Opinion | With Houston Rockets’ Daryl Morey finally out of the picture, China and NBA can safely fall back in love again
- Morey had to know his number would be up and almost one year to the day of that fateful tweet supporting Hong Kong protesters he is gone
- The departure looks perfectly timed, just as the NBA reappears on TV in China during the NBA Finals
No one has to tell Daryl Morey that timing is everything in sports. In October of 2019 the esteemed general manager of the Houston Rockets posted perhaps the most ill-timed tweet in the short history of Twitter on the eve of his team’s NBA exhibition series in Tokyo: “Fight for Freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.”
With violence escalating between the police and protesters in the streets of Hong Kong, the impact of those seven words would end up costing the NBA billions of dollars in revenue in China. It would also force NBA commissioner Adam Silver to publicly defy the wrath of Beijing by declaring at an extraordinary press conference in Tokyo that the NBA would always support Morey or any other employee’s freedom of speech.
An MIT graduate who pioneered the use of analytics in the NBA, Morey had to know his number would eventually be up and almost one year to the day of that fateful tweet it was. When the Rockets announced on Thursday he was leaving the team, the timing was suspiciously perfect.
The basketball world was distracted, having just crowned a champion in the Los Angeles Lakers, while baseball was down to its final four teams including the hometown Houston Astros, and the NFL was reeling from a series of Covid-19 infections. Throw in the non-stop rancour and madness of a momentous US presidential election featuring the two candidates in duelling prime time and it quickly became, Daryl who?
