Let's look past the LOF & LOH noise for a second here and look at things in perspective: The 94' and 95' Rockets' squads were complete teams. The 95' team especially did NOT feature the Kobe & Shaq duet + role-players blueprint that people seem to fawn over and want to emulate. Kobe & Shaq is not an ideal template for our squad because foremost; Dwight does not compare to prime Shaq who was an unstoppable offensive force and oftentimes off-set Kobe's offensive inefficiencies. Those offensive efficiencies are often attributed by commentators to the reality that Kobe was the only legitimate perimeter threat on those Lakers' squads, and as we've seen with Harden's struggles against OKC in the first-round, perhaps a secondary perimeter threat would be more effective than a 3 & D guard. We saw the difficulties that a Yao & T-Mac duo had when they were surrounded by mediocre role-players, albeit injuries also played a huge part in their limited post-season success. Instead if we look at the 95' championship squad we can see that we had one of the greatest post-scorers in Hakeem as the first option, Clyde Drexler as the lead guard, we had Robert Horry an exceptional PF that could hit the glass for boards and long jumpers which extended to the three point line, we had cerebral two-way wing players like Mario Elie who could hit the three to provide spacing and we also had Kenny Smith who was another legitimate threat to score at the basket rather than having a role as simply a spot-up 3 point shooter with good D. That's the mix of players that we currently have right now. Sure we're missing our Robert Horry and it remains to be seen whether Dwight can be anywhere close to Hakeem, or if Harden can be a Clyde, or whether Lin can handle the pressure and be a Kenny Smith. What our team identity is not however, and should not strive to be is a poor imitation of Shaq & Kobe + role-players in the vane hope that somehow Chandler Parsons can be the X-Factor that alleviates all of our shortcomings.
