http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/playo...inger_john&page=FranchiseRankings2010-Rockets Enjoy- No. 10: Houston RocketsEmail Print Comments6 By John Hollinger ESPN.com Archive Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE/Getty Images Hakeem the Dream took his game and the Rockets to new heights in Houston's two title seasons. 10. HOUSTON ROCKETS: 50.4 POINTS PER SEASON (1967-2010) Wins: 1,779 Playoff wins: 116 Series wins: 24 Titles: 2 All-Stars: 51 Best player: Hakeem Olajuwon Best coach: Rudy Tomjanovich Best team: 1993-94 (58-24, won NBA title) While we bemoan the nicknames L.A. and Utah were stuck with because the relocated teams carried a nickname to a city where it no longer made sense, Houston was a bit more fortunate. The Rockets left San Diego after only four years but brought the Rockets name to Houston --- the home of NASA headquarters. It was a perfect fit. The club has been synonymous with great centers ever since. Moses Malone and Hakeem Olajuwon both won MVP awards and conference championships here, while Yao Ming has become a worldwide icon. FRANCHISE HISTORY Houston Rockets (1971-Present) San Diego Rockets (1967-71) The team's first decade was a miserable one, with just two playoff appearances, but the Rockets broke through behind forward Rudy Tomjanovich and a 21-year-old Malone to win the Central Division and reach the Eastern Conference finals in 1977. Four years later Malone would deliver them a playoff upset of the Lakers and a trip to the Finals after a 40-42 regular season, where they lost to Boston in a surprisingly tough six games. Moses left two years later, but his departure put Houston in position to draft Olajuwon and Ralph Sampson in consecutive years. That duo reached the 1986 Finals thanks to a miraculous spinning shot by Sampson that beat the Lakers in the conference finals before, again, Houston lost to Boston in six games. Despite seven straight nonlosing seasons with Olajuwon, the Rockets couldn't seem to get over the hump, winning between 41 and 52 games and losing in the first or second round every year. That changed in 1994, when Tomjanovich -- now coaching -- set a series of 3-point shooting role players around Olajuwon and relied on Hakeem's dominant low-post skills to do the rest. Houston became known as Clutch City after the Rockets won consecutive titles with this group, the second coming in 1995 as the conference's sixth seed following a midseason trade for Clyde Drexler. In those two seasons the Rockets went 8-0 in elimination games and twice came back from 2-0 deficits in the second round against Phoenix. And with three great centers, 26 playoff seasons, four trips to the Finals and nine 50-win seasons -- including four in the past six years -- they've given their fans plenty to cheer since coming from San Diego.
Here are the complete rankings: No. 1: Los Angeles Lakers No. 2: Boston Celtics No. 3: San Antonio Spurs No. 4: Chicago Bulls No. 5: Phoenix Suns No. 6: Philadelphia 76ers No. 7: Utah Jazz No. 8: Portland Trail Blazers No. 9: Orlando Magic No. 10: Houston Rockets No. 11: Indiana Pacers No. 12: Milwaukee Bucks No. 13: Oklahoma City Thunder No. 14: Miami Heat No. 15: Detroit Pistons No. 16: Dallas Mavericks No. 17: New York Knicks No. 18: Denver Nuggets No. 19: Cleveland Cavaliers No. 20: Golden State Warriors No. 21: Atlanta Hawks No. 22: New Jersey Nets No. 23: Washington Wizards No. 24: New Orleans Hornets No. 25: Sacramento Kings No. 26: Toronto Raptors No. 27: Minnesota Timberwolves No. 28: Charlotte Bobcats No. 29: Los Angeles Clippers No. 30: Memphis Grizzlies
So how is this ranking calculated? Because two of the Top 10 teams (above the Rockets, mind you) don't even have hardware to matter while the team right behind the Rockets hasn't been relevent (i.e. a playoff team) for the right reasons in a long time.
My mistake, I'm sure you'd like that information as well- _____________________________________________________ My team is better than your team. That simple argument is at the heart of sports. Fans can debate about players or strategies or countless other issues, but what tends to get hearts pounding the most is when fans start trading boasts about which side is better. Almost immediately, the barbs will begin about the various sides' accomplishments. Celtics fans will throw their 17 championships in the face of anyone who dares challenge them; Lakers fans might answer with their 30 conference titles; while Spurs supporters will point out that their past decade is arguably the best of anyone's. And so on down the line, until we get to a few scattered Grizzlies supporters waiting meekly in the corner for a Clippers fan to walk by. And that's where we step in. With six decades of history to fall back on, we can take a look in the rearview mirror and stack up each team's accomplishments from 1 to 30. Obviously we can't account for every single credit and debit over such a huge time frame, but it turns out that once we install some basic accounting principles, the list pretty much falls into place. To start with, we set this up to look at things from the perspective of fans, as opposed to coaches or owners or -- God forbid -- statistical analysts. Therefore, the rules are as follows: 1. Winning matters. 2. Winning in the playoffs matters more. 3. Winning a championship is far and away the best thing that can happen. 4. Watching superstars is amazing, even if the team around them isn't any good. 5. Intangibles matter: Fans want to like and admire the team they're cheering. With those rules in mind, I set up a simple formula to award "points" for all the positives and rank the teams' accomplishments accordingly: Regular-season wins are worth one point. This is the source of 82 percent of the points in this system, but it matters much more for noncontending teams. Playoff wins are worth two points. You might argue that this tends to favor recent playoff teams since the current postseason is so much longer; on the other hand, it's a lot harder to accumulate these in a 30-team league than it was in an eight-team league. Playoff series wins are worth four points. There's a big difference between 3-4 and 4-3, and having an added category for series wins reflects this fact. During some seasons the league had staggered playoff systems in which teams advanced with a bye, and in those years teams were awarded "phantom" playoff series wins for earning a bye. Playoff losses don't matter. Nobody cares if they won 4-0 or 4-3. In fact, most fans end up with much fonder memories of a hard-fought 4-3 series than they do of a 4-0 rout. Championships are worth 30 points. I settled on this while trying to balance out the dilemma of "Would you rather win one championship and stink for the next four years, or be halfway decent five years in a row?" I think nearly every fan would take the former over the latter, and I'm guessing a lot of Heat fans are nodding in agreement right now. Putting such a premium on championships gives us the right balance between being great and merely being competitive. All-Star selections are worth two points each. Most fans would much rather watch superstar performers than ensemble casts, with the only exception being if it's a championship-caliber ensemble. For instance, ask a Hawks fan whether it was more fun to watch Dominique's teams in the '80s or Mookie Blaylock's in the '90s. The '90s teams were about as successful, but from a fan's perspective there's no comparison. Relocation is a 100-point penalty. Changing cities is the ultimate failure for a sports franchise, leaving the fans in the former city out in the cold and forcing the team to build a new history with unfamiliar faces in a different locale. In a couple of instances I penalized teams 50 points for "half-relocations" -- Baltimore to Washington for the Bullets, Long Island to New Jersey for the Nets -- when they stayed in the same general region but likely had to cultivate a new base of ticket holders. Intangibles matter too, and I created a separate category for special circumstances. For instance, the Blazers of the early part of this decade were perfectly respectable in terms of wins and losses, but few were eager to admit rooting for that team because of all the scoundrels littering the roster. This is the one part that's completely subjective, but for several teams I subtracted or added 50 to 150 points based on playing styles, player behavior, superstars and other major factors. ABA playoff results count half. The NBA likes to pretend the ABA never happened when it presents historical results, but by the early 1970s the two leagues were of similar quality, and the best player in basketball (Julius Erving) was in the ABA. Still, I had to count the results at half because the league was so small at times. It's pretty easy to make a deep playoff run in a six-team league. Once I summed up the total for each team, I divided by the number of seasons the team had played in the NBA; otherwise this system would be horribly unfair to expansion teams. The result is a number of points per season for each team, and conveniently the average is almost exactly 50: 50.17, to be exact. In the following pages we'll get into where every team ranks and why.
Of the 10 championship teams in the past decade, only 2 ended the regular season with the best record in the league. So how can this be the majority source? If you're a higher seeded team and gets beaten by a lower seeded team, you should be penalized half a point for each of those 4 losses. You can't just throw losses under the rug and act like it doesn't matter. Because All-Star selections have been done in an informed and intelligent manner I can't believe Hollinger factors this in when half of the All-Star Roster comprises of players that gets in on name recognition alone. I wonder if he docked OKC 100 points or 50 because they stayed in the same (west) region I don't even know where to begin with this one... I'm just shocked that a guy that made up a pretty good (NOT PERFECT, but pretty good) calculation on a player's efficiency can come up with something ridiculous as this. Hollinger should ask Karl Malone and John Stockton if they rather have just one ring or to bask in the glow of how great their division champs banner hangs.
Some of his criterion are questionable, but I agree with his decision to not ignore the ABA. There was plenty of talent in the ABA by the later years, I agree with his comment about talent parity in the later ABA and NBA, and there is definitely an argument that Erving in his ABA prime was even better than Kareem. Obviously half is kind of an arbitrary number, but it's better than zero.
Winning a championship is worth 30 points, so it more than makes up for not having the best regular season record. I agree that being upset in the playoffs should come with a penalty. You don't seem to understand why he's giving points for all-stars. It's precisely because of the fun that comes from watching a player with "name recognition." Most fans would rather watch a 50-win team with a couple of all-stars than a 50-win team with no all-stars. Are you really comparing the move from Baltimore to D.C. to Seattle to OKC? It makes sense to not dock as many points for a team moving close by, because they don't completely alienate the fan base, which is the reason for docking points to begin with.
Other than the fact that I think championships should be worth even more than 30 points, not too bad. I guess I'm just bitter that 0 championship teams like Orlando and Utah gets ahead of us. But I guess that's what you get for having so many crap seasons.
OK, first time I read something stupid out of Hollinger. There is just no way Phoenix, Orlando or Utah should be above the Rockets. He needs to somehow recalibrate his formula to common sense. If one of them was above, you could argue, but all three...
They should have been docked -100 for relocation... and -150 for general lack of intangibles and their overall level of suck. How did they place in front of us? We should have had +150 for being a scrappy team and beating teams that we weren't "supposed" to beat. Not to mention +60 for the championship titles... What the hell. This list is rigged.
It's like he is favoring a team that is half-decent over a decade rather than teams that actually wins championship(s) in one decade... Orlando has only gone to the finals once. Yet they place in front of us.
*I mean once recently. I'm talking about their recent team that hasn't been able to win a title, yet they make the players every year and somehow place in front of us.
The rockets have pretty much been irrelevant since 1997. Its kind of sad, but we have been a pretty mediocre franchise for a while.
In a way that is true, we have still been as competitive as Chicago post Jordan and Orlando before Howard developed. The Jazz and maybe even the Suns, I can concede but Orlando?
