Luther Head! You can never get too much head. Or Ryan Bowen our team needs a token white guy. The real answer is non of the above. Tracy and Yao played with trash. None of these guys would crack our rotation. Or maybe Carl Landry since he was a second round pick on a minimum deal it would fit right into our ultimate goal of Luxury Tax savings this year. If we had Scola and Artest in there prime maybe, but they were both old when they came here. And Scola would be a liability on our switching defense. I still haven’t figured out what Shane Battier does. He’s to slow for our switching defense and he can’t hit a consistent three. He would get flamed more than Ariza with all those bricks.
To be honest, I can't decide between Battier, Scola, and Hayes. This team needs the attitude, and more importantly the intelligence and professionalism, of those guys. Out of those three, I'd take Battier due to today's style of play. Hayes is Tucker who can't shoot. (But Hayes is a much better post defender and smarter passer.) Scola would be great playing alongside Harden. But he is too slow to play the switching defense. BTW, I am assuming that the OP wanted to compare those players WHEN THEY PLAYED ON THE ROCKETS, not at their prime. Otherwise, Artest would be a very enticing choice.
Too slow for switching defense? Have you seen him defend all the elite perimeter scorers of his days? All those bricks? Do you know that he was a career 38% 3pt shooter while Ariza is only 35%? Battier is pretty much a better, smarter, and more reliable Ariza.
Scola was a beast. In a prime era of PFs like Duncan, Garnett, Dirk, Gasol, Wallace, Webber, Bosh, Brand, Boozer.... He would not only match up to any of them, but sometimes even outplay them. Hey, remember 2004 Olympics? I know Shane was our "glue guy" in the Tmac / Yao era, but it should at least be close with Scola. The poll results just show what Scola was his whole career: underappreciated.
I watched him get lit up by everyone. Only person I would say he was good at guarding was Kobe. He studied Kobe more than anyone and was good at staying in front of him and forcing him into bad percentage shots. Most overrated player of our time. Shane Battier. Ariza just shoots way more threes because of how our offense is designed, if Battier shot more he would have been just as bad percentage wise. He was always wide open, I expected him to shoot way better. In the playoffs he averaged 9.1 Pts 4 Rebounds 1.8 Assists 1.2 Steals .8 Blocks at 1.2 Turnovers a game for the rockets while shooting 43%. What an amazing player.. And he doesn't even guard as many positions as Ariza did. I have seen Ariza guard Curry, Thomson, Durant, heck even Anthony Davis. Sure wish Shane Battier would have shut down Deron Williams or Carlos Boozer, when they were lighting us up. Except he was too busy hanging out with Matt Harping or Gordon Giricheck and standing the corner on offense bricking shots.
I picked Shane because you'll need to hit 3's on this team and play switching defense which I think he could handle better than the smaller guys.
I would want him off the bench 10-15 mins a game when we are up by 20 points and I want someone to post up and score. Something we do not have an apparently not wanted on our team .
Its Battier and its not even close IMO. Knock down shooter and ultimate glue man defensively. He could switch and guard any position on the court and he was a very smart defender. Even though guys like Durant could beat him (like KD does with everyone) with his length Battier would definitely employee his kobe-system defense of forcing KD into the worst shots possible. One of the most underrated things about Battier was his mental toughness. No one in the NBA today has the killer instinct (or whatever you want to call it) of Battier and whenever Kobe did hit tough jumper after jumper on Battier he would just come back and defend him like nothing happened. That probably caused more respect (and frustration) from Kobe than anything else. I remember reading some crazy layup drill that caused a lot of other more athletic players to quit because of how repetitive it was and Battier completely crushed it. The scout/coach running it said it was a measure of mental toughness more than anything. Honestly if we had a Shane Battier circa 2007 on this team right now I would consider us about even with Golden State, if we had 2007 Shane instead of Ariza and Mbah a Moute last year we would have won the series even with the Paul injury imo.
