They should have traded their pick and Steve Francis to Cleveland for 2003 first round pick. They could've had two lottery pick in 2003. Obviously I'm saying all this knowing what I know now and how deep the 2003 draft was.
huh? We picked #1 overall and our centers were Jason Collier and Kelvin Cato. I know Cato was getting paid a ton of money, but in what universe would we pick anyone but Yao? Jayson Williams was not going to be anywhere on our radar with Franchise around.
Houston could've easily lost the lottery and ended up with lower than #6 in that lottery. We had the 6th worst record in the league. If it were by worst record, he would've ended up in Golden State, Chicago, or Memphis.
iirc, the rockets tried to trade up from 15 to draft amare or at least were hoping he'd be available at 15. lol @ qyntel woods on the list. i remember how some people were unhappy the rockets didn't draft "the next t-mac" with the 15 pick.
If we didn't draft Yao, it would have been Jay Williams you'd assume (but we had Francis already). Considering Jay had a freak accident motorcycle ride (wrong place at the wrong time), there's is a very high chance he would have never had a career ending injury if he were in Houston. The way I see it, one scenario for us would be to draft Jay, and trade Francis (who had very high trade value at the time). The thing is, there was no way we were passing on Yao with such a good backcourt in Francis/Mobley. Would have made no sense to draft Jay. Still, had we drafted him, his career would have been saved.
Maybe we would have traded Francis for Amar'e- or even picked him. That would have been an interesting team. Hell, a T-Mac-Amare team would have been fun to watch.
I doubt it.. But that was one bad draft class.. Amare was picked much later and Luis Scola and Boozer in the second round. Also, I know I'm going to get hate for this but Yao is one of the most overrated players. He had plenty of potential but unfortunately wasn't able to realise much of it due to injury. Loved the guy as a rocket though. If he had been healthy, we would have been awesome in the playoffs with JVG as head coach.
Chinese players are usually overrated but Yao was in this case appropriately rated barring injuries in comparison to guys like Wang Zhizhi or Yi Jian Lian. That is why you do not see many Chinese faces around the NBA.
I remember Bill Simmons predicted that drafting Yao Ming over Jay Williams would be worse than drafting Sam Bowie over Michael Jordan.
