There is no guarantee we wouldn't have taken him either. Considering Morey loves him enough now to trade for him. Chances are he also loved him on draft day.
Yes, I'm quite glad we tanked. All this good fortune could have come earlier though if we had tanked earlier.
1 Star? This thread is merited. People have been doubting Morey's approach for a couple years..saying you cannot rebuild without tanking, and mediocre something something. We now have two young top five picks, several young prospects, favorable cap situation, and on top of that we are good NOW. Basically in a much better situation than teams who have been tanking for years. Yeah, we can put that argument to rest. Morey 1 Tankers 0
Like it has for which team exactly? Rockets are in a better situation than almost any other perennial-tanking team you can name.
Explain how having an additional top 5-10 pick from last years draft on top of what we have now would be a bad thing. There is no reason we couldn't have the players we have now plus Drummond or Lillard.
I've said it before, I always wanted to tank to get a guy like Harden. Now that we have him we need to focus on making the playoffs. This is a very young team and they need experience together. I didn't think it was possible, I thought Les was killing this franchise and Morey found a way to make it happen. Of course there's still Morey haters that insist that he got lucky with the Harden trade lol.
had the Rockets obtained #5, wasn't the thinking that they'd pick up Drummond and then send him to Orlando for Dwight. I like our lineup now bettter, but a Lin-Howard core plus whatever else Morey could scrounge up would also have been attractive (and maybe Howard wouldn't have turned into such a mope since he has no Kobe to deal with.) As far as "tanking" v. non-tanking, the only real "non-tanking" moves the Rockets made were really resigning & holding onto Scola too long (then had to suck it up and amnesty him) and the Dalembert deal.... Remember, the point of tanking isn't to be historically bad, it's to be just bad enough to be good again. at the earliest possible opportunity.
We had three first round picks in the teens and I'd be surprised if we couldn't have moved up from 16 to 12 instead of 14 to 12 to grab Lamb. Plus Martin and the Toronto pick were the biggest parts of the Harden trade.
It was luck and even Morey would admit to it. Word is that our package wasn't even the one the Thunder wanted the most. Morey deserves all the credit in the world for pulling the trigger and handing over a max deal but he got very lucky that Harden was even available to the Rockets.
We wouldve taken taken Drummond IMO with the 5th pick, we needed a C desperately and I believe he was their target at numero 5
So you admit that we basically traded our two best players for Harden but think that we should have gotten rid of those two players and tanked earlier? Tell me, exactly when should we have done this? BEFORE Harden became available? That's why nobody with any knowledge has called this deal "luck". Biding your time, collecting assets, and waiting for opportunities is called planning, not luck. Only a fool would consider any trade involving a max player lucky, especially when you're dealing with one of the best GMs in the league.
