Houston’s Daryl Morey Fires Back At Mark Cuban’s Chemistry Comments

The back-and-forth between inner-state rivals the Houston Rockets and Dallas Mavericks got amped up over the summer when Chandler Parsons signed with the Mavs at the club, naturally, and Houston didn’t match. After Mavs owner Mark Cuban said in August Rockets general manager Daryl Morey didn’t compose his roster with any idea about chemistry , Morey fired back at Cuban telling Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski “Hey, if Mark believed so much in chemistry, he wouldn’t have busted up a title team for cap room.”

This is going to turn into a Texas slugfest this season, and we can’t wait! The Parsons signing was step one, but the Rockets offered then-free agent Dirk Nowitzki a deal, even though everyone already knew he was re-signing with the Mavs this summer. Then came the back-and-forth between Parsons, James Harden and Dwight Howard after Parsons became a Maverick. That rift between former teammates cooled, but the owner of the Mavs and the general manager of the Rockets have started a new one.

“Our teams have had great chemistry, and it’s something we believe in,” Morey told Yahoo on Sunday night. “Hey, if Mark believed so much in chemistry, he wouldn’t have busted up a title team for cap room. He’s trying to reunite a lot of those people now, bringing back the center [Tyson Chandler] from that title team. Maybe he’s got some chemistry religion recently.”

Morey, long a proponent of advanced analytics — witness this famous New York Times profile of Shane Battierfor evidence — hosts the Sloan Analytics Conference at MIT every year, and he mentioned Cuban’s own push for advanced analytics as a rejoinder to Cuban’s comments about chemistry:

“[Cuban’s] tripled his analytics staff. If he’s equating analytics with not caring about chemistry, well, he’s tripling down on it. I think he’s smart to paint a competitor in a negative light, but none of those statements are lining up. He says that we’re the team that you sign with and then we will trade you, when that’s what he said he would’ve done with Dwight.

“We don’t care about chemistry, but he busted up a championship team for what he hoped cap room could do.”

This is delicious for anyone who loves a good old fashioned beef. The fact the Mavericks and Rockets share a state, Texas — along with 2014 NBA Champion, San Antonio — makes the war of words between the Rockets GM And Mavericks owner even better. It’s going to a rumbling rodeo when the two teams face each other next season, but we hope Cuban answers Morey’s public put-down before then so this goes back and forth even more.

What do you think?

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