Daryl Morey, General Manager of the Houston Rockets, to be a featured presenter at SBC 2018

@dmorey

Daryl Morey finishes his twelfth season with the Houston Rockets and his eleventh as the team’s head of all basketball operations. Morey, who officially assumed his current position on May 10, 2007, previously served as the team’s Assistant General Manager after joining the organization on Apr. 3, 2006. He was re-signed as the team’s General Manager and Managing Director of Basketball Operations on Sept. 25, 2009.

Since moving into the role of General Manager, Morey has built a Rockets team that has gone a combined 271-139 (.660) over the last five seasons and has set a number of team records. Morey, who has spearheaded an innovative integration of statistical analytics into the evaluation of NBA talent, earned selection to the SportsBusiness Journal Forty Under 40 Class of 2010, which honors the most promising young executives in sports business under the age of 40. In 2010, ESPN.com named the Rockets Basketball Operations as one of the two best management teams in all of basketball. Morey’s ability to manage and bolster the Rockets roster earned him YAHOO.com Executive of the Year accolades in 2008-09. In addition to earning votes for 2008-09 NBA Executive of the Year, Morey was named “Top 50 Most Influential in Basketball” in 2009 by HOOPSWORLD. Morey was also recognized in 2009 as one of “The 10 Most Creative People in Sports” by Fast Company magazine. His articles on sports analytics have been published in leading publications such as Harvard Business Review, The Economist and Grantland.

The Rockets have had winning seasons in each campaign under Morey, including a 34-32 mark in 2011-12 and a 43-39 record in 2010-11. Despite the loss of Yao Ming for the entire 2009-10 campaign, the Rockets maintained their winning edge with a 42-40 mark to become the only team in the previous 20 NBA seasons to finish above .500 without an All-Star. In addition, Aaron Brooks was voted the NBA’s 2009-10 Most Improved Player. From 2006-07 through 2008-09, the Rockets won more regular season games (160) than in any three-year run in the history of the franchise. Houston registered a 53-29 mark in 2008-09 to give the team a third consecutive 50-win season for the first time in team annals (52-30 in 2006-07 and 55-27 in 2007-08). In the 2009 NBA Playoffs, the Rockets advanced to the Western Conference Semifinals for the first time since 1997, taking the eventual NBA Champion L.A. Lakers to a Game Seven despite playing without Tracy McGrady and losing the services of Yao for the final four contests of that series. In 2007-08, the Rockets won a remarkable 22 straight games, which stands as the third-longest winning streak in professional sports history. In the fall of 2012, he acquired All-Star James Harden via trade from the Oklahoma City Thunder. During Morey’s tenure, the Rockets have not had a losing record and have advanced to the playoffs 8 times, including to the Western Conference Finals in 2015.

Morey came to Houston after serving three years as SVP Operations for the Boston Celtics. With the Celtics, his responsibilities included the development of analytical methods and technology to enhance basketball decisions, such as the draft, trades and free agency.

Prior to his time with the Celtics, Morey worked as a Principal consultant with an emphasis on sports at The Parthenon Group, a leading strategy consulting firm. Morey was also a statistical consultant with STATS, Inc., the industry pioneer in the use of sports statistics highlighted in the Michael Lewis book Moneyball.

Morey holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science with an emphasis on statistics from Northwestern University, as well as an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Morey, who currently serves as an adjunct professor in the Sport Management Program at Rice University, was also the professor for the MIT Sloan class, “Analytical Sports Management.” He continues to be a co-chair of the annual MIT Sloan Sports Conference, which is the largest annual sports conference hosted by a business school. In 2012, Fast Company actually ranked the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference third among its Most Innovative Companies in Sports, trailing only the NFL and MLB Advanced Media (MLBAM).

Morey grew up in a small town near Medina, Ohio. He and his wife have two children.