MBurns : NBA Mailbag re: Gumpy **person who posted the question sounds like a poster here. Hasn't the Rockets organization realized that Jeff Van Gundy is not the right coach for the team? His half-court offense took away the team's athletic advantage last season and he has rebuilt the team almost in the image of his old Knicks teams, bringing a number of old has-been players to the team. Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming are the only players now who can run. And speaking of Yao, why didn't Rockets management allow Moses Malone and/or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to tutor him? What Yao needs is to learn to be more aggressive inside the paint. Instead they are having Patrick Ewing teach Yao to be a jump-shooting center like Ewing was with the Knicks. Might the Rockets be wise to trade Yao soon while he still has lots of value? -- Hazel Neoh, Aurora, Colo. I agree with you to some extent about Van Gundy, but not about trading Yao. There is no doubt that the Rockets have been a big disappointment so far, and part of it has been the coaching. VG has not found a way yet to mesh the incredible offensive talents of T-Mac. He seems bent on making them a half-court walk-it-up team, which not only denies McGrady open-court opportunities but also forces Yao to work harder in the post. Van Gundy is a defense-first coach, so we'll give him some more time to see if he is focusing right now on that end of the court before finding a way to tweak the offense. Keep in mind, he did lose three starters (Steve Francis, Cuttino Mobley and Kelvin Cato) in that trade for T-Mac. But eventually VG's going to have to open things up a bit or T-Mac (and the bored Houston fans) are going to go nuts. As for Yao, he's a potential franchise player. It would be foolish to give up on him right now. http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/news;_y...w-?slug=cnnsi-nbamailbag&prov=cnnsi&type=lgns J
