Who could we realistically trade for to turn us around?

I'm not sure what you're arguing here. Are you saying that I'm wrong and that the Rockets' core of Harden, Ryan Anderson, and Eric Gordon will make us contenders? Or that signing those two guys has set us up to make some franchise-changing trade for a new star? I'm saying there's no discernible path forward here, there's no "trade to turn us around" on the horizon, and the only real progress we've made this summer is extending Harden. We're waiting for something good to happen later.

Maybe we don't disagree; I'm just having a hard time understanding.

 

No I agree with all that. Maybe I misunderstood your first post.

The problem I see is we have nuked our flexibility and Morey has no way to work his well known asset flipping now.

So the moves the Rockets made are that of a team that thinks it is contending, not rebuilding. If they were rebuilding they would maintain capspace

 

I might give too much credit to Morey for being able to move assets around. But, this is not a contending roster and I have to believe Morey knows that. So there has to be some intention -- right? -- to make more moves.

 

I'm sure morey knows that but not Les.

My interpretation of the moves is that Les thinks we should be contending so he hired a "real coach" and let D'Antoni pick his free agents. This ties into him firing McHale so suddenly.


Morey has more or less been pushed aside

 

imagine if we were 2nd team in the west last year. We would have had a shot with kd, horford, anyone we wanted, but we were an 8th seed team. Add players to get better and hope our role players play as a team and shoot the 3 well as we did the season in our 2 seed year and get a 4-5 seed win a playoff round then suddenly we land one superstar we are a title contender. All rides on how we do here, we use to try to land superstars then try to get a team around them but it seems like we are getting a team to show another superstar we can be contenders. Les go.

 

Aha! smh The truth...right out of the chute.

 

This is true, unfortunately this team as constructed is overachieving if they sniff the 4/5 seeds. In the West .

 

I guess that's my intuition as well. Rockets are hoping a good showing will make their assets more tradeable, and the team more attractive. That puts a lot of the future of the team, though, on things they can't control.

 

Getting back to original point of OP, the one player available good enough to turn team around NOW would be Russell Westbrook. Westbrook already plays well with Harden, MVP level production and is proven kryptonite to GSW and SA.

 

Pretty terrible interpretation. Morey has coveted all of the new acquisitions for years.

 

They were 3 games out of the 5th spot in the miserable failure that was last year. If you already knew that going into the statement above and still believe what you typed, let's be nice and just say I strongly disagree with your statement.