Portland is riding on a 4 wining steak over Miami,Dallas, San Antonio,Denver with only the last one at home. The next 5 games will be much easy for them. Those 4 wins are impressive and difficult for them to win all even without injuries. Juwan Howard played 30+ minutes each in 3 games. I liked his game a lot when he was here. It is just hard to believe that Portland is so good with him.
He's just there for a hot meal, and free uniform. :grin: http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/promise_of_hot_meal_free
Earlier in the season, JH failed so miserably that Dante Cunningham got playing time. IMO, Nate gave him entirely too much rope before setting him down. Since Oden went down, he's turned it around and is contributing. Later on in the season he will go into the tank for good, but they only need heavy minutes from him for 8-9 more games because Rudy and Outlaw will return.
For as much slack and heat J. Ho takes from this board you gotta admire his work ethic and contributions. It's most noticeable in how he stays in game shape even though he could have told you first hand that his chances of seeing the court this year were slim to none if the season were to restart tomorrow. You've got players like Shaq and Sheed (uber out of shape mind you) etc. who have been in the league about the same amount of time and they are simply "winging" it till they get into mid/post season form. Furthermore, I think we probably would've beat the Mavs in 05 had we not lost Howard to his heart condition? if memory serves right. The inability of Ryan Bowen to knock down that open jumper cost us a LOT of points. It was basically like we were playing 4 on 5 on offense.
You and I are one of the very few here that believe that. So many people here loved to hate on the guy and won't give him credit for anything at all. The fact his performance plummeted the next season didn't help.
totally agree.. if JHo didnt go down that year we would have beaten the mavs for sure.. you guys have to remember we had to play chuck and he wasnt as good as he is now and his offense was near ZERO.. so they doubled Yao every single time... if JHo was there that couldnt do that..
'05 Juwan Howard was playing solid ball before he went out, February numbers from that year http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/h/howarju01/splits/2005/ .447 FG .893 FT 32.7 MPG 12.7 PTS 8.6 RBS Yeah I'd say a watered down Luis Scola would be more effective than Ryan Bowen
Not only that, when Yao went down, howard always raised his game. Yeah he takes alot of flak, but he did his job and competed also.
I still remember the time Yao and Tracy were out and we relied on Juwan's jumper for a number of games. He was scoring in the twenties...and we were winning.
His rookie contract was not crazy. In fact, it was only good for two years. It was the 1996 $105 million contract that was crazy.
