The Houston Rockets might have ended up with a championship or two if Daryl Morey didn’t challenge Draymond Green and Co openly.
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The Cavaliers–Warriors Finals matchups in the past decade are undoubtedly one of the best rivalries in basketball, ever. That might have been the shortest spanning of all the great rivalries but gave the NBA some of the best series of basketball for four straight years.
There was another team that the Warriors always had to come through against in those years to make it to the Finals. That team, assembled around one of the best offensive threats in the NBA, James Harden, was Houston Rockets.
The Rockets met the Warriors 4 times out of the 5 Finals the latter team reached from 2015 to 2019. We all know who came through in each of those Playoffs’ series. But Rockets GM at the time Daryl Morey had other ideas about it. He was confident that his team was certainly beating the Warriors.
The current Sixers President of basketball was not wrong about his idea, that’s why his Rockets came close a few times. But saying it out loud made it tough for his team, says the Warriors’ point-forward.
Daryl Morey added fuel to the fire says Draymond Green
Draymond Green has recently said that those Houston teams could’ve easily won some championships had their GM not come forward and challenged the Warriors openly. On JJ Redick’s The Old Man and the Three podcast, the 3-time NBA champ opened up when asked about those James Harden-led Rockets teams.
“I don’t think there was another team in the NBA that could’ve beaten [the Rockets]. Where they made their biggest mistake was Daryl Morey coming out and saying, ‘This team is built to beat the Warriors.’ … What I would say, Daryl Morey, is that ‘Real G’s move in silence.’ They just kind of do what they do, and they move in silence, Daryl.”
That rivalry started in 2015 when the first-seeded Dubs thrashed the second-seeded Rockets in 5-games. Next season, after a similar 4-1 beating, but in the first round of Playoffs, Morey brought in veteran point guard Chris Paul to challenge Draymond Green and Co. in 2017.
Even after finishing as the top seed in 2018, with “the Beard” winning the MVP, the Rockets lost the 7-game series to their frontiers in the Conference Finals. Although the stage was set for the Houston team to win that series having a 3-2 lead, CP3 going down with a hamstring injury in the 5th game was enough for Golden State to take back the series in seven games.
Draymond Green on Daryl Morey’s obsession with trying to beat the Warriors: pic.twitter.com/FIAOrn7raw
— Connor Letourneau (@Con_Chron) January 5, 2018
The next season (2018-19) was rather an easy series for the Warriors as Draymond further said in the interview on how they had numbers for Rockets play even when they were 15-20 points up in all the games. The Warriors comprehensively took the series in 6 games but went on to tragically lose the Finals to Kawhi’s Raptors.
Who knows had Daryl Morey not instigated Dray and the Warriors, contributing to their will to win it all, the Rockets might have won themselves a championship or two.
