These are the times when Daryl Morey is even more valuable to the Houston Rockets.

Through a smart combination of trades, drafts and free-agent signings, the Rockets' general manager has put together a deep roster, essential for a team whose stars haven't been able to stay healthy.

"It's frustrating in that it takes you farther away from your goals," Morey said of the injuries. "But it's probably the most interesting part of the job, is make sure you manage your roster such that if you do take injuries or you do have issues, you're hedging that risk as much as possible."

The Rockets won 55 games, including 22 in a row, last season despite having McGrady and Yao on the floor together only 41 times. The injury woes quickly popped up less than a month into this season.

McGrady is still bothered after offseason knee surgery and missed nearly the entire second half of Monday's victory at Oklahoma City. The Rockets have gone all season without Shane Battier, who was joined on the bench Wednesday against Dallas by Yao.

Yet they went into the weekend leading the powerful Southwest Division, boosted by contributions from reserves such as Carl Landry, Aaron Brooks, Chuck Hayes and even free agent Van Wafer.

"Often it might have made a difference of one win in a year, but we feel like the hard work that went into scouting and finding those players, one win is a big difference," Morey said. "One more win for us last year and we would have been a higher seed and had an easier first-round matchup."

Morey, who received his MBA from MIT and worked to develop Stats, Inc.'s Basketball statistical department, is a leader in the use of analytical data in the NBA. He won't say how large a staff the Rockets have researching theirs, but has found coaches interested in his methods.

"I think that coaches know it's a long season and while generally you can trust what you're watching, sometimes it's good to take a step back and see how it's worked overall," Morey said. "(The) last coach, (Jeff) Van Gundy, was interested if certain players miss shots early, does that mean they're going to miss later?

"So I found that what we can provide coaches day to day makes the relationship very easy, because we don't answer them, but we can help give him some directional information to answer the questions they have every day that might have been harder to answer in the past."

Morey's own analyses of his team don't show the answers the Rockets want to see, though there's plenty of time for that to change.

"We benchmark ourselves to conference final and finals teams, and constantly assess where we're at. As much as we'd like to think we're doing good things, we're still falling short of where to need to be to really have a high probability of winning," Morey said.

"I think the Lakers and Celtics are the class of the league right now in terms of where we want to be. And we're in that next group down and we're hoping to get up to their level of play."

* Later this season, Chicago will play against Chicago in Washington.

That's the way it will appear from the uniforms, anyway.

As part of the Wizards' 45th anniversary celebration, they will play four games this season in uniforms from 1962-63, when they were the Chicago Zephyrs. One of those games will be Feb. 27, when they play host to the Bulls.

Three other teams will wear retro uniforms while taking part in NBA Hardwood Classics Nights, which began this weekend.

The 76ers will celebrate their 60th anniversary by playing 19 games wearing the home uniform from their 1982-83 team, which had won Philadelphia's last championship before the Phillies' World Series victory.