You took the words right out of my mouth on your first point. No point in being hostile, this is healthy discussion. As to confirmed instances, there is at least one confirmed instance of a player reading the forum - Ron Artest. And he really doesn't seem to care what people think about him and has been around for a while, so I can only imagine how much the new guys care what the fans think. Our opinions matter to players much more than you'd expect. Their time isn't more valuable than any of our time. They do stuff that regular guys their age do - play video games, go out to bars, go to movies, in howard's case, go to dave and busters. There is also confirmation of Morey reading this forum, when someone asked if he reads it and he said something like his username is DaDakota I believe. This is a great forum, and people read it. The following is incredible and it pretty much has a monopoly when it comes to Rockets forums. That being said, there is nothing wrong with criticizing an aspect of it. Although my opinion may be a minority opinion, the ballot states that 17% feel this way, so it's still worthy of discussion. Keeping it real is fine, and when our players criticize their own team, they aren't saying "they exposed us" and nobody is going out and saying "dwight played especially horrible" I just hear too much of that kind of stuff in the media, especially in LA, and I would rather see a more at minimum neutral approach here. Teams will not be perfect. There will be off days. But we haven't had any kind of bad losing streak or anything where people should be saying we are exposed. There is no exposure to be made of this team, because it is a solid contender, and almost all contenders will have off-days. Yes we lost to the Warriors four times this season, but we also have not been completely healthy during any of those games. So it is what it is. My opinion is my opinion, and 17% of the members here share that opinion, per the poll. I will continue to be a loyal member of this site, and avoid reading the home page so long as the verbiage reminds me of stuff opposing fans would yell at me in the parking lot and stuff charles barkley would say on TNT.
