Out of curiousity, I decided to calculate the average age of the Rockets roster since 2004-2005 (the first year of McGrady as a Rocket). The average is weighed by minutes played so as to reflect how young the guys who actually played in the games are: Below is the result: Spoiler A few observations: 1. There seems to be a clear "cliff" between the years before and after Yao Ming went down in 2009. The pre-2009 "trying to contend" rosters were veteran heavy even though the 2 stars were fairly young back then. 2. Over the last few years, the Rockets have put some young players into the playing rotation, but are not so much on a radical "youth movement" as they are on a "youth renewal" process-- keeping the average age constant by replacing their minutes with younger guys, but only when the younger guys show they are learning to play winning ball. Remember, if you go the "stability route" and keep the roster together, the team should go up each year as each player gets older by 1 year. I haven't calculated the average age of all teams in the league, but below are some examples: Team Avg Age (weighed by Minutes) OKC 24.82 BOS 29.92 WAS 24.45 IND 26.12 SAC 24.49 OKC is obviously a great success story, but typically a radical youth movement gives you teams that look like SAC and WAS-- very young but not very good. Another notable thing is that the radically young SAC and WAS teams are only 1.5 years younger than the Rockets, who have continued to give vets Scola, Martin and Dalembert minutes. In sum, the Rockets are like high school girls: Spoiler As we get older, they stay the same age. 3. The 2004/2005 was too damn old to be kept together-- they are almost as old as this year's Celtics and that's with their two stars being rather young at the time. The Sura/Wesley/Juwan/Mutombo supporting cast played hard, but the team really should have seen the expiration date coming.
That can be weighted, calculated, and put into pretty graphical form! Nice work CH, interesting stuff.
I remember the days when David Wesley, Jon Barry, Juwan Howard, and Mutombo were playing major roles. I am pretty sure they kept a geriatrician (or is it gerontologist?) as team doctor.
We went from a GM that loved steady veterans, to a GM who loves potential talent, I'm not really that surprised.
I think it was a necromancer. Another note: I realized that there is a potential source of rounding error here: the age I used came from Basketball-reference.com and the numbers are in whole years. So, I think that someone who is 24 years and 350 days old is listed as 24 years old. This rounding situation hopefully evens itself out given that there are more than a dozen people on the roster each year, but it's there.
If only for the Dazed and Confused reference, great thread. -only thoughts are to those who say the Rockets need to get younger and rebuild, this is evidence that they in fact are rebuilding with youth. The only problem is that the youth they have isnt good enough to beat out the THREE players on the roster that are considered "veterans."
