The reasons for our success are the reasons for our failure

The reason for our success last season was the team was truly embarrassed by Portland and the 1st round exit. The training camp before the start of last season was intense with 2 sessions a day and a strong emphasis on defense. Players were motivated to do better. Team played with each other and for each other making sacrifices along the way. Harden was beast mode

The reason for our failure this season is entitlement, overconfidence and a pathetic training camp which falls on McHale and coaches not being able to motivate these guys and get them ready. This team came unprepared to play this season. They came in entitled thinking just adding Lawson would result in Rockets cruising to the WCF.

The players didn't have the same focus. The leader Harden was busy b****ing about the MVP, talking up his marketing and brand and tapping Khloe. The training camp was light with no emphasis on anything just because we have so called "veterans".

 

I think having everyone show up for the new season either hurt or out of shape was the biggest factor. Some players got paid (including a $200 million deal) and lost the eye of the tiger.

 

Last year we went 56-26 and finished tied with the 3rd best record in the NBA.

Last year we went 19-21 (.475) against teams with a winning record.
Last year we went 37-5 (.880) against teams with a .500 or lower record.

Last year we started the season 19-6, with 11 of those first 25 games coming against playoff teams. We went 6-5 against the playoff teams and 13-1 against the lottery teams.

This year we started the season 12-13. We're 4-6 against suspected playoff teams and 8-8 against suspected lottery teams.


It's the little things.

Complacency was cloaked as continuity. We re-signed a guy like Brewer to a contract too large. And now he's happy. And obviously he didn't work on his game to improve this past summer.

James Harden signed a mega-shoe deal and didn't work on his game this summer.

KJ McDaniels signed a big money deal (for him). And apparently he worked out all summer but he didn't work to improve the key things he needed to improve upon.

Bev signed a relatively large money deal (for him). And he's no longer Mr. 94 feet. He's a step slower, gets beat all the time now by quicker guards. He either lost a step or he lost some desire.

Morey did watch Smoove leave and didn't replace him. While knowing Dwight was going to be suspended the first game out of the gate and wouldn't be playing back-to-backs and DMo wasn't going to be playing for the first part of the season. Morey saw all that and didn't go get a vet big to tide us over. Meanwhile the Spurs signed Boban Marjanovic right under our noses for a little bit of nothing. Other backup bigs around the league get signed for a pittance.

Our weaknesses last season were rebounding, 3-point shooting accuracy, and the free throw shooting of our bigs. We lost Smoove so our rebounding got worse. Nothing was done. We added Thornton to help with our shooting but we don't hardly play him for some reason even though he lights up the scoreboard every time he plays. And Dwight has marginally improved his FT shooting.



Continuity is overrated.


Urgency is underrated.

We need guys willing to play for their careers. We need guys on minimum contracts that are willing to bust their nuts to carve out a role for themselves. We need that kind of urgency. And we don't have it. We've got continuity. Or complacency. Or something like that.


Knowing how crappy our record was against teams with winning records last season should have let us know that we were overachieving the whole season long and the 56-26 record was a mirage. But instead....Morey bought it for some strange reason. I would love to know what evals he used to determine that continuity was our best course. An NBA GM, especially Morey, has to be aware of the performance fall-off of role players after they sign a contract that is more money than they've ever seen in their life and is a huge step up in lifestyle for them. It is very rare that role players suddenly take a huge leap and get better after signing a long-term deal or even stay grinding and hustling like they were before they made it after they sign that long-term deal. How in the sam hill Morey banked on continuity is beyond me.

I only hope that Morey knows something about the trade market for guys like Brewer, McDaniels, and Beverley that I don't know. Because right now...it looks to me like we've got 2 boat anchors and if Bev suffers another injury maybe 3 boat anchors out of those contracts Morey doled out this past summer. I am hoping Morey knows more about the trade market than I do and that he can move some of those contracts for players that can help us win some games here.

Yeah Will, we knew who Howard and Harden were. But I thought Morey knew more than I did. I thought if Morey said we needed continuity that he knew something better than I did. So I wrote my questions about our off-season out here and left them because I trusted Morey knew something I didn't.

And perhaps Morey still does. Perhaps Morey already has a superstar deal lined up ready to go in January or February which changes the complexion of everything here. Perhaps. Hopefully. Because without something that changes the whole playing field here...some of us already knew the reasons for our failures when they were taking place this past summer.

 

The reason for the Rockets failure is that the team has no heart. They are lazy, they are sloppy, they have no pride.

Rudy T said to never underestimate the heart of a champion....well never overrate guys with the heart of a loser.

The current Rockets have the talent, and they even show it for stretches of a few minutes every once in a while when they decide to care....but it never lasts. They have no leadership and they just don't care enough. Right now, it's a team full of supremely talented losers and I don't see anything coming down the pipes that would make that change.

 

I don't know if the soul of a team has to be home grown. Nash, for example, was not home grown with the Suns. He was probably identified more with them than with the Mavs. Shaq's case was a bit fuzzy. He and Kobe sort of "shared" the team during their glory days.

But I totally agree that a team of "mercenaries" is not a pretty sight. The way Morey built the team is by nature a team of mercenaries. It has become a cliche that everyone is just an asset. He had no choice because his hands were tied by the no-tanking mandate (although I have a feeling that he actually enjoyed the challenge).

I have always been critical about this asset flipping thing. It's just not a way to build team culture. There is also a lot of luck involved. As the OP pointed out, you can't pick and choose your stars via trade/FA. But then again, to a lesser extent, you can't pick and choose your stars via draft either because it depends on who's available when you draft.

Moreover, Morey has not shown that he is any better than other GMs in drafting high. He has not got a lot of chances. But the ones that he got, he didn't hit any jackpots like he did in trades and lower picks.

 

I disagree strongly with this assessment. Harden is 3 times the Harden we acquired. Howard left LA because he wanted to join a better team and he played poorly because because he was injured and his injury mistreated. His athleticism declining is something we knew would happen soon given his mileage and the wear and tear on his knees.

There is no mystery here. When Harden doesn't have the ball in his hands, whether it's on offense or defense, he is a worse player than Jason Terry. He has basically never had to play off the ball in his career. When he does have the ball in his hands, he is not taking advantage of his teammates.

Meanwhile we threw him into that position by starting Lawson, and instead of working hard to improve this side of his game Harden just did nothing without the ball. Without any coach who has expertise in ball movement, this was doomed to fail.

That doesn't explain this season though. We could have just done everything we did last year and gotten the same results. The West is allegedly weaker too. Harden and Howard can do everything and anything they did last season, if not more. The coaching is the same. What changed is that our role players went from playing like the hungriest team in the league to playing average basketball. We're taking 3's like it's an easy post up, no thought going into whether it's a good 3, a well timed 3, or if there's anyone open inside. I'm not at all advocating for a traditional inside out team, but it is idiotic that the middle has disappeared for us. Having a threat inside creates inches and feet for 3pt shooters and lord knows our 3pt shooters are average enough to need the help.

Howard just sacrificed for the team that's why he's scoring less. He is not posting up. Team has bailed on him though because they are not rewarding him for his sacrifice with extra pick n roll opportunities, finding him more swiftly, passing it into the post better. They have a guy who can outscore his counterpart in 80% of games and outdefend his counterpart 95% of the time but we are treating him like Kosta Koufos and then ****ting on him simply because he's not getting enough shots. I wish those shots were going to Harden. Instead of Howard we're going to Brewer, Beverley, Jones, Ariza. Howard is a better scorer than all those guys, by miles.

We need to make a couple of lateral role player trades.

 

I agree except with the comment about Harden. He has grown leaps and bounds since his bench days in Oklahoma, and that's because we gave him the chance of being that alpha dog. For the most part, i think he's succeeded. I don;t think anyone outside the Rockets organization thought he'd be this good. Now, because the lack of structure and the looseness, etc., I think he's developed some bad habits within the team concept. He was and still is a young player and we just gave him the ball. I think this can be remedied with a coach that can bring some authority and that he will respect. Maybe JVG, or Thibs, who Harden had good words about him during the summer with Team USA.

 

They have had great opportunities to get franchise players..luck plays a role though...could still get simmons this summer.

 

The problem is not getting the players... it's having a coach to integrate them into his system...

The COACH and not the GM... The GM and coach should communicate on what players will best fit the system.

T_Man

 

what they're doing has failed and made them the worse team for years. won't be getting much better any time soon.

 

HOT TAKE

 

You're smart when you're not trolling.

 

Meh, I don't buy this.

Tons of teams were offering Dwight the max.

Tons of teams would have offered Harden the max if he had become a free agent.

Morey took advantage of opportunities to get ahead of everyone and bring them here.

 

We got Howard in FA. That's like saying "LeBron wasn't the Heat's guy. No. They wouldn't have been able to get him"

Everybody knew James Harden was good, but OKC wanted to give the money to KPerkins

 

Look at the Spurs record in 2013-14 against playoff teams and bad teams, what you're talking about isn't unusual in the slightest, especially given how injured we were. If you're beating playoff teams 2/3 of the time, you're winning well into the 60's.

Also you're talking about signing people and complacency, i'm not sure why you're talking "players", it's only one player, corey brewer (Bev has been much the same player, he is who he is, you can call him overpaid, but complacent? no), who has at least come around, he didn't re-sign any other role player to anything more than a minimum contract. To add to that, he added Lawson, who should by your reasoning be playing for his future, and how's that working out.

To make it even more comical, you've talked about him not paying Josh Smith, whilst simultaneously saying that paying role players leads to their downfall....

You've come into this with a pre-conception, one not really borne out in the reality of what occurred, he paid one rotation role player, one.

And then there are things that he really couldn't predict. That Harden would get hooked up with a Kartrashian and cost the first 3 weeks of the season, that Dwight would become a useless cancer, that Jones would go from a net nothing to a net hyper negative, that the team would shoot 30% on open shots, for them to all happen at once, sometimes **** just happens.

 

The rest of the league got better too, there's much more parity in the East and the West

I distinctly remember last year we were squeezing out a lot of wins against bad teams playing just as bad and Harden just scores a bunch of buckets late and then saves us. It happened so much that this board was complaining about it too towards the end of the season.

Maybe last year's team was just not as good as we thought it'd be, we got by because of confidence, hustle and Harden being an actual MVP. But when teams get better and you don't have a stable game plan, we lose the confidence and play to our actual level.

I think a lot of things needs to change, we need to stop thinking we are in a slump, we are just bad relative to the rest of the league. We need a new coach, new players, new game plan, new system and new attitude.

I also think it's stupid to pinpoint it on certain individuals, why are we pretending like Harden didn't have really bad games last season or the season before that, do people forget the Portland series where he pretty much gave up on the game because Mathews was getting under his skin. Even last season I remember a series of games where he slumped quite hard and pretty much stopped trying because his shots weren't falling.

Harden is actually the one player that is closest to how he was performing last year.

I wouldn't mind a do-over and just keep Harden and Dmo, I just want to see some consistency and stability on how we perform, not just depending on Harden to bail us out like last season, not just getting by with playing "hard" and with "Heart", not just hoping Josh Smith goes MVP mode in the playoffs for one game.

One of the things I liked about when Rick was coaching was that you always knew what you are going to get. I mean sure when our roster was depleted we didn't make the playoffs, but we still had a system going on offense where I knew Kevin Martin was going to score off of certain plays and Scola would always get his on the block. I also knew that Martin and Brooks was ass on defense and would probably allow a lot of points, but they were also going to score a lot of points off of fast breaks.

With this team, it's like a lottery every single night, is Harden going to drop 50 points or is he going to go 1-10 from three and give up, is Brewer and Ariza going to gamble and get a bunch of steals or dribble around like headless chickens and throw the game.

 

At the same time Warriors were after Howard and Iguodala.

And we all know what happened and that Iggy was a major contributor for them.

 

damn I hate it when Will is logical and coherent

 

so basically the op was saying it wasnt good enough to begin with...

... which is kinda what i thought.

 

Actually were was hope but Harden and Howard never clicked on a championship level (Wade and worn down Shaq in Miami)

Howard went semi injured and they never used the pick n roll enough