I think Bzdelick's influence is underrated when it comes to the teams start and turnaround this year.
Paul will lay it all out on the line no doubt about it. Different year different team though. More playmakers and scorers so Paul has been more of a distributor and scoring when need be. It’s going to be quite an exciting run.
I dont think age has that much to do with it.. as Harden and Capela have offset any losses we see from CP3 and PJ tuck.. I think the first 20 games, we didnt come hungry and were upset at how close we got to dethroning the warriors and possibly winning a title.. something like that either really demotivates you or motivates the heck out of you.. obviously we didnt get the motivation. We also know we have the same 65 win core, so like the warriors from last year, regular season didn't matter that much as no team really improved enough (outside the bucks and maybe raptors) to concern us. We still are widely considered as a top three team in the league. When it counts we have beaten the teams we are supposed to beat Warriors, Nuggets, Jazz etc. Finally the role players we got were just crap, and Melo is just a team killer, the guy literally has never been on any good teams and didn't complement Harden and CP3 at all.. I am hoping CP3 finds his mojo when playoff comes, but last years team was historic and they had the believe.. People forget we were 51-4 when Capela, Harden and CP3 played that was 75 win pace.. it wasn't just players and talent it was also motivation and playing for something bigger then them. My fear is Harden has again taken such a huge step forward that we have become more live or die by Harden (80% times we live in the regular season) but I fear it wont translate against top tier teams in the playoffs..
Our starters: player FG% 3PT% James Harden 43.8 36.2 Clint Capela 64.3 0.0 Eric Gordon 40.5 35.1 Chris Paul 41.7 34.7 P.J. Tucker 39.8 37.8 Leagure average 46.0 35.5 it is a overachieving season, IMO.
The NBA got better and we really didn’t. Our team is as good as last years but we didn’t exactly improve as a team. We are probably worse even. But teams like Denver, Milwaukee, Philly, Brooklyn, etc all got better
People might not agree why we are worse. Its actually common sense, but we all can agree that BigBum is a terrible poster/thread starter
After kind of thinking about this season and what went wrong along the way to this point, i’ve come to one conclusion... Some will say Melo Some will say injuries I say the Rockets did not hit 65 due to BigBum threads. I need to work the analytics, but I’m more than positive.
That’s just silly. We resigned our two best players, one of which to a team friendly contract and the other to a contract not as bad as it could have been. Disaster would have been something like losing key pieces, not signing guys at the fringes that played like ****.
How does that contradict anything I said? We re-signed our two best players that we could have lost, one of which we signed (CC) to a very friendly deal. That happened lay off season. The one you called a disaster. It wasn’t. We swung and missed on some shitty role players while keeping the core of a championship contending team together for likely another couple years. That’s not a disaster. A disaster is what happened to the Spurs, watching your championship window for years and years slam shut. Or what happened to OKC when Durant left. Or what happened to Cleveland when lebron left and they went from 4 finals in a row to lottery bound for years. Yeah, that’s what a disaster would have looked like- Paul and Capella leaving. Not signing shitty role players trying to fill out the 7, 8 and 9 spots in a rotation. Those guys are fungible as daril Murray proved in retooling on the fly. You lack perspective.
THIS..... Seriously, we're awesome the last 50+ games, and dealt with a ton of injuries to significant players this year. I can't say we're better than the 65-win team, but I can say we're different, have found our stride, our rotations, and healthy at the right time. Additionally, RAnderson and Luc were playoff no-shows last year, but they were significant to our regular season record. IF we stay healthy this playoffs, we CAN do more damage than last years playoff squad.
