The Houston Rockets Are The Perfect Example Of Why Tanking Works In The NBA

Saw Dragic & got sad

 

Philly is playing a bunch of retreads/D-League veterans that have no hope of remaining of the roster once Philly gets good. Morey in 2012 was still collecting good first-round picks who had high upside and could one day turn into contributors on a contending team, like TJones and DMo now. Jarvis Varnado, James Anderson and Henry Sims would hope to be career minimum-contract guys at most...what benefit aside from a high pick does Philly hope to achieve this season? MCW is learning how to lose in the NBA, and surely they're not going to land a superstar dangling their current collection of second-round picks and scrubs with no potential.

This is not all Hinkie's doing as the roster he inherited was horrible to begin with, but he's still got a way to go before he's on DM's level.

 

Me Alexander made a statement to morey to not lose and get better. He challenged Morey. I don't think the rockets tanked at all.

 

DM was shedding garbage for young talent o manageable salary caps to improve both short and long term, but there is only so much you can do when you are stuck on that mediocrity treadmill. Les Alexander finally green lighted it after too many fruitless seasons and DM went to work blowing up the team.

We pretty much let go of everyone but Parsons. We signed Asik and Lin as huge gambles going into a questionable season. Of course Asik did pan out, sort of, Lin is still very much, um... debatable. To be fair to both the Rockets and Lin however, the dice that we were throwing back then was on Lin the leader of a team with Martin as the off ball psuedo-star and not Lin in his current role of 6th man off the bench. However, times changed and unless you are a LoF and perhaps Lin, changed for the good!

WE GOT HARDEN! We got Morey's dream player for the dream offense; transition offense, aggressive penetration for close shots, free throws, and three balls! We got to the playoffs in what everyone had resigned to most likely a losing season. The next year we got Dwight Howard thanks to Parsons and Harden, so very few remember that Rockets did try to tank a season.

 

I doubt we would have kept past the trade deadline in this scenario.....

This article is dead on.... We wouldn't have been Bucks/76ers bad but pretty terrible when JLin is your playmaker and KMart is your second scoring option and only Asik would have been a plus defender (a great defender). No way we would have been competitive in the west with that roster.

 

As for Philly, I don't think they are tanking in the same way as Rockets at all. Philly is just wiping the slate the season. They are just letting their young talent develop through PT and filling out the roster the best they can. Hopefully this losing season does not crush the young ones. Philly is aggressively going all in for the future.

 

Don't know why everyone is so hostile to this. The rockets pretty much did tank, luckily morey already had enough assets to swing a major deal. Nothing wrong with that, that's what you have to do to win.

 

But we didn't tank...

 

Dumb article is dumb.

 

This is dumb

The Rockets had a winning record the season before. They replaced Lowry and Dally for Lin and Asik which is a wash. They cut Scola who was on the decline. Parsons was better than Bud

No way in hell that team was losing 60 odd games.

Rockets never tanked and that is a FACT

 

Definitions are absolute, not relative. There is no "my" definition of tanking versus "your" definition.

I think your definition is the correct definition.

 

This is an awful article and piss poor journalism.

Tanking is playing w/out the intention of winning. A team can tank a season in hopes for a better draft pick or tank a game in hopes of better playoff position.

Rebuilding is just that; Trading assets or liabilities to build a better team for the next year. Either way, this team is still trying to win.

And then you have owners like Sterling who do worse than tanking. They are only there for the bottom dollar. Owners like this have no business in the NBA.

 

Quoted for truth.

 

Apparently you don't read articles. Now we know.

 

Yep. I didn't bother checking but yeah this has got to be true.

As the bleacher report cleans up its act a bit, Yahoo "Contributor Network" fills the void for serving up barely thought-through content mill offal and leavings.

 

People are hostile to this because he cited the Rockets as "the perfect example" of tanking, and clearly they are not. If he had said that the Rockets were a perfect example of "asset gathering to get better" and gone on to say that "tanking is one form of asset gathering," then that would be fine. But the point is the Rockets never employed that form of asset gathering. They didn't tank. Now if you want to speculate on whether the Rockets would have been willing to tank last season, go ahead. But that's speculation. The fact is they didn't tank.

 

Yeah, that article was a bit disappointing. The roster that we had prior to acquiring Lin and Asik had run it's course. Most were role players that were meant to accommodate our previous star in Yao. Historically, keeping together a group of players not good enough to compete for a championship was a condemnation not to mediocrity but obscurity. You just didn't matter ultimately.

Perhaps the author should have just used a bit hindsight. He/She underplays the fact that it was Morey at the helm when crafting those trades. By reading the article, you would get the impression that it's a cookie cutter strategy that can be employed by most GMs. It's one thing to dismantle a team, that's the easy part because you already know what you have. The ability to constantly assess talent that's undervalued and turn them into valuable pieces is, thankfully, a hallmark of our FO with Morey at the helm. Also, the ability to parlay those assets has been deft under his watch. Everything has been for the preparation of something better.

Most fans that have been around long enough knows that there were indicators that Morey was just about as good to rebuild a team as any. To use an analogy, it was never about tearing down (tanking) the house if you saw the blueprint (prior FO decisions).

TLDR ver.: Meh article. We never tanked. Chance favors the prepared. Profit

 

OKC must be tanking. They traded Harden for Jeremy Lamb. :grin:

 

I guess we need to define what tanking is.

Yes, the Rockets got worse that year, but they weren't going for the #1 pick.They were trying to stay competitive within the confines of salary flexibility and asset gathering.

 

People completely misread that article. Yes Morey was intending to tank. No one could have predicted that Asik would become one of the top four defensive centers in the NBA. No one could have predicted with 100% reliability that Harden would blossom into a true super star. Even after the Harden trade the Vegas over/under numbers stood at 34 wins.

One of the most important aspects of tanking is creating gobs of cap space. Out with the grizzled veterans and in with incredibly cheap young players who show potential. And in certain special cases all that cap space can magically turn into Harden and Howard.

Just because the Rockets did not tank does not mean that their roster just before the Harden trade was not intended to tank.