The Sixers’ Daryl Morey Is Moonlighting as … a Musical Theater Producer

Sixers president of basketball operations Daryl Morey. He attended the workshop reading of Small Ball, the musical comedy he’s producing, at Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Suzanne Roberts Theatre. / Photography by Linda Johnson

Basketball has produced its fair share of cultural touchstones on the big screen: Space Jam, Love and Basketball, Air Bud. But how would the sport fare on the stage?

According to conventional wisdom: not well. “Musicals and sports — you’d think they’d mix, but they don’t,” says Mickle Maher, a Chicago-based playwright who nevertheless has written Small Ball, a basketball-themed musical that made its Philadelphia debut in a one-night-only private workshop reading at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre on Wednesday. When Maher was first approached by a producer about dreaming up a stage production, he thought to himself, “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard.” He came around, though, mostly thanks to who that producer was: NBA general manager Daryl Morey.

Small Ball got its start during Morey’s stint as general manager of the Houston Rockets in the 2010s. One day, while on a scouting trip in Europe, Morey, a lifelong theater nerd who seriously considered going to college for musical theater composition (he ended up studying math), was killing time, answering fan questions on Twitter. One posed was: What would you be doing if not for basketball? Answer: Probably something in musical theater. Someone from a Houston theater saw the response and got in touch about a collaboration. Morey happened to be kicking around an idea for a loosely autobiographical “underdog story of someone trying to push analytics at an unknown college.” Now they just needed a writer.

Enter Maher, the co-founder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck and author of multiple off-Broadway plays. At first, he wasn’t totally convinced. “I was like, ‘If you’re going to hire me, I’m going to do my own thing; I’m not going to adapt the Daryl Morey story,’” he says. Which is how the absurdist plot of Small Ball came to be. Set on the island of Lilliput from Gulliver’s Travels, the play follows a down-on-his-luck basketball player who has the unfortunate burden of sharing a name with the greatest player of all time. Michael Jordan has found himself on a team of six-inch-tall Lilliputians, which presents a particular challenge: Jordan can’t pass them the human-size basketball for fear of crushing them. Also, the Lilliputians have no concept of the number five, which means they play all of their games down a player. Meanwhile, Jordan has fallen in love with one of his teammates. When Morey read Maher’s treatment, he was tickled. “I very smartly threw out my outline,” he says. One thing Morey knows is how to make an advantageous trade.

Colby Lewis reads the part of “Michael Jordan” in Daryl Morey’s Small Ball.

At the Suzanne Roberts Theater, the play began. Morey, in a blue sport coat and dress sneakers, looked on from the audience. Nine actors sat in a row on the stage, reading their lines from binders. Ingeniously, all of the action takes place at post-game press conferences. Two omnipresent, highly obnoxious journalists — Morey clearly relishes having the upper hand in this relationship for once — shepherd the plot along. In the opening number, a somber Jordan, holding a basketball, sings, “First you lose, and then they make you talk about it.” There’s a sociopathic assistant coach named Pippin, a detail Morey says his players relate to. There’s a song about sex with giants. (Sample lyric: “Sex with giants! Do we want to have sex, sex, sex with giants?”) And, of course, there’s an analytics subplot. At one point, the anti-numbers Lilliputian coach, who has named himself Phil Jackson, screams, “Your cold calculations, you’re ripping the beautiful heart from the game!”

With a running time approaching two and a half hours — about the length of a Sixers game — the show could possibly use more trimming. (Early drafts hit the three-hour mark.) But for all the play’s weirdness, it’s also weirdly touching. 

Maya Lagerstam reads the part of Lilli beside Colby Lewis as “Michael Jordan” in Daryl Morey’s Small Ball.

Being a theater producer isn’t so unlike being a general manager; you’re assembling a team, in search of a nebulous thing called chemistry. As a producer, Morey receives high marks. “You couldn’t imagine a better person,” Maher says. “He has opinions, but he doesn’t walk into the room and go, ‘You gotta do this.’ It’s pretty much how he manages the basketball team.” When Morey and Maher were selecting a composer for the show, Morey decided they should each rank the candidates separately, to weed out groupthink — the same process he uses for the Sixers.

The hope is that Small Ball, which so far has had runs in Houston and Denver, might make it to the stage in Philly. A workshop reading is an important first step. “I think the odds of a show doing well and making it are about as long as winning the title,” Morey said before the performance. A Philly run wouldn’t quite be winning the title—maybe more like reaching the conference finals? 

That might not be such a bad goal for both the Sixers and Small Ball. Incremental progress is a general manager’s and a theater producer’s friend. “We get closer to New York each time,” Morey says of the musical. If there’s anything he’s learned from his day job, it’s to trust the process.