Sam Amick

USA TODAY Sports

When the Los Angeles Lakers and Houston Rockets tip off at Staples Center Tuesday night to open the NBA season, on display will be examples of how difficult it is to build a winning franchise — and keep winning​.

The Lakers' Kobe Bryant is coming off a torn Achilles tendon and broken bone in his left knee that sidelined him most of last season. And 40-year-old Steve Nash is already out for the season with a back injury.

So Lakers fans will be holding their breath as Bryant, 36, tries to recapture that old magic and lead the team to an improbable playoff berth in one of the most down times in team history. Helping him will be guard Jeremy Lin, acquired with a first round pick over the summer from the Rockets as a way to clear salary cap room for a star player who never came.

Yep, it's going to be awkward.

A year after signing Dwight Howard away from the Lakers, the Rockets not only didn't add another big-time free agent to join Howard and James Harden (they failed to persuade Chris Bosh to leave the Heat or Carmelo Anthony to leave the Knicks), but also lost key players Chandler Parsons, Omer Asik and Lin, who helped them finish fourth in the Western Conference last season.

Now, with the Plan B addition of Trevor Ariza signifying a shift toward a defensive mentality that they hope serves as a silver lining, Morey finds himself fighting a perception battle that he can't afford to lose if he's going to eventually land the third star who he sees as the key to their championship formula. He is, his rivals would have you believe, a cold and calculated executive who wheels and deals with little regard for the players and the ever-elusive, ever-essential element known as team chemistry.

On his way out, Lin tweeted that the Rockets had insulted him during their recruitment of Carmelo Anthony, which included a banner outside the arena featuring Anthony wearing Lin's No. 7. Lin's possible exit was no secret, as the Rockets had made it abundantly clear in the weeks leading up to the deal that trading Lin was a serious possibility. What's more, it was hardly the first time this sort of marketing move had been used by them or other teams. Still, it was a public relations gaffe that gave their rivals — chief among them Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — an easy angle when it came to painting the most unflattering of Rockets pictures.

Howard, on the other hand, has raved about Houston since eschewing the Lakers' five-year offer in order to join the Rockets on a four-year max. And even after the most challenging of summers, he has continued to express confidence in the team's front office. Harden, who came from the Thunder organization that is so often celebrated for its player culture, is similarly bullish.

"It's been great here," Harden told USA TODAY Sports. "The coaches have been great. The front office is amazing. My teammates work hard to better each other every single day in practice. It's all smiles and we have fun. That's the most important thing. The culture is great over here, and it's only going to get better.

"(The Rockets and Thunder are) different organizations, but both cultures are very good. It's more strict in Oklahoma City. They have their ways and there's no other way. Here it's a little bit more lenient. You kind of have fun. There's a lot more communication with players. Players have their opinion, and players can voice their opinion over here. Both are great…(but) we're just trying to build something special."

But for all the complexities of this debate, Morey is clearly the victim of a simplistic story line. He has long been seen as the nerdy type, an anti-athlete figure of sorts whose background — MIT product who was a computer science graduate at Northwestern University before joining the Boston Celtics — is worlds away from the player-turned-executive path that used to be the norm.

His success in leading the league's push toward analytics (decisions, in essence, based on data, data and more data as opposed to gut feel) has been on annual display at the Sloan Conference that ESPN writer Bill Simmons once deemed "Dork-a-palooza" (with Morey as "Dork Elvis"). With that, as Morey is well aware, comes a target on his back that will likely be there so long as his ways haven't led to a championship.

"There are some broader themes here, like (the idea that) using analysis means somehow you're like Spock, an unfeeling robot machine," Morey told USA TODAY Sports. "Now yeah, I have a more open style (than some of his like-minded contemporaries) and I really don't hide that fact. My background would make it, to me, silly to try and say that all I do is wear shorts and bounce a basketball all day and don't ever partake in any analysis.

"Everyone needs to bring a unique angle, and for sure one area where I've had a lot of success across multiple jobs prior to getting to the Rockets is how to best use information to make better decisions. At the end of the day, this job is about making decisions, so for me it's silly for me to hide if that's something we do. I think a lot of people try to hide it. Those who use a lot of analysis outside of me tend to be very reluctant to talk about how that's a part of what they do, because there's a potential negative perception. And there really shouldn't be."

Not surprisingly, Shane Battier agrees.

The former Houston Rockets forward was a subplot all his own during his five years in Houston, when a New York Times article by author Michael Lewis led to the same sort of backlash that Morey has endured because of his trend-setting ways. The piece, which portrayed Battier as a Kobe Bryant stopper of sorts, analyzed Battier's fascinating mental approach to his elite defense and explored the edge it afforded him. Like-minded though they were, Morey traded Battier to the Memphis Grizzlies in 2011 en route to him winning two championships with the Miami Heat after he signed there as a free agent.

"I think people look at Daryl as a guy who is playing NBA2K15 with his roster," Battier, who is now retired, told USA TODAY Sports. "Now Daryl would be the first to tell you, 'Look, I am about improving my team in every way possible and I'm going to do it in a way that makes sense for this organization.' But if you gave truth serum to every (general manager), that's what they would tell you. Daryl is a little more forthcoming with his motivations.

"I think Daryl's background as an MIT guy, a Northwestern guy works against him. And then again, people feel he's cold and calculating and doesn't have a heart. I enjoyed my conversations with Daryl. He's one of the smartest people I've come to know in sports. We've always had a great personal relationship."

The difference between Battier and so many other players, however, is his willingness to acknowledge the cold, hard truth about about the NBA: anyone not named LeBron James or perhaps Kevin Durant is trade-able.

"The NBA, and athletes in general, they want to be told that they're loved and that there's a such thing as loyalty and that there's a such thing as staying with people throughout up times and down times," Battier said. "That's the narrative that you're always sold…but the reality is that it's a performance-based league. This is not the YMCA. It's not intramural basketball. This is the NBA, and it's about performance. If you do not produce or if someone can produce better than you can, guess what? You're going to be moved on. So I do think that Daryl gets a bad rap. He's pretty forthcoming about his intentions to improve the team, and that rubs players the wrong way because, look, every player thinks that he's irreplaceable.

"But this is not kumbaya time. This is about winning, and it is a cold and calculated business. It's not marketed that way, but it is at the end of the day."

For all the noise surrounding Morey and the Rockets, the only question that matters is whether NBA stars are concerned enough about this perception of Morey that they would let it effect their free agency decisions (or their desire to play in Houston for the long-term if traded there). Bosh has said all along that his decision to return to the Miami Heat had nothing to do with the Rockets and everything to do with his affinity for the place where he had won two championships — not to mention that the Heat offered him a five-year, $118 million deal while the Rockets were, per league rules, limited to a four-year, $88 million offer.

And just as the players and their perceptions will always matter when it comes to the free agency fight, the views of agents is just as vital. One such power broker, the widely-respected Mark Bartelstein of Priority Sports, disputed the notion that the Rockets have a problem here.

"I think that Daryl and his staff, (assistant general manager) Gersson (Rosas) and Daryl, they're really aggressive in trying to always be looking for opportunities to make their team better," Bartelstein, who currently has one Rockets player (point guard Isaiah Canaan), told USA TODAY Sports. "There's no question that they're transaction-oriented, but it's in the spirit of trying to always improve their team. When you're a member of the team, they treat you great. I think they try to give you all of the resources to become better as a player, to improve as a player. They're very good in player development, and they're terrific with feedback — how your clients are doing and what they need to do to get better.

"Personally, I enjoy the way (Morey) does business. I haven't had anybody come to me when I was in Houston who was unhappy because they felt like they weren't being given all the resources they needed to become the best player they could become."

Lest anyone wonder if the power of all these perceptions may put Morey's job in jeopardy, that certainly doesn't appear to be the case. From longtime owner Les Alexander to Rockets CEO Tad Brown on down, they rave about Morey's style.

"It's been easy for people to (criticize) Daryl because of the type of general manager he is, and he has been pretty high profile," Brown told USA TODAY Sports. "He was espousing things that were pretty non-traditional for a way of doing things. When people are different, and they do things differently — and successfully, I might add (that happens). We're certainly not where we want to be. We haven't won a championship yet, but everything that we're doing is trying to get there, and it's easy for people to try to take shots. But again, I really believe that the people who try to take shots, it's agenda-driven.

"We have been and always will be a player's franchise. We celebrate our players. We celebrate our culture, and we promote the idea of building great chemistry around our franchise players and the people who mean the most to the organization. Mr. Alexander has always said that this is a player's organization. That's who we are. And anything that's been (said) otherwise is just not true."

The funny thing about narratives, though, is that they are constantly re-written. And if Morey and the Rockets can land that next star before Howard and Harden leave their respective primes, then this story will surely change.

"If you talked to Red Auerbach, who I had the good fortune of working with for a couple of years in Boston, he would say, 'Hey, it's all about getting the top players in the league and treating them well,'" said Morey, who was with the Celtics for three years before joining the Rockets in 2006. "It's not like we've reinvented anything. ... But because of people portraying it that way, it's natural for people to say, 'Hey, what have they done?'

"I don't have any problems with people saying, 'Hey, what have they done?' I think that's a fair question. But I think given the hand we were dealt, we've made some good decisions. But until we turn that into a championship or more success than we've had, I think that's right."