Great post. I'd much prefer to root for a team that values winning over anything else and realizes that tanking is not a 100% guaranteed solution as so many here seem to think. Losing begets losing many times. Just take a look at the lottery most years and you'll see the same usual suspects picking in the top 10 year after year while rarely ever sniffing playoff contention. Yeah, sign me up for that!
Can we at least try to find a core for the future then? The team as is just won't cut it next year. Make moves for players that could be in our future plans
Based on the record since the championship years (something Les had nothing to do with), the bottom-line has been mostly negative which means that Les has failed as an owner. You can spin it anyway you want, but the facts are screaming at us all. Les continues to get all this credit for being a "great owner," but where is the basis in fact. He picks the Rocket's organization including the GM, he is responsible. Injuries? Bad luck? Francis was a head case with well known substance abuse issues. Yao was a wonderful person but the victim of "giantism" with predictable health problems, T-Mac was an premadonna with well documented back problems. They were all high risk choices, but they all received max contracts and were then keep too long. Thus, the hole the team is in now. To add to the frustration, a supporting cast was never assembled for Yao until he was gone, so his "healthy" years were wasted.
I guess i'm in the minority on this one... I don't have a problem with not tanking... I have a problem with the team that's being assembled. Morey is basically the basketball version of Moneyball and that can't and want work with basketball. Basketball is a team - team sport, where as baseball is a team - individual sport. You can acquire assets in baseball, because each person is responsible for their own success. Basketball ball is all about team work and chemistry and you can't accomplish that by just putting assets on the court. I said this in the past, Morey has to figure what direction this team is going in... Are they going to be a running team like OKC or a half court team like SA.. T_Man
it's true. you could start MM, smith, christmas, fortson, and they wouldn't be as bad as the bobcats. people are ridiculous wanting to get rid of the young players we have like dragic,lowry and parsons. You only trade them for a franchise player and last I check there are only five of those and none of those teams are giving them away. Other than davis, no franchise player in this draft.
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The fact that most posts here actually believe Morey's words at face value shows exactly why he said it. When SA held out DRob when he was perfectly healthy, they didn't say anything about tanking. When Cleveland benched all their veterans and put up a scrub lineup, they didn't say they were tanking. In fact, not a single team in the history of the NBA has flat out indicated that they tried to tank. If Morey ever said the Rockets would tank, not only would ticket sales plummet down to nothing, David Stern would throw down the hammer at us for making the NBA look bad.
Morey is right that gutting the entire franchise to be bad from all angles would be a terrible approach. They are just too far away from being a team that wins less than 22 games with the quality of young players they have, coaches, development personel, etc. You literally have to be "Donald Sterling" franchise aweful to get in that top 3 pick and then overnight change everything around that pick before they up and leave you for the West coast after their rookie contract is up. Alot of you are right that Les would literally have to sell the team, or foreclose on the rights to the franchise abruptly in order to have this team go south that fast overnight. Its clear to me that the only solution to this issue to work out another mega trade in the mold of the Gasol trade, or multiple trades that completely changes the face of the team. This is easier said than done because it took years for the Gasol deal to come around, and it might take years for another deal like that to come again. However, a deal like that one will be much more likely than Les selling the team to a bum off of Telephone Road.
We'll see how good this approach is for the bottom line long term, I guess. I can't think of a team outside of Los Angeles that has been able to rebuild without taking its medicine first. I just don't see us getting out of this hole without finding the piece to build around in the draft...and I don't think we're gonna find that piece with the 13th or 14th pick in the draft.
Well, please stop the dream to get Dwight and DWill, you just spend too much time to post this nonsense, I can bet on it, we will not get Howard and DWill, your approach is just total failure one.
That's a great point...I don't know if this is just lip service or not. He goes to enough of those analytical conferences where they churn out reports suggesting that tanking is by far the more probable way for franchises to improve. So maybe this is all lip service. But I don't think it matters what he thinks/wants at this point. I think Les is steering the ship.
Howard is going to demand a trade supposedly. The Rockets might have enough to get it done especially since it was rumored that we were heavily in the mix at the deadline.
