In a move that the Houston Chronicle called “astounding,” the Rockets announced last Thursday that they had hired Daryl Morey to be their new assistant general manager. The team said that Morey, presently the senior vice president of operations and information for the Boston Celtics, would work with Rockets GM Carroll Dawson and succeed him in the 2007-08 season.

What the paper considered astounding was the fact that Morey is best known as a statistical analyst; he has no experience as a player, a scout, or a GM. The 32 year-old graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management worked at STATS (an on-line statistics think tank) during his matriculation and developed his own variations of expected wins and losses based on scoring for football, hockey, and basketball teams.

It had been widely assumed that the Rockets would hire from within. Dennis Lindley, the Rockets vice president of basketball operations, was considered a frontrunner. But it shouldn’t be astonishing that the Rockets would break from the NBA orthodoxy of hiring from either a pool of veteran front office personnel or from the ranks of popular former players. Texas is a bastion of progressive thought in the NBA.

The San Antonio Spurs and Dallas Mavericks are considered the league leaders in applying statistical analysis to their personnel decisions. The Spurs in particular are experts at scouting the European leagues and drafting the likes of Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker long before their names are known.

The Mavericks, meanwhile, have an incredibly detailed statistical database of their team’s responses to opponents’ tactics. Early this season, when TNT talking heads Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith chided the Mavs’ policy of switching when defending pick-androlls against Phoenix, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban rebuffed their comments by producing detailed analysis of the team’s different responses to the Suns’ offense and proved that switching had produced the best results.

As Morey well knows, Houston’s task for the next few seasons is to build a team around center Yao Ming and small forward Tracy McGrady. The two superstars will occupy more than two-thirds of the team’s salary cap room, so Morey will have to be frugal in finding capable sup porting talent. Perhaps the Rockets chose to buck convention because the current GM and his staff have littered the payroll with old, unproductive players like Charlie Ward, Vin Baker, Bob Sura,and Juwan Howard. Or, perhaps the scenarios in New York, Golden State, and Minnesota functioned as loud cautionary tales about hiring popular former players and throwing money at their whims.

While Morey’s analytical skills may be well suited to his task, his results in Boston were mixed at best. Morey developed tracking and performance indicators for young players that became cornerstones of the Celts’ front office judgments on their youth movement.In three years, Boston brought in Al Jefferson, Kendrick Perkins, Tony Allen, Delonte West, Ryan Gomes, Orien Greene, and Gerald Green to support Paul Pierce.

But the progress has been slow, and the team’s other personnel moves have bordered on disastrous.The re-signing of Mark Blount two years ago after his one good season predictably blew up in Boston’s face. The Celtics’ off-season signing of Brian Scalabrine also raised eyebrows at the time and now has most fans grimacing at the sound of his name. Morey’s track record shows that he knows a promising talent when he sees one, but he has not illustrated the skill to separate good role players from useless ones.In other words,he’s a stathead with a scout’s strengths and weaknesses.And Houston may have done the wrong thing for the right reasons.

The other key subplot in the hiring of Morey is the future of Rockets coach Jeff Van Gundy. In general, coaches on teams who change general managers should choose to rent instead of buying their homes. Van Gundy, as is the case with many grizzled defense-oriented coaches, prefers veterans to young players.Aside from Ming, Van Gundy’s track record in developing young players is practically non-existent. If Morey’s skill set in Boston is any indication, he will work hard to replace the veteran dross on the Rockets’ roster with youngsters. This is a coach-GM clash that won’t take place until summer 2007, but you can already see it coming.

Overall, the move of stat heads from advisory roles into supervisory ones was inevitable. The trend was launched by the ineptitude of GMs operating on hunches and the general preference of team owners to have some sort of data backing their multi-million dollar outlays. Based on the available evidence, however,Morey is a fanciful choice. Still, the Rockets are a top team when their big two stars are healthy, so Morey will have an enviable foundation to build on when he takes the reins next summer.

mjohnson@nysun.com