ATLANTA—Maybe it was an innocent bit of back and forth on social media.
But when New York Times reporter Scott Cacciola pointed out on Twitter Friday night that the Raptors had lost two straight games since Cacciola wrote a generally glowing review of the team’s stylistic makeover, it was curious that an NBA executive promptly chimed in. Daryl Morey, general manager of the Houston Rockets and long-time advocate of the kind of up-tempo, three-point-shot-focused attack to which the Raptors are late-to-the-game converts, replied to Cacciola’s tweet with a link to the Wikipedia page for the statistical concept of “Regression toward the mean.