Robert Horry dishes on the Barkley trade and why it didn't make sense for the Rockets

Horry and Cassell never wanted to leave. Scott Brooks cried when we let him go. I don't blame them for not wanting to leave Houston.

And Horry might be right, adding Price & Willis (who eventually started over Barkley for a period) alongside Cassell, Brown and Horry might have been the best mix long-term.

But the butthurt is strong... Barkley might not have been in the best shape every year but he brought it on the court and made the team better. He brought exactly what we needed (rebounding) to beat the Sonics.

We had an incredible record in 97 with Olajuwon, Barkley and Drexler all healthy. Drexler suffered an injury that slowed down the momentum. After that all 3 players began to regress physically. But Barkley always brought it.

There was a game that Drexler and Olajuwon sat out. We played the Bulls. 0 chance to win the game. Othella Harrington was our 2nd best scoring option available. Barkley carried that team. We lost but Barkley never let up. I've seen Drexler and Olajuwon quit in that situation, most veterans do, but Barkley left it on the floor. Horry couldn't do that. It wasn't in his wheelhouse, so for him to speak out against a superior player that way doesn't sit right with me.

If Horry was so special he should have held Phoenix afloat instead of fading into nothing for a period, throwing towels at the head coach (props for doing that though, **** Ainge).

I love Horry. But he has no place to attack Barkley. Chucky Brown can. Horry cant. Horry has never had to carry that kind of a load. I'm torn, I love that Horry wanted to be a Rocket for life. That he has the competitive fire to want to finish what he started here. But you cant attack a Hall of Famer like he's the reason we never won another title.

 

Horry has revisionist history as well... Rockets would have never traded him if he didn't consistently coast in the regular season and didn't "fail to evolve" his game beyond being a 3 point shooter and crafty defender. (I remember CD and Rudy were working with him and begging him to improve his post-up game, and it never amounted to much)

Little did everybody know (Horry included) that THAT would be the player he simply was... the Rockets couldn't really afford that sort of role player when they had no other scoring options. He did fit in on other otherwise "complete" teams that didn't need much more than 3 point shooting from him.

 

People are putting so much weight on us being able to beat Seattle. First of all in 93 we got screwed in game 7, like worse than any team at the end of a critical game. Imo we won that series from a standpoint of we were the better team by the end of it, and proved it in game 7 on the road. Up to that point the home teams would blow each other out. Some of the worst officiating in the history of the NBA then. In 96 we were banged up and not healthy, especially the guards. I sincerely believe with a healthy cassell and drextler, that's all we needed. Kenny smith was done in 96 too. Maloney would have been a good backup for Cassell. And Willis and Johnson would have made a difference with a younger core that was clutch.

In the end the Spurs had trouble with the Lakers a lot too. But did they ever trade anyone? They never were able to win back to back. And they considered trading Parker many times. The way I see it is if we won 1 championship, the trade was successful. But since we didn't, you never know what could of happened from 96-99. Plus post 99, Cassell could have been the starting PG in Houston for many years after.

 

Yeah but he mentioned adding Kevin and Eddie. That might have been a bigger factor. You had Kevin who could rebound like Barkley and Eddie that was a dead eye three point shooter. Horry was a defensive genius who could have played at the three and hit his threes (he was still skinning and jumping out the building and blocking shots). Sorry but I have to say that Big Shot Bob has point. Hindsight though, you know what they say.

 

skinny

 

Great recap of what killed our team... I still believe if we just would've kept Horry and Cassell we would have won additional championships. They wouldve gotten better and taken pressure off Hakeem and Clyde. Charles got us over the Seattle hump but nothing else.

 

True. Everyone expected Horry to take that next step after the 1995 playoffs where he was dominant(especially in the Finals). Instead he had a mediocre 1995-96 season. In fairness, the entire team was in turmoil that year with injuries to Dream, Elie, Cassell, and Drexler and Kenny Smith looking so washed up that he wound up briefly losing his starting gig to Eldridge Recasner. So it couldn't have been easy for Horry to find any sort of rhythm with the lineup constantly changing around him. But at the same time, it's not overstating things to say that he was a disappointment. The Pippen comparisons coming out of the 1995 championship were a little much, but he also could've been a lot more than just a guy who sleepwalked through the regular season and then hit a bunch of clutch shots in the playoffs.

 

Great points, the Barkley trade looks bad because the bad decisions made afterwards and Charles didn't help by getting out of shape.

I do believe that we would've and could've won by keeping Horry and Cassell.

 

I disagree about Horry and Cassell. Horry exposed himself in 1995-96 for what he was. A mediocre regular season player who would make a few big shots in the playoffs. That's fine if you have prime Shaq and Kobe or Duncan, Parker, and Ginobili in the lineup. But an old Dream and Clyde can't make up for that lack of production over 82 games.

Cassell was a really good but not great PG over the course of his NBA career. He certainly had some solid seasons with the Bucks, T'Wolves, and Clippers and helped take those teams further into the playoffs than they'd been in a long time(and in the case of Milwaukee and Minnesota, further than they've been since). But he never got back to the NBA Finals until he joined that 2008 Celtics team to pick up another ring.

 

Horry is right that Barkley didn't work hard, but the only piece I regret losing was Sam Cassell. Horry was a good utility guy, but he was limited. I really hated losing Cassell though who blossomed into a really great floor general. Having someone like that to facilitate on the late Olajuwon teams would have helped a bunch.

I think it's a mistake to think of it as a simple binary of trade Horry/Cassell for Barkley or don't. I think we needed to upgrade at the power forward, but maybe a different trade would have been best. There was too much redundancy between Barkley, Willis, and Olajuwon that we really couldn't get the most out of each of them. Making a trade for a different solution at PF -- and maybe without losing Casell -- could have made a better mix of talents.

 

I was in Austin during that time, everyone liked Dream, Cassel, Horry. After the trade, one of my friends told me that the rockets team was more like a team with three old men walking on moon. I though that it was fun, but it was true.

 

That 95-96 season was just awful across the board, very weird season and Horry was fine. Cassell would've made a great starter and we even could've had Abdul-Rauf if it wasnt for the perceived attitude issues. It wasnt just those two. We broke up the whole team in less than a year: Thorpe gone, Maxwell gone, Herrera gone, Kenny gone, Cassell & Horry gone. That was just downright ridiculous. Had we just extended Maxwell's contract, he might have been able to deal with less minutes. If we had just been patient with Herrera, Kenny after injuries and understood that Sam & Horry were the future, we still wouldve had a solid team. Barkley is not the issue here for me, the whole breaking up of the championship team is. We forgot who got us there. We didnt show a lot of respect to all those guys. Leslie does now, but at the time, hell no.

 

3 of those guys were gone when we won a title though. And Kenny straight played himself off the team. He went into a slump he was never able to shake.

 

if your team won b2b titles right after you bot it, as a rookie owner it's easier to make all-in kinda moves to get a shot at a 3rd title - especially when your 2 superstars were about to (or already starting to) hit the downside of their careers.

the barkley trade wasnt the problem. what happened to personnel decisions after that was the problem. the list got so long that i couldnt even remember all the names of bad signings until i saw someone mention them in this thread.

 

People would have criticized the Clyde trade as well if it didn't result in a miraculous championship run... that was the move that made it "ok" to make big moves for guys like Barkley, Pippen, attempt at Stoudamire, etc.

Les began "chasing it".... but it wasn't necessarily wrong to do so.

Like it was said above, Horry was who he was... in fact his game devolved over the years (and he simply became the nobody regular season guy who gets hot in the playoffs). Cassel was ok... but like I said earlier, Dream wasn't too fond of him.

If the Barkley trade really offered the last great chance that Hakeem/Clyde had, then so be it... you do it again if you have to. Neither of those guys were primed for a "rebuild", and nobody was complaining in 97 when the "big 3" was playing at .700 clip and getting further than any Rockets team has since gotten.

 

Eddie Johnson was a desperation mid-season signing in 97... more revisionist history from the regular season sleepwalking "Big-shot-bob".

Lets just leave it that the 47-35 1995 team was simply a "special" team that likely was never going to duplicate that sort of "magical" run. Something needed to be changed to squeeze every last ounce of greatness out of Hakeem/Clyde.

 

yeah. wake me up next time a 6 seed wins it all.

i was rooting for the spurs this yr to beat the clips and at the back of my mind i had a slight thought that they might have a chance to win another title being 6th seed. i was thinking maybe duncan, ginobili and co. had that sth. special too. but damn, here goes game 7...

 

Charles didn't keep himself in shape,no doubt about that. There was absolutely no chance at winning it all by retaining Horry and Sam. The Sonics blew us out 4-0 despite Horry's fine shooting against them.

 

The trade didn't work out, and Cassell went on to be an all-star, while we had Matt Maloney.

We came close in 1997, so the trade wasn't awful by any means, but hindsight lets us know we'd only come close.

 

It didn't work out. We didn't win a ring. And all we needed was a power forward which we got in Willis anyway. Plus Barkley killed the chemistry. Should have just added eddie johnson and willis.