The Rockets pull another mulligan.

Two summers in a row, while the rest of the NBA world seems to traffic in the kind of high-stakes rumors that make Peter Vescey’s palms sweaty and heart skip a beat, the Houston Rockets made two presumably heady, low-budget moves by signing Trevor Ariza and Brad Miller in consecutive summers. And apparently, for the second summer in a row, Daryl Morey decided he didn’t like the deal after only a year and shipped out the offending contract to take on players on rookie contracts. The departure of Miller will certainly end an era in hilariously depressing ends of important late-season games (and will definitely kill our hip quotient), but this move signifies something about Morey that almost seems to make him better than infallible: self-awareness.

2506938109 1a77f8561e The Rockets pull another mulligan.

General managers of professional basketball teams are a stubborn sort, the kind of men who like to go down with the ship and save the lifeboats for all of the lucky guys on short contracts (or, in Otis Smith’s case, take an entire city down with him). Too often teams stand by a faulty decision, sometimes for lack of better options but occasionally out of sheer doggedness in proving just how right the original decision was. Daryl Morey lacks the misguided machismo usually guiding such lines of thought, and because of this, Morey’s been able to unload some of the worse contracts in his tenure just a year after signing said deals, at once owning up to his mistake while almost always bringing in superior talent at lower costs. Maybe Morey still hasn’t caught the whale of a star this team’s fanbase (myself loudly included) has been crowing for ever since the realization that Yao Ming’s feet and ankles were made of yogurt pretzels and Silly Bandz, but all of the low-risk gambles and sub-radar maneuvering that evoked these fans’ love still make the Rockets the kings of the low-stakes transaction in the NBA, something even I can appreciate.

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