Yeah, that Clyde Drexler was a disaster when he came over in February of '95. We barely won the championship.
How is that backwards? The offseason is clearly the most important time to change, but that is already past. Do you suggest no more changes until next offseason? That flies against the practice of virtually all GMs. My point was there's no need to clamor for change now when the prices for a trade are higher than they would be later when teams give up. We can wait til closer to the trade deadline. The rockets are clearly not gun shy about trading at the deadline and have done so virtually every year. And last I checked, we won one of our championships with a trade midseason - drexler? I was just trying to say there's no need to trade right now as so many people are clamoring for, when prices are high and we don't even know what this team, if healthy, is capable of. It would be dumber to play the games, realize you don't have enough, and then do nothing. You have to weigh what you can get versus waiting until the offseason, and I'm sure that's what the front office is considering. In any cases, changes happen mid season all the time. Morey even makes statement like - he is comfortable that by postseason they'll have a better team - which implies trades.
Remember when camby and dally were benched for the smaller line up of scola and landry. Morey doesn't understand the essence of a big body. Calculators skip out on weight and height. We are notoriously known for making sf play pf and pf play center.
Of course. My bad. I changed it. The point stands though. What was a bigger mid-season trade than that one? How did it turn out? Just responding to The Freak's last one. And yes I am very old.
You posted that right before I did. Agree with the sentiment - trades or pickup of good players at midseason can be very effective.
It has been a while since anything major went down mid-season. It has become the "below average player trade deadline."
Are we saying that the Drexler trade leading the 6-seed Rockets to a championship is the norm? That was 20 years ago and had never happened before or since. I'll save you the trouble and throw out the Rasheed Wallace to Detroit trade as another success story for the trade deadline. What is more likely is that the teams that make big trades during the year have their chemistry disrupted and are basically ruled out for big post-season success in the same year that the late season trade happens.
Yes midsession trades don't always or even often lead to a championship. But they help bolster the bench or weaknesses that are identified for the first 3/5 of the season. For example, maybe we pick up a decent backup center, or a decent backup power forward if TJ is still hurt. There's no reason to believe that a midseason trade can't be useful. I agree - the more time a team has to gel, the better. 3 of the main pieces are in place now (H, H and Ariza). Now we're talking about trades around the fringes.
I don't really disagree with you. I saw an easy shot and I took it. I'm just making the argument for adding talent, hopefully great talent, mid-season. If I'm going to trade for a Drexler or even a Dragic I'd rather add him to the team mid-season than next year. We all know Morey wants to go big, to add a major talent. And a major talent is more likely to find his legs in our system (this wouldn't have been the case under JVG by the way - every player needed about a season to get that) than a lesser one. Especially if it's the right fit. Our offensive system is very simple; just add water (players). That's why we've been able to do as well as we have while having four players out that could beat our four top active players in a pickup game. And we thought we didn't have depth. We still need more depth, obviously, but I'd say we're lacking our 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th best players right now (only my rankings) and until we lost our 7th best (IMO Canaan) we've still been very successful with what the announcers just said was the 8th starting lineup in 16 games. That's a pretty good indicator that you can add talent to this team, if it's the right talent, and see it thrive rather quickly.
Morey does not agree with you. If he did, he would have signed a guy like Lowry instead of throwing that away to chase a guy like Carmelo, who doesn't even fit here. If all he wanted was 'fringe' guys, he could have acquired them easily before the season. Make no mistake, he could do that easily if he wanted to. He could have upgraded the 4 spot a long time ago, without even thinking about it. Unfortunately his vision of what the team needs is drastically different from that.
I never said morey was only looking for fringe players. Everyone and their mom knows he's looking for a 3rd star and all evidence points to the fact that he could pull the trigger now on some mid level depth instead of a 3rd star but that he doesn't want to do it because he doesn't ant to give up flexibility. My comment about fringe players (I meant non-stars) is that right now I don't see a star coming midseason (but I hope for the best, I just think it's a low chance) so I think we're probably more likely to not get a star via midseason trade, unless we get very lucky. It seems like morey is either trying to trade for the star or wait until offseason (I'd rather see if our team is good enough to maybe not need a 3rd star but go for depth - but I'm comfortable with Morey's choices since he's proven to be pretty savvy). I also think he should have just signed lowry for $12M and then bolstered our depth. In hindsight, that was the best choice. Lowry could have been our 3rd star. But Morey also nearly hit a home run this summer too. I'm ok with our misses because we hit two home runs in consecutive summers and bc he knows what's he's doing. It's not the end of the world to have missed the third.
Nope, I don't. Morey benched Camby and Dally for Scola and Landry? Do you remember, however, when we had a 7ft, top-five NBA defensive center who wanted to be traded and would sulk a whole season, only Morey didn't trade him? When was that?
It not happening since is sort of a symptom of it happening, it's not the impact to chemistry as much as a player of that calibre has simply never been traded mid season to a contender since and I'm not sure any team wants to be the portland goat - we got Hakeem and to a lesser extent Sampson out of trading Moses and watching him win a ring, Portland got to watch their franchise's greatest ever player eternally associate himself with his new team. There hasn't even been a trade that had the potential of repeating that success.
maybe i'm getting old too grin so i'm not quite sure, but didn't the bad boy pistons also get their first ring after trading dantley for mark aguirre just before the trade deadline?
