dude cmon...he played out of his mind in the dallas series...everyone else just didnt step up. both of the utah series we lost mainly due to the mismatch of yao guarding boozer/okur. tmac had a triple double in game 7 as i recall? and all three of those teams were better suited for playing the rockets and had a lot more experience. rockets had the best group of role players last year playing against a young and inexperienced team that had no mismatches to take advantage of. oden and godzilla are exactly the type of players yao loves playing against. and do you honestly feel that we wouldnt have won with an 80% (07-08) mcgrady? cmon man the first round thing is kinda just bad luck. (******* ewing theory).
I wish he would try harder to play within the offense than hang onto the ball and go one on one. There should be a rule to pass the ball at least 3 times unless you have an open look.
It is not bad luck at all, 4 times teams led by him with home court advantage have choked in the playoffs. It is certainly not all him, but because he dominated the ball, in late game situations teams would stop letting him do what he wanted, and unless Tmac got uber hot, they lost. A good team will beat a good individual more often than not. If TMac could come in and be a scoring ROLE player, and not dominate the ball he could fit, but I just don't think that will happen. Even last night, you could see the beginnings of the deferal process and that is bad for this or any team, because volume shooters like him are not consistent enough to win in the playoffs. DD
i agree...small ball rarely works in the playoffs, and definitely won't with this group of guys. especially in the 4th quarter when teams really clamp down. as well as rockets have played...their talent level is nowhere near those of those suns, kings, and pistons that had success in the playoffs. (i know kings and pistons weren't exactly small...but they depended on sharing the ball without a major star player)
DD tracy has only had home court advantage twice. never as a top 4 team. everything else i agree with pretty much. But where are u getting the four home court advantages from?
i agree that he takes some of the blame, and rightly so since hes the best player and he couldnt do it...if it was kobe or wade they wouldnt have let the team lose in the those situations. but its not his fault when the opposing team clamps down on him and he passes to the open man and our shooters simply couldnt hit their shots. had they made them it would be a different story. i disagree about the playoffs point though. i think we will definitely need him in the playoffs. im not saying have him dominate the ball like before, but there will be times when we need him to create for himself or others during stretches where the motion offense isn't flowing, and this will definitely happen with the better teams (denver, lakers, suns, mavs) that we will likely be facing.
Bingo. It's not one style. WE needed to be able to run and get out on the break and get easy baskets. But to go to the championship level, we've got to be able to spread it out in halfcourt, when we are in a grinder, and be an efficient half court offense also. McGrady is the type of player we need on the floor to go to that level, combined with guys that can shoot the long ball (Brooks/Battier/Ariza/Budinger) and guys that can slice and finish (Brooks/Lowry/Ariza/Budinger) and one man in the post that is highly efficient (Landry). IMHO, a halfcourt offense featuring McGrady, Brooks, Ariza, Budinger, Landry would be killer. I am hoping McGrady continues to improve, and that there is a meeting of the minds and agreement between McGrady, Morey, and Adelman that they want to all work together this year. Then I am hoping they trade him at the trade deadline to a team that will buy him out and allow him to return to us for a playoff run, after we squeeze another asset onto our roster with the trade of McGrady. I would love to see them trade him to New Orleans for Okafor/and possibly more and then NO buy him out and he return to H-town. I would be interested in seeing him traded to Memphis along with Cook for Randolph, Jaric, and Gasol. Then bring him back for the playoffs. If we could get one more legit big man in a trade and be able to bring McGrady back, we could go deep. We need some size to compete against LA, SA, and Boston........to go along with what we already have. I still think Morey is going to trade McGrady at the deadline. Because it makes sense for us going forward. The best chance we have to add a big time free agent is in a sign and trade in the offseason of 2010, not in an outright straight signing. The sign and trade being the player (Lebron/DWade/C.Bosh) signing and being traded to us for talent that we have on the books. These big time free agents are going to be enticed by the situation that gives them: 1. The best chance to win; 2. The chance to make the most money. (China). 3. The best chance to win multiple championships and dominate their basketball era. With that in mind, to entice teams to do a S&T, we are going to have to have talent on the roster to send to them and still have enough talent on the roster to put around our superstars. The most efficient way to do this would be to entice McGrady that we want him here, get him to agree to be traded, bought out, and re-sign here for the balance of the season at league minimum. Then make the S&T during the offseason and re-sign McGrady to a MLE type contract and then you have a nucleus of Yao/McGrady plus another superstar (Lebron/Wade/Bosh/possibly Chris Paul), to go along with outstanding role players that are left over.....Scola/Brooks/Lowry/Landry/Ariza/etc. The ideal scenario for the Rockets is for McGrady to play well, McGrady, Adelman, and Morey to mend the fences, McGrady agree to re-sign after being traded and bought out, and then we trade him at the deadline for some real good talent from a team trying to dump salary.
detroit was first seed and orlando 8th.... the first halfcourt advantage for tmac, was in utah series
Once Orlando took a 2-1 lead in the series against Detroit, the Magic effectively had home court. Detroit regained it after knotting the series 3-3. Same principle applies to the Hou/Dal series.
Wow I only recall McGrady having ONE homecourt advantage which was the first Utah series. I don't know if he had one in Toronto but that shouldn't matter because he wasn't the main cog on that team. The series with Detroit, his team was an 8th seed and that team had no business winning any games vs Detroit. The Dallas series we were cheated, didn't have HC, and were a lesser team. 06-07 he had HC and that was a series they should have won but let get away. 07-08 I think he had HC but there was Yao so that was a flawed team and you couldn't expect them to get past Utah.
So you expected the Magic with a much inferior team to beat that loaded DET team and blaming the loss on Tmac? Tmac opened and his mouth and said the wrong things and for that, he gets no sympathy, but that team shouldn't have even won a game in that series.
That's not true. He began as a defensive minded player in Toronto and evolved into a scoring threat Orlando/Houston.
In that series, the Magic won 3 out of the first 4 games yet you think it's unreasonable to expect them to win 1 out of the final 3? Get real.
The second best player on that Orlando team was Darell Armstrong. They were widely perceived as huge underdogs.
They didn't have home court advantage going into the series. That means they didn't have the better record. All of this talk is old, compare the team rosters in each series. I'd bet my bottom dollar that he was on teams with the lesser talent. That definitely was the case since his arrival in Houston. Where does coaching come into play? Where do match ups come into play? He was on teams that didn't win. Now I find it funny that people argue that he is not bigger than the team here, yet they make arguments concerning his lack of getting out of the first round from a perspective that he's the lone reason for team failure. That sounds hypocritical to me. If he is not bigger than this team during success why is he bigger than this and his other teams during perceived failure?
