The Houston Rockets Are The Perfect Example Of Why Tanking Works In The NBA

Wrong year dude.

 

The author is simply trying to redefine tanking as smart management of a roster - something that we have fortunately witnessed copious examples of here in Houston. Interesting read.

 

Man what a stupid article....

If this guy doesn't know the difference between tanking for a prime draft pick and juggling assets to create cap and an attractive package for potential trades... idk...smh....

 

The main reason that Rockets is a playoff team now is not tanking, it is David Stern who blocked the Gasol deal and made everything possible.

 

Its not speculation at all that the rockets were tanking its pretty much fact. The season prior our teams best players were:

Lowry Dragic Scola Martin (clearly the best 4), followed by Parsons (young guy we wouldnt trade), Budinger, Lee, and Patterson

3 of the top 4 were traded for a draft pick, let walk in free agency, and amnestied, and 2 of the next tier were traded for draft picks.

Making these moves after barely missing the playoffs and replacing adelman with mchale is tanking. It's really not an opinion, not a debate, its the way it is.

Morey even told les that we were going to lose a lot, which he has said many times in interviews

 

Except it's not true

we almost made playoffs with Dragic, Lee, Parsons, Pat Pat and Scola playing with boykins as backup point guard.

And the 2012-2013 season stats showed that Lin, Dragic and Lowry played almost at the same level.

You can't really argue that Lin, Martin, Parsons, Patpat, Asik is that much worse than the roster of Dragic, Lee, Parsons, Patpat, Scola (yeah Patterson was playing center because Camby and Dalembert were never healthy)

 

The suns and Raptors were bottom of the league last year

The emergence of Lowry and Dragic also coincided with the emergence of Derozan, Amir Johnson, Gerald Green, better coaching from the suns and getting rid of cancers like Gay and Bargnani

Lin arguable had better seasons that both Lowry and Dragic last season who were both miserable and Lowry was even benched for Calderon at one point.

 

Im still amused that people cant distinguish between tanking and rebuilding.

 

I am just curious. Is tanking really tanking before it happens.

We were projected to be a bad team, but it didn't happen. We were thought to be tanking but it didn't happen.

By all accounts if this is the case, the Lakers of that same year should be given the title by default. They had Kobe, D12 and Steve Nash... supposedly the best team (on paper) in the league.

But, it didn't happen.

 

This fact is what people repeatedly ignore. People keep saying why we are having Lin instead of Dragic or Lowry. They forget how mediocre those two guys were last season, just like Lin is.

 

I'm not sure what Lowry did last year on the Raptors change the fact that this year's Lowry was more in line with his production as a Rocket. You're implying that even if Lowry had stayed with the Rockets and was healthy, he'd be sucking more than Lin did last year. Which is disengenous. If the Rockets had somehow managed to get Harden while keeping Lowry as the starting PG instead of Lin, no Rockets fan would agree with you that our team would be worse.

 

Your argument would make sense if NBA teams play 5-man rotations. If the Rockets had not tanked/rebuild/whatever you want to call it last year, they could've had Asik, PPat, Parsons, Budinger, Lee, Martin, Lowry, Dragic.

Good luck convincing anyone that the above roster is only a bit better than what we actually had before the Harden trade.

 

I never said the Rockets weren't rebuilding. Morey has been rebuilding the team since Yao retired.

All i'm saying is, in the beginning of the 2012-2013 season, Morey didn't all of sudden wants to lose a lot of games in order to gain a top 3 pick like people suggested. In fact, he pretty much did what he did the previous seasons with the roster with a bunch of assets and picks and creating cap space in anticipations for a superstar.

The roster you named wasn't even realistic because Lee and Dragic were both asking for big money after breaking out the season before, and Lowry was clearly disgruntled and no longer wanted to be part of the organization. If Morey really wanted to lose more games, he wouldn't have thrown that much money at Lin and Asik, who at the time was widely considered to be on the same level as Dragic and Lowry, and Asik was an improvement at center.

 

Morey himself predicted we would lose a lot of games that year? Whether that's actually true or not prior to the Harden trade, the Rockets BELIEVED they were going to lose.

Dragic had a low cap hold. So the Rockets could've re-signed him for any amount without worrying about cap implications.

Lowry, even if as you say he was definitely gone, could've been traded for a player instead of a pick, don't you think?

 

I'm not implying anything. You are implying because Lowry and Dragic's teams winning more games this year proves that Morey tried to lose more games 2 seaons ago by letting both Lowry and Dragic go. The fact is two years ago all three point guards were pretty much considered to be the same tier players.

 

I don't know exactly what Morey's projection of the team record was at the time. But from what I saw of the roster, I personally thought we only got marginally worse from the previous year, I thought at the time Lin filled the PG spot, Asik improved the Center spot, and the rest was intact. We lost Lee which was too bad, but that's about it.

 

Good article.

I don't think the defining line is all the clear. I don't agree with him that the Sixers aren't tanking in the worst sense of the word -- they bought-out Granger to keep the win-count down. But, most of what the Sixers have done isn't tanking in the worst sense. For the most part, teams aren't intentionally losing to maximize the draft pick. They decimate the roster for flexible assets and cap space. If no one is trully tanking, what's the point of defining a word to name an empty set?

'Rebuilding' is plain too nice a word, though, for what teams are doing. I think the purest rebuilding is when a team has run its course and its stars have retired or signed on to ride someone else's coat-tails leaving the time with no viable way to continue to compete. The Celtics did that recently. The fanbase and season ticket holders don't feel cheated because they know players get older or get injured or demand trades to the Lakers, and their team has to pick up the pieces and start again.

But, most teams don't do that -- they hit reset on their previous rebuild that wasn't working out, trading productive players for pennies on the dollar or letting them leave for nothing but cap space. And, somehow these efforts never happen in years when the team's draft pick is owed to someone else. That behavior falls somewhere in the middle of the Rebuilding-Tanking spectrum. The team decided to be bad that year instead of having it forced upon them, and the value of the pick is part of the equation of deciding when to do it. So, yeah, there's a lot of gray between rebuilding and tanking.

The Harden offseason was definitely one of those gray areas. Morey decimated the roster for flexibility and we were going to be pretty bad if Harden didn't come along. Morey wasn't crying in his beer for losing the value of the draft pick because he got a very quick payoff for his rebuild/tank. The article is dead-on we tanked the previous roster to get the flexibility to do a deal like the Harden trade -- we hit reset on a .500 roster, let guys walk and traded others for pennies on the dollar. It was wise to do it, but Morey didn't have to do it (a rebuild), he chose to (something closer to a tank job).

 

interesting read, good points, but sensationalist in my opinion... and it reads like a Laker fan wrote it.

Bottom line, everything he wrote is basically on target, except that you'd call that tanking in the accepted sense of the word. Yeah, that's his point to an extent, but pfft.

 

I don't really get this article. Is anything other that overpaying for players considered "tanking".

Is any trade for draft picks considered "tanking"?

There's revenue/profit and there is also the salary cap. Unless the league wants to remove the cap and completely subsidize all budgets, there will always be a motive to "tank". Even the NY Yankees are "tanking" since they decided not to pay Robinson Cano 1 billion dollars...

 

I wonder if he considers OKC tanking for not matching Harden.