Maybe or maybe not. But I think the 2009er Rockets with Artest, Brooks, Scola, Battier were ironically closer to the championship. Funny thought but I think it is true. They had more grit and without the injuries they might just have beat the Lakers in the 2nd round and had it going for the 3rd round. I guess some fellow posters also felt that way.
LOL. I think in a way you are right though in a way. I think us as fans, and Morey/GM's probably know Harden better than he knows himself. I'm not trying to make promises for Harden to suddenly snap out of it, and win multiple titles. I just want everyone to be realistic that he's still our best chance at getting back to contention. He's also going to most likely continue to have Harden moments. Its just who he is at this point. If you just don't like Harden as a person and the way he carries himself on the court then that's totally fine. Totally understand. Don't need to lie about it. However I do want those folks to be honest with that decision if that's what you want, and be honest about the talent that you want to leave the Houston Rockets. Love him or hate him, he's pretty damn good. Be able to really truly back up your opinion if you want him gone, and be able to live with the alternatives you are wanting instead.
There has been no PG couple in more than a decade, it's extremely uncommon and only happens when the gap is huge.
The alternative does not look that good either, admittedly. The interesting part is we have not gone deep into the draft since the Yao days... and Yao was an interesting player. a nice specimen and home grown player that made Les a lot of bucks. It is a waiting game and you have to be mentally prepared for it. Some guys do not have patience to wait out an entire season and are asking to trade this player, that player. The reality might be that both Westbrook and Durant might end being better and more consistent than James Harden. And Presti did not make that big of a mistake.
Thw 2 guards, like the 2 forward are almost always the 2 that finish with the most mvp votes, where position is irrelevant. It was last year, and the year before that, and the year before that and...
I mostly agree with your take about Harden. But I disagree with this assessment. The Rockets in the last two seasons were a very good team but not "100% contender." They could beat any team in the playoffs but also could lose to any team. They were just a wildly inconsistent team. In the regular season, the sum total of the inconsistency gave them a respectable record. But in the playoffs, a couple of bad games in a series can kill you. Last season, they played bad and good all the way through the playoffs. They happened to play good at a few key moments (e.g 4th quarter of Game 6 Clippers series) to go deep. They could have equally easily got bumped out much earlier. Even before this season, we saw what this team was. They are not dependable. They give up too easily. You can't depend on them to go deep in the playoffs season after season like the Spurs, the Thunder, the Heat, the LeBron Cavs, and now the Warriors, even when they are healthy . The Rockets just aren't that kind of team. Not now, not last season.
so what happened last night? an all time great doesnt know how or cant beat a little double teams? lolz. again, i call for the attention from y'all. (in ai's "practice" speech mode) - we're not talking about some ordinary great, folks. we're talking 'bout ALL TIME great here... haha.
Still waiting for some cherry picked stat usualy from some delusional fool like jordannn or fizzle or lars to show that Harden's TO are ok and acceptable for his usage or his continued jacking and bricking of 3 pointers is ok since he shot 40% in DEEMBER
He has as many TO as Westbrook. So why aren't you bagging on him? His assist to turnover ratio is the same as Curry, so why aren't people bagging on him? Harden has a very low Turnover to usagae ratio. Harden is a superstar and all superstar have high turnover(except that scrub Lin).
Its an interesting point about OKC/Presti. Honestly, I don't see Westbrook improving as much as he has (and Durant in some capacity of his playmaking) if Harden is still in OKC. Then again, I don't know if Harden is MVP caliber with them either, and he likely still has his minutes staggered with Westbrook. All in all, I think Presti got great assets at the time, and had to foresight to know that Harden needed to stretch his legs more to see how great he could be with his own team. It is what it is, and both teams probably made the best deal possible.... especially Houston ,who even if Harden was to bottom out, have a career ending injury, or leave the Rockets in some capacity this afternoon, made the right move and has had three very good seasons, and one great one with a title run. I'd argue that 2013/14 should have been a title run even more than last year with probably a better team & more opportunity in the playoffs past the first round. So yeah, I think i Presti still did okay, and its not really his fault that Westbrook, Durant, and Ibaka all had key injuries at less than ideal times in the years following the Harden trade. If they were all 4 healthy at the same time, someone would have had to be benched, and someone would have been unhappy being held back.
I do not know about the future, dobro but the Cavs tonight and teams in the playoffs have shown that Harden is easily shut down. And when Harden is shut down truth be told the whole Offense of that Rockets team is 90% shut down and dysfunctional And that is just 50% of the game, Defense is another story
I guess I'd need you to clarify on what you mean by inconsistent. Because any which way you look at them from a production standpoint, they were pretty damn consistent all season long on offense, and defense. Especially defense where they were top 10 pretty much all year long, and it carried into the playoffs. They won what.. 68% of the time then entire year? That's pretty damn consistent to me. You don't get to where they got without pretty high consistency. Sure they dropped a dud or two that you remember, but unless you watch contending teams every day (like we did with last yrs Rox), you'd probably not notice regular season bombs like the early season loss to the Clippers I remember, and that one loss to the Pelican's I recall. If you are talking about this season however, yes this is the epitome of an inconsistent basketball team statistically from a production standpoint, higher turnovers, wildly ineffective defensively, and an offensive pace that went from top 3 to almost out of the top 10. I don't know what happened, but its pretty obvious that the team the past two years, and this years team are completely different. They perform completely different, and its night and day from a production consistency standpoint. Different year different team. The Rockets were a top 4 basketball team in the conference finals, and played the Warriors very close the first 3 games. A few balls bouncing here and there in the first two games, and the Rockets could have been 2-1 and could have been poised to win the series. If that's not the definition of contending I don't know what is? According to Clutchfans (and probably the media who don't give the 2014/15 Rockets their due) you aren't a contender unless you actually win the title. Contending and winning are two different things. The Rockets in 2014/15 were either contenders or we just need to drop that who title from our fan vocabulary because it would then make zero sense whatsoever to NOT call the Rockets contenders.
I agree to the point that when a Harden-centric offense has a defensive gameplan designed around taking Harden out of the game (and performs at good at this scheme as the Cavs did last night, POR before, and MIA before that, etc), it makes that Harden-centric team very out of whack at least offensively. That should be pretty obvious. He's the catalyst for the offense. If you can do what Cleveland did to Harden last night then yeah, that's your best chance at beating that team. But this whole notion that EVERYONE shuts down Harden (especially in the playoffs) is absolutely nonsense. And what is the exact definition of "Shutting down?" Because it surely isnt LIMITING that player to only 27 PPG, almost 8 assists, 6 boards, etc. a game which is Harden's stat line last year in the playoffs. I recall Rick Carlisle (a coach most think of as one of the best X's and O's coaches in the game) saying that he thinks Harden is the most difficult player to gameplan against. If he's that easy to "shutdown" why is Rick saying that? If every team could do what Cleveland did last night, and Portland did before to Harden before they would do it, and Harden would be a very bad NBA point guard. But that's just not the truth. We've seen teams shut him down, and so we know how bad it looks. If you watched Lebron with the Cavs in first go around, and even some in Miami you will know exactly what it looks like when other great players get taken out of the game too when they are the primary facilitators of their teams gameplan offensively... it looks freaking horrid. THIS YEAR however we are seeing more and more bad games where Harden has had a lower assist to turnover rate than he's ever had even in the playoffs against teams keying in on him. Harden this year vs. Harden over his career is something that is an isolated incident, and the stats back that up. He's been bad by Harden terms this year yes. But over the course of his career there is no question how great of a player he has been, and even this year despite the drop in his efficiency, he's still AT LEAST showing the talent. Why he hasn't played up to the level of where he was the past 3 years I don't know. But you have 3+ years of data that proves he's still your best shot of getting this team back to contention quick. You have a player that has played like that 3 years in a row vs. the alternative (blowing it up for who and what exactly??).... the hard data shows me pretty clear and plain that we should give Harden & co. a chance to retool and get back on track to where they were just several months ago.
Lol. You should look at his peers like Westbrook, who have been top in usage and minutes like Hardin regards to turnovers. So derp derp troll. [/SPOILER][/QUOTE]
Here's 1 for ya. Harden, Wall and Westbrook are 3 of the top 5 players in field goals made plus assists. They are also the top 3 players in turnovers per minute. Coincidence? No. Last night Harden was a joke and he's turning it over more than he should, but it's not uncommon for high usage/high volume guys to turn it over a lot. Evidenced by the stat I gave there. Proceed with your delusional bs and what not.
You did exactly what he said and found some weird and obscure stat to defend Harden's bad play. A huge difference is Wall's assist% is much higher and Wades tov% is much lower. Hardens turnovers are way too high for his level of assists
