The 2025 NBA Finals between the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder should have Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations, Daryl Morey, straddling the fence of philosophical basketball emotions.
The Pacers and Thunder in many ways represent the kind of team Morey tried to build with the Rockets, and he has tried similar tactics with the Sixers, albeit from a much different starting point. But the Pacers and Thunder also represent a new guard in the NBA where the whole being greater than the sum of the parts is more important than parts being greater than the sum of the whole.
The parallels are pretty eye-opening. The Pacers and Thunder are both led by star guards who were acquired via trade before anyone knew they would become are good as they are—in SGA’s case, an MVP. Morey’s first big trade as an executive back in 2012 was to get James Harden to Houston when, again, nobody could have forecasted him to become as dominant as he became—he too winning an MVP.
Both the Pacers and Thunder have a secondary option good enough to assume that role for a championship caliber team. The Pacers traded for Pascal Siakam in 2024, and the Thunder drafted Jalen Williams in 2022. Daryl Morey traded for Dwight Howard to pair with James Harden, and then traded for Chris Paul, and then traded for Russell Westbrook, all while Harden was in his prime.
The Pacers and Thunder have built out the rest of their teams to cater to the strengths of their superstar. The Pacers move frenetically without the ball and are knockdown shooters alongside Haliburton. The Thunder space the floor in the half-court to acquiesce to SGA, and squeeze the life out of opponents on the defensive end of the floor. Daryl Morey was the pioneer of having a roster full of 3-and-D wings to put around an apex playmaker, two when Chris Paul was there.
There are a plethora of reasons why it did not work out for the Rockets to at least make an NBA Finals. Dwight Howard was never a perfect fit next to Harden. They ran into the dynastic Golden State Warriors twice in the Western Conference Finals. In their second meeting, Chris Paul got injured mid-series and the Rockets had one of the worst shooting performances in NBA history in Game 7 in their own building to eliminate them.
Furthermore, the Pacers and Thunder have benefitted from a league-wide paradigm shift since Morey’s time with the Rockets—and it has been of his main team-building shortcomings with the Sixers—in that the most successful teams today are not the veteran laden squads with boatloads of experience, they are the young, fast, and healthy teams with naive eagerness and boundless physical endurance.
When Daryl Morey originally traded for James Harden, he had just watched the young upstart Oklahoma City Thunder lose to the veteran Heatles in the NBA Finals. He then watched the same Heat and even older San Antonio Spurs battle for two titles. Then the Warriors came around, and while they were relatively young, their core had been playing together for years at that point, and then of course they added Kevin Durant a couple years after that.
Morey’s last crack at it in Houston, the Rockets lost to LeBron James, Anthony Davis, and the Lakers in the NBA Bubble—another team of veteran superstars. Daryl Morey has always put older and more experienced players on his rosters because those are the types of teams that have kept him from reaching the mountaintop.
Given the benefit of hindsight, Daryl Morey revolutionized a process that proved it can work, though it never actually worked for one of his teams. Where Morey has always fallen short has been subtly hinted at throughout this article and it is by far the most instructive thing he can learn from the Pacers and Thunder: continuity matters.
The Pacers made the Eastern Conference Finals last year and were taken out by the eventual champion Boston Celtics with relative ease. A lot of teams in their position—so close to title contention but also not really close at all—would have made an impulsive move to improve the overall talent of the team, but that also takes away from all the good that was already built.
Instead the Pacers trusted that their two stars and the ancillary pieces around them would be good enough to grow organically into something more, and they were right. Tyrese Haliburton has publicly lauded Pacers’ President of Basketball Operations, Kevin Pritchard, for keeping the team together and trusting that their newfound success was not a fluke.
The Thunder have been the best regular season team in the league for two years now. In fact, the only team to finish first in their conference with an average younger age than this year’s Thunder was last year’s Thunder. They met their match in the second-round last year against Luka Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks en route to a Finals appearance of their own.
Oklahoma City, with their war chest of tradable assets, also could have made an impulsive trade to marginally improve the talent of the roster. Instead, they trusted that their two stars and the ancillary pieces around them would be good enough to grow organically into something more, and they were right. They buttressed their roster with additive role players who fit the scheme and culture perfectly, and they currently find themselves in the NBA Finals.
The sample size is much larger than just the 2025 Pacers and Thunder. Since Daryl Morey traded for James Harden, continuity of the core has mattered for just about every champion, even the veteran teams. The 2013 Heat were already defending champions and that was the third year of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh playing with one another.
The 2014 Spurs won their fourth championship with their Big 3 and had the help from junior year phenom, Kawhi Leonard. The aforementioned 2015 Warriors were young but the core had been playing together for awhile. The 2021 Bucks never gave up on the Giannis Antetokounmpo and Khris Middleton tandem and were rewarded for it. The 2022 Warriors came back from the post-KD and injury riddled years to show they still had it in them.
Jamal Murray was worried his injury history made him expendable in Denver, but he got to be the second banana to the Nuggets’ first-ever championship in 2023. Last year’s Celtics got to raise the trophy after falling just short so many times with Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown.
Really just LeBron’s Cavaliers and Lakers, and Kevin Durant’s Warriors do not fit the continuity mold. But LeBron had the Midas touch and Kevin Durant in his prime joined a ready-made champion who at the time did fit the continuity mold—they do not really count. The 2019 Raptors had continuity throughout their entire roster aside from turning a very good player in DeMar DeRozan into an elite player in Kawhi Leonard. As much as Daryl Morey loved James Harden, he did not have the winning impact of LeBron come playoff time. And none of Morey’s acquisitions worked out as harmoniously as it did for Kawhi in Toronto.
Daryl Morey has never been wrong in his assessment that a lot of talent is required to win a championship. But Morey has always viewed a talent surplus from more of an on-paper perspective than on-court. Not resigning James Harden in Philadelphia and then signing Paul George one year later gave the Sixers the fourth best title odds in the preseason. By the end of the season, they had the fifth worst record in the NBA.
Had Harden remained instead of signing George, the 2024-25 Sixers may not have had the fourth best preseason title odds, but they would have been a much better basketball team in year four of Harden getting to play with Joel Embiid and Tyrese Maxey.
Daryl Morey is hellbent on winning an NBA Championship. Owners, players, and fans should not want their lead decision maker to be any other way. But Morey views every single season as a new big bite at the apple, and he needs to start taking little nibbles over the span of multiple seasons, and not be afraid of failure, if he wants to see one his teams ever be in the position the Pacers and Thunder find themselves in right now.
