given season based on how high the team’s title odds were by the end of it, an obvious logical error undermines the entire premise of his viewpoint. He seems to take the view that reaching relatively high championship odds is mostly a hard-earned achievement, but falling short of capitalizing on those odds is mostly a stroke of bad luck – that the steps that they took towards winning were primarily their own doing, but the steps that led to their downfall were mostly out of their control. This is not the draft lottery; you don’t get your odds as high as possible and then hope for the right bounce. Merit remains involved all the way through. You lost for a reason.
Basketball is both an art and a science, and it will always be a sport played by human beings, and therefore influenced by human emotions and characteristics. As bright as Daryl is, I think he will always be held back by his lack of recognition towards those very obvious facts. As the team enters what might end up becoming a rebuild, I really do trust Morey to generally make the right decisions – I trust him to draft well, win trades, and accumulate assets. But I don’t particularly trust him to build anything resembling a franchise with a coherent identity and winning culture.
My guess would be that Morey regards things like culture to be woo-woo concepts that unintelligent laymen place too much emphasis upon; he probably regards most of what we call “culture” as being downstream of achievements on the court – if your team is really talented, you will win games, and everyone will be happy and look good. There’s a grain of truth to that; we do have to acknowledge that Morey is one of the winningest regular season executives of all time. His approach wins regular season games.
Still, in reality, ignoring the cultural, emotional, and interpersonal aspects of building a great sports team is a pseudo-intellectual stance that is only an advisable framework for people who lack an adequate ability to see, evaluate, and project the future impacts of character. To not acknowledge that the greatness of certain players and teams are in part due to their personality traits is simply to be willfully ignorant. If your default response is to downplay the importance – hell, the existence – of a team, player, or coach’s character, you’re depriving yourself of the ability to consider a massively important set of (admittedly unquantifiable) data when making decisions.
Plenty of talented NBA teams – plenty of talented Sixers teams – have fallen short of expectations for reasons that have nothing to do with their level of skill. I would love to hear Morey make the case that Ben Simmons’ performance in the 2021 playoffs was simply a matter of random variance and had nothing to do with his mental makeup.
I don’t know, man. Maybe down the road, Morey will one day build a superteam with so much talent – here or elsewhere – that they win the title without requiring him to evolve his perspective one bit. But we’re now four-plus years into the Morey era, and we’ve seen a lot of talent come in and out of this organization with nothing but three truly gutless playoff exits and one semi-respectable playoff exit to show for it. If he doesn’t understand why fans are angry, particularly about those three horrific losses, he probably doesn’t understand why they happened in the first place. And with such a closed-off perspective, I wonder how he could ever course correct and take the necessary steps towards building a team that is less likely to crumple in high-pressure situations. Hearing his perspective on it didn’t necessarily make me angry, but it definitely made me worried.
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA. Mike’s writing is brought to you by Body Bio, supplements based on science, focusing on your gut and brain health.
Well said, MOC. I'd love to hear Spike and MIke's thoughts on this specific article. In general, the entire Ricky community has been pretty fair towards Daryl and his time here. He definitely helped his cause by coming onto the pod while he was still a Rockets exec.
But, the more time has passed with Daryl at the helm, it's become obvious to me that for all of his IQ, he clearly lacks EQ (emotional intelligence). There's a reason why the Heat, despite their talent-deficiency, are never counted out when it comes to making deep playoff runs - "Heat culture" is real and much of it has to do with the mental makeup and character of the guys they acquire.
Well stated… and you didn’t make this specific application, although it was implied, but lack of character in who Morey says is our elite best player (Joel) is the main reason for playoff underachievement since 2018… the blessing in disguise is that MAYBE now with Embiid’s injury, Morey is forced to pivot and STOP building around Joel (albeit while still missing the character point of your article).