I'd rather the Rockets do all the "obvious" moves that end up being correct, rather than trying to go off-the-board and be seen as brilliant. I think that Morey for a long time was a bit too beholden to pure statistical modeling and over-valuing certain traits, and wanted to actively prove that the rest of the league could be outsmarted. I wanted Kawhi Leonard so badly over Marcus Morris, and he was consensus mocked much higher during their draft year. Even the best GMs can mess up the easy decisions. Going 6 for 6 without drafting an obvious bust (JG doubters aside) on their top picks in 2021/2022/2023 is actually incredibly statistically unlikely. Even if you want to include Garuba/Christopher/Washington as busts, it's hard to complain much about a 66% hit rate across three consecutive first round drafts. I do not necessarily think that Stone has proven to be an above-average GM yet, but he hasn't done anything catastrophically wrong to think that he and Witus would not deserve being extended. I agree that there is this general feeling of "lack of care/hustle", in that it feels like they are not constantly trying to extract value from every piece of the roster like Morey did. I am not sure if it is a conscious choice to be seen an favoring stability and less "players-as-assets" than the previous front office, but it may end up sapping the ability to make deals once the Rockets become salary cap limited. KPJ may have saved them from themselves (imagine if he was arrested this summer, after his 2024/2025 full guarantees had already vested), but front offices are evaluated on the actual results far more often than their process. I think that you are underrating the move of actually hiring Udoka as a coach. This is not NBA2K, where you just outbid everyone, get a free stats boost, and have automatons improve their skills based on an algorithm. This is dealing with real people, and Stone had to convince Udoka to sign with a team that had just narrowly avoided being the first team in NBA history to finish with the worst record in three consecutive years. He had to formulate a vision for a team that could attract a coach of Udoka's caliber, and manage the relationship between the Fertittas and Udoka. He had to convince his billionaire owner to not pursue Harden in FA, when they have probably been talking since last Christmas. The moves that Stone makes over the next season-and-a-half, where they define their core and need to make the next leap from playoff hopeful to playoff-lock, will determine how Stone is going to be perceived by history. It could very well be that he doesn't have it, and will be fired before he serves out the rest of this current extension. But I think for not at least, he's done "enough" to buy himself more time.
I agree that Stone's draft records have been solid so far. He did have luck on his side. None of the consensus top 4 picks in the past three drafts have shown to be definitive busts. So he's lucky to pick top 4 three years in a row and none of these "safe" picks could have been disastrously. (Jalen and Scoot are still undetermined.) With the lower picks, he had three hits (Sengun, Eason, Whitmore) and three misses (Christopher, Garuba, Washington). Overall it's been pretty good. His FA signings are kind of hit and miss. He avoided a potentially disastrous signing of Oladipo. The Theis signing was puzzling. He failed to get Lopez, although Sengun's emergence kind of mitigated it. (It also shows that he could have missed Sengun's potential if Lopez was signed.) We will probably never know how close it was to giving Harden the full max. It could have been disastrous. Tate, Landale, Bullock, Holiday and Jeff Green are okay deals, not brilliant. I think the biggest criticism of Stone's regime is his obsession with KPJ and letting the toxic culture degenerate under Silas. One may argue that it stunted at least to some degrees the development of Jalen, Alpi, and Jabari. The hiring of Udoka was perfect for a turn around for the young players, but Ime's availability was also somewhat of a luck. How he moves forward to keep the core and build around it is going to be the real test.
That 66% hit rate is extremely skewed by the fact that we had a 2nd, 3rd and 4th overall pick. Its harder to miss when youre drafting high and the drafts were all very good in the top 4. Also, I don't give much credit for Ime. Convincing a coach to take a job where we have 1) tons of cap space, 2) top draft picks, 3) a city that free agents want to come to, 4) no expectations/pressure, 5) some decision-making authority (Ime is why we got Fred over Harden) and 6) a sizable contract isn't as hard as you're making it sound. What was his other option? MIL which is cash strapped with no picks and not a FA destination anyways? Your conclusion which is basically that "he hasn't made a catastrophic mistake and the team is on the up and up so why not." I get that, but I have a higher bar when it comes to getting an extension. Those hard little value-add deals that Morey consistently made over and over gave us confidence early on that he could continue to do so. Stone's signings and trades would be value-destructive if we were in a contending mode. That's why he doesn't deserve the extension. You say he has done enough to deserve the new deal but strip out the top 2/3/4 picks and wtf has he done that is considered enough? Anyone can tank and make those draft decisions. He's not special in that regard at all and deserves no credit for it. You say oh well if he screws up we'll just fire him before the extension concludes. Uh yeah but in that scenario, we will likely continue to face the repercussions of his screw ups long after he is gone. If Brooklyn fires Sean Marks today, how much better will they feel tomorrow know they still have to live with his mistakes for years.
He has been much improved this year, I can admit that. I just thought it would have been good to hand over the reins to someone like Witus directly. Spoiler
Udoka might be a proponent of #BetOnYourself and had confidence in being able to turn around Houston's roster, but you should take off the Rocket Red-tinted glasses if you think Houston was a prime coaching destination... Out of the 6 available jobs last summer (I realize that some opened up after Ime signed with Houston, but again, credit to Stone for closing the deal well in advance of the best jobs becoming available). 1. Milwaukee - Championship-level core with Giannis, and this year has clearly shown their missing piece is even competent coaching. Despite not being a FA-destination, they convinced Dame to accept a trade, and directly beat out "a city that fee agents want to come to" in retaining Brook Lopez. 2. Phoenix - Kevin Durant and Devin Booker, along with the trade assets to pick up Bradley Beal and DeAndre Ayton as a trade chip. Again, their season did not go according to plan, but this was probably the trendy pick for the second best west team after the reigning champs in Denver. 3. Philadelphia - MVP Joel Embiid, a loaded roster, and one of the best and aggressive GMs in the league. There are pretty good odds that zero of Houston's current players ever develop to be as good as Embiid, and probably better than even odds that none of them even develop to be better than Maxey. 4. Toronto - Mainly leaning on the personal connection between Udoka and Masai Ujiri, but this was a roster one year removed from a 48-win season, with a prospect comparable or better than any of the Rockets' picks. 5. Detroit - Very similar to Houston, arguably a better situation due to having a less meddlesome ownership group and GM. Again, the KPJ issues were very clearly well known around the league even prior to his arrest and trade; most of the sources close to the Rockets were intentionally keeping stories back. If I'm a coach, I'm not at all concerned about what a team is going to do in 3-4 years once the young guns develop, I'm concerned about keeping my job and repairing my reputation immediately. Give me the ready-made contending core 11-out-of-10 times. I think that you're vastly underestimating the difficulty of going 3-for-3 on top lottery picks. Go back to the last 10 drafts before 2020 (2011-2020), and less than 50% of the top-4 selections have earned a single all-star selection. Not screwing up at the top of the draft is just as hard as getting the picks in the first place, and why tanking is such a high risk method of rebuilding. I'm a #secondroundpickguy, a #decliningcontractguy, a #tradeexceptionguy, and love it when my GM/team is doing clever stuff to acquire assets by taking on deadweight contracts, or extending the expiration of trade exceptions. It irks me to no end that Stone seems to be uninterested in doing these kinds of deals. But I'm realistic that at the end of the day, most of what matters is what you do with the top of the roster, and the pure luck that comes with player acquisition and individual development. I'm not worried about the owner paying multiple GMs or coaches salaries if they get fired midway through an extension. It's not my money, and doesn't affect the cap. I don't want a front office that is desperate and trying to either save their jobs or impress the owner. I want one that is trying to be a good steward of the franchise, and I think that getting a substantial improvement over the Stone/Witus team right now is hard to see; who is that man/woman? Only two I can think of off the top of my head that I'd be a bit intrigued over are Bob Myers, formerly of Golden State, or Bobby Webster, current GM of the Raptors under Ujiri.
I think that Stone has gotten a lot better since he took over in 2020. In hindsight, the Oladipo extension would have been a terrible move at that time, but one that would not have changed the long-term future of the Rockets in the slightest. The 2-year, $45M deal would have covered 2021 - 2023, the same span as John Wall's deal was clogging up the cap anyway. And the Rockets didn't exactly need any help losing more games over those two seasons; it would have cleared in time to follow the exact same plan last off-season. Theis is another example of a deal not working out, but the downside was well managed. They dumped the contract entirely in-season, and arguably, they got the more valuable player back in Dennis Schroder. (Weirdly, they also probably "won" the Oladipo-Miami move that was seen as a robbery, considering how solid Olynyk has been for multiple teams). So I tend to take a fairly neutral view of it; it didn't cost them anything except for paid salary and they clearly did their homework in making sure the contract was a net positive asset. I disagreed with their pursuit of Lopez, and I am still strongly on the hill that Dillon Brooks is just the next incarnation of Ryan Anderson. We appreciate him because the team got way better and we had absolute trash in his spot the year before, but he's overpaid, has a long-term deal, and has limitations that are going to be badly exploited as the games start to matter. We gave up De'Anthony Melton to dump Ryan Anderson's contract last time around; I'm not going to be the slightest bit surprised when we have to attach a first rounder to Brooks in a year when Eason and Whitmore have taken all of his minutes. No argument on the KPJ coddling. I personally think that if KPJ doesn't take himself out of the equation before the season starts, and destroyed the culture of what Udoka was building, we'd be posting replies on a "STONE FIRED" thread instead, and b****ing about Witus being collateral damage and a massive loss considering all of their draft success.
Eli Witus' mother is probably reading this thread trying to get any information about him she can from our resident Eli Witus experts. Eli Witus is not a person - he's a mythical beast created in the minds of fans. Either that or he is probably nothing more than a Python script running on someone's PC in a Rockets back office. "Somebody, restart the Witus - I think it crashed".
For those talking about the Victor Oladipo contract offer and how lucky it was he didn't accept it because we were boneheaded to offer it, here's the clip where Vic himself says they knew he wouldn't accept it. They just offered it as kind of a gesture of good will :
Wow, not sure if Dipo was telling the truth. But it's pretty twisted. How did they know Victor wouldn't accept the deal? And what if he changed his mind? (Reminds me of the Boozer betrayal.)
His saying he didn't have an opportunity to say yes or no doesn't make sense, is he inferring that his agent refused it? How is an "offer" without the ability for him to accept or decline it... even an offer? "That's how the business works" ?? Such ****ery upon the English language this is.
I’m not sure who the guy is exactly. But I would rather fire Stone and replace him entirely with Witus. I love the Witus extension as much as I hate the Stone one. We absolutely under no circumstances can lose Witus. While I disagree, I can at least understand your arguments for MIL/PHX/PHI. I absolutely will grant credit for locking in Udoka before those teams had a chance to really chase him but again, that’s something any fan would do. I too was clamoring for this so I can’t give that much credit for making obvious decisions. But dude you are REACHING to think that TOR/DET are anywhere close to as attractive as HOU was. I’m pretty astounded that you think DET was even arguably better as a situation. Also drafting 3/3 is absolutely not hard when 1) all your picks are 2/3/4 and 2) the drafts were all pretty good at the top. Do you remember the polls on this site? Our fan base was in lock step with every decision he made except JG/Mobley when it was about 50/50 (it’s still unclear that he hit on this choice btw- until those last few weeks of JG outperformance, this was a miss. TBD for now). This proves that a majority of the fan base could make the decisions stone made at the top of these drafts. This years draft will be the true test since it’s way worse and the pick will likely be much lower. I’m sure you’ll see way more divergence on this forum as a result. I too am not worried about the org losing money for firing executives early. That’s never been my argument. My argument is that as talent grows and cap space dwindles, decision making gets exponentially more difficult. Everything is easy when you are tanking and clearing cap in the process. Stone is going to have to start building around the edges without the benefits of time and cap space and he has shown atrocious decision making when it comes to those types of moves.
I do not know much about Witus, and whether he even wants the top GM job for a team. Talent evaluation is an unbelievably important aspect of being a great GM, but it is only one part. You can be the smartest man in the room, like Sam Hinkie, and not be able to play the political game with other teams, agents, and your own owner to be effective in the role. I'm not saying that he isn't a great candidate; maybe he truly is amazing at everything and is just being held back by Rafael Stone. But you'd have to really believe in Stone being principally at fault for the moves that didn't work out, and Witus showing a track record of accurate scouting behind the scenes to believe that just firing Stone and promoting Witus would be a net positive. If you think that the current front office is not up to snuff, then I feel like you just clean house and start over with a new approach. I have no idea how strong the relationship is between Ujiri and Udoka, but most of the reports in the media were hinting that the personal and professional connections were there. Maybe it was more of a leverage play from Udoka's side overhyping Udoka's interest, but there is probably a very good chance that Toronto has the best player out of both the Rockets and Raptors rosters right now and into the future, and that's not a terrible place to be. 2023 - 2024 results are heavily coloring just how attractive these situations were one year ago during the coaching carousel. I am pretty sure that most of the league would have ranked Cade above any of the Rockets' young guys if you wanted to start rebuilding from the ground up in 2023. The entire league was far lower on Sengun than Houston faithful; hell, even Stone/Udoka didn't think Sengun would be the SENHUB, considering their pursuit of Brook Lopez. In the preseason over/unders, you had Houston projected around 31 wins after spending heavily in free agency, and Detroit right behind them at 29 wins, with $70M+ in cap space for the summer of 2024. I think that Houston was more attractive because I'm biased as hell towards this team, but I am also realistic that when you lose as much as they did for multiple years, this organization had rightly earned a reputation as a complete dumpster fire, regardless of whether it was on purpose or not. I'm also personally colored by my extreme dislike for KPJ and everything that was reported about his antics. No way in hell would I tie my future career as an NBA head coach to coddling and accommodating that guy; any vacancy that had him as the team leader and voice of the locker room should automatically be less attractive.
