I definitely don't see us going past the 2nd round without those two, but I'm praying we can manage to sneak past the first. I know I shouldn't care too much about what the media / "outsiders" say, but I'm just sick to death of the taunting about not getting out of the first round. Given all of the adversity we've battled all season + the current injury situation, I could be OK with just advancing.
The mental makeover of this team would still be suspect at best with those 2 to go really deep this year. Frustrating as always but hey Rockets fans are used to those playoff results. Nothing we cannot cope with.
I think the actual makeup and not the mental makeup has a lot more to do with what our problems would have been even if we were healthy. The Rockets are playing in a perimeter player dominated league with only one good perimeter player. Until we fix that problem this team isn't going to win anything IMO.
Precisely. Missing 4 post up baskets per game isn't going to kill the team (although they come in very handy when the 3s aren't falling) - what we really need is someone else who can get in the lane and finish.
We really need height on this team. I don't know why Morey has such a hard time seeing that. Why on earth DMo is the only legit 7' on this team just baffles me. There is something that can't be seen in a page filled with numbers and that is how much just having height alters a shot. We lost Asik and Dmo is out for the season, which leaves us with a front court of two 6'9 players a 6'8 scrub and a 6'10 gimp. We either run our butts off or we just get pounded like last years first round. We might as well start planning for the next season.
We had Asik and could not get over Portland given that Asik was not his usual self but that aint the biggest of problems here.
Motiejunas should bounce back from this injury and he is expected to be ready to roll when training camp opens in the fall. Motiejunas is signed through 2015-16 and he's set to make only $2.28 million next season.
Agree 100%. Got into with some Spurs fans last night about it and said I was making excuses ect, was told Splitter out for Spurs and that he's more valuable then DMO and I couldn't stop laughing, I retorted with is Splitter your 2nd option on offense and all got quiet LOL. Losing Beverly and DMO was a killer, could the Rockets upset someone not named GS of SA in the first round you bet.
I'd have to agree too. We are all about 3s and layups. Nothing in between. We are a 3pt shooting team, but our guys aren't that good at shooting 3s. Morey needs to actually get good shooters who can shoot 3s in the offseason.
Motiejunas is our only front court player whose effective outside 3 feet, on top of that he's one of the league's best players in that 3-10 foot deadzone that most near every nba player sucks at (which means he can post up if you have a center that can't score outside 3 feet and is occupying the rim), and he's the best 3 point shooter of them, and he's the best free throw shooter of them, and he can actually defend the paint in spot backup center minutes, he's also a good enough post player that dwight was willing to let him take them. He's also one of only 2 people on the team who can create his own shot at an effective conversion rate. In a void, he may not be that much better than other people (he's a horrendous pick and roll player for example), but he has a specific skillset that isn't just duplicated amongst the other 3 and in games of matchups, versatility of lineups is everything. Added to that he was improving, that he finally figured out how to be effective against Davis was the most impressive part of his last game, and then he was done :/
I don't know about that. I think D-Mo is actually our best pick and roll player other than Dwight. Josh is pretty good at running the 4-5 pick and roll though.
Being the X-Factor is not necessarily about being exceptional at one thing. DMo did so many little things for the Rockets, especially on the offensive end. With DMo, we had options, quite a lot of them. He could shoot threes, he could post-up, he could pass well, he's a good PnR player, moved well without the ball.
Jones wasn't really important being that we had Smith who does everything Jones does and more....except hit 60% of FT's. We'd probably be able to get along without DMo if we had an actual backup 5. He also really helped ball movement, the screens and whatnot that he brought to the table were very underrated.
Of course he was important. What was he averaging in the stretch before he had a collapsed lung? He at the very least, I mean very least, provided us solid minutes in our frontcourt depth. TJones is going to have to return to that form for us to have a chance in the playoffs. It's silly to not want a front court of: Howard/DMo TJones/JSmith
I didn't say that I didn't want Jones to help add depth at PF, just that he's just not that important to the Rockets success. In a perfect world we could have flipped Jones for a legit backup center at the trade deadline and DMo would have stayed healthy leading to a Howard/legit backup C DMo/Smith Front court that would have been a lot better.
MIP? I doubt he gets it, but I think he should and we can see now how bad do we look without him and how badly does Harden miss his legit screens.
