When are we going to start criticizing Rafael Stone?

I couldn't have said it much better myself. Your last paragraph really is what I think should have him in hot water, but the first two items are probably what's keeping him employed at the moment. He did manage to technically reload the team with picks and talent very quick.

On your point about the Talent being undetermined.... I would say that what we were able to get with the Consensus 2nd best prospect in 21, and Consensus #1 draft pick for 2022 for 99% of the mock drafts leading up to a shocking twist... Stone has managed to get very very fortunate and has the highly coveted upside talent that many "tanking" teams perpetually try to get year after year. Think of all of those Bobcat and Kings seasons where they would have killed to get a prospect in the draft like Jalen or Jabari.

The problem is what we are doing with that talent now that we were lucky enough to get them both, and a warning sign about pinning all our hopes and dreams on MAYBE getting lucky again to draft Wemby or Scoot. There's no guarantee with roster mismanagement and poor coaching/development, that Wemby is just another Jalen Green who struggles in the NBA because he's in a bad situation and culture.

So Stone did very well in assembling talent and picks on paper, but after assembling a fantasy roster & cupboard of picks, it's still on him to put the team in a situation to be a real life success and not just a fantasy roster on 2K. If we are grading on 1 to 100 like in school, the truth is Stone currently has a 50 because he's only done half the assignment. A 50 in school is an F.

I'm not ready to expel him yet, but we do need to be honest with the fact that he is currently failing, and with the OKC picks coming due soon, and Jalen & Jabari's time to incubate numbered (before top prospects often get moved after a disappointing start... See Fultz, Wiggins, Evan Turner, etc.), time is ticking fast for Stone.

 

Wut?

OKC has been rebuilding the last 3 years and have gotten off to hot starts before and then have finished bottom 3.

What have they done to be compared to the Astros?

 

But he was willing to pay Oladipo that much to do the same?

And you are ok with that?

No getting a #1 pick for Allen was not a great decision as seen by what Allen is currently doing for the Cavs.

If we had Allen on this current team we would be a hell of a lot further along.

 

I have to disagree with you here, its not certain that we are not currently on the path to being the Bobcats or the Kings both were held back by picking non Star level players so high in the draft year after year neither Green nor Smith has shown they are difference making players, would you be comfortable paying both the max and building around them?

Just because you picked the consensus players does not make you a good GM sometimes you need to see beyond the consensus and I would still take Mobley over Green and the jury is still out on if Smith was worth the #3 pick.

 

Stone needs to do something about balancing out the roster by this trade deadline in my opinion. If they leave things “as is” I’m going to be pretty disappointed. At the bare minimum, he needs to address the Gordon situation. It would be nice if they could acquire a good veteran locker room influence, ideally a point guard, but as long as he doesn’t fail to move Gordon again I’ll basically be content with the job his doing so far. I really don’t think they can go the rest of the season “as is” though because there needs to be at least some growth somewhere, and right now there isn’t any.

 

What are the things you would have done differently from Stone (given the information he had at that time) to significantly improve our future?

What would you do going forward with current information that is different from the organization's assumed current path?

I'm honestly interested to hear.

I think everyone's upset because we suck but I don't see anything I would have done differently to significantly improve our future (without the power of hindsight).

And, others want to balance the roster, that's just so irrelevant to the goal of building a championship contender when you don't wven have a star. When Lebron looks back on his career he's not crediting the Cavs roster balance for his development and success. You balance the roster when you start showing signs of having star talent on the roster. We're so far removed from that type of move. We're not even at step one of a rebuild.

 

It was a known fact that Oladipo was going to decline the extension, the offer was a formality.


Having Allen on this team the last two years and its very unlikely you have the #2 and #3 picks in the past two drafts and you probably aren't #1 right now .... you are worse off than you are today.

 

I think if Stone misses with this year's top draft pick, he's out. I cut him a bit of slack for Green and Smith looking terrible, but he has to actually get a star quality player this time around if he gets another top 4 pick.

 

You don't offer that much money as a formality, I don't know why that dumb **** excuse keeps getting floated around here.

Why would any team in their right mind offer anybody a contract as a formality? it makes zero sense.

Allen was not making either of these teams that much better and I would have no problem having Wagner and either a Mathurin, Murray or Ivey on the team.

Can we be much worse than we are today?

 

I would have kept Allen and drafted Mobley or Wagner.

 

I am finding it harder and harder to defend the status quo. But I do still think this club is accomplishing some of its pre-season goals.

1) Playing time for those that need it most so we can see what they look like. check.
2) Develop players individual talents. mixed/incomplete
3) Develop team chemistry. fail
4) Stay within striking distance of a good draft pick. check.

I am beginning to wonder if this is a case whereby we don't like what we see, so we gravitate towards the explanation we like the most or that fits our preconceived notions of how this should all play out.

Perhaps we don't like what we see, because what we have isn't as good as we thought.

 

True... but it brings up the question of what certain top prospects are in one situation vs another. Of course there are some generational talents (Lebron, Duncan, etc.) who would make any team automatically great... but that's not typical. However there is evidence that situation does matter to the vast majority of top 3 talents.

There's also the case where you can see that most prospects take some time so you wonder if you want to be bad for an extended period of time where it ends up that your developmental talents aren't ever good for your team, and only get good on the next team.

I guess is the main point is there is no silver bullet to rebuilding. The only thing I'm 100% sure on is I do feel it is time to move on with a new coach at the latest in the Summer where a brand new experienced coaching unit can come in and establish some fundamental structure to playing more competitive while less variance heavy basketball. These youngsters need to learn how to play the right way regardless of what moves Stone does or doesn't make and regardless if it's Wemby, Scoot, or the 5th pick in the draft. It's obvious to me that even Wemby most likely won't be Lebron or Hakeem and more than likely will be more Jabari/Jalen where they also will likely need development and coaching.

With Stone, I have some major complaints, but I don't know if firing him is the right move at all. The KPJ and Nix fascination is a weird one though, and can't forgive his BS the past two deadlines where he leaked or let it leak to Woj that the Rockets had deals for Oladipo and EG that they actually didn't have. I think it's unprofessional, and makes him look like an amateur. He's likely untrustworthy among his peers, and that concerns me as someone with a sales background myself. I am concerned the Rockets now have less opportunities in the funnel which makes making good trades harder.

I do think that Jalen and Jabari were the right picks though, but might not have been put in the best situation thus far by Stone and the Coaching staff.

 

I thought Silas has done a pretty decent job to this point, but I think his time might have passed since it seems players are kinda tuning him out.

I think overall the team has kinda overachieved by just being pretty competitive night to night, I don't see a lot of top end talent on this roster, they are all pieces.

 

I agree. None of this is his fault I'm fairly certain, but I just don't think he's the right fit. Speaking to the "Situation + Talent = Higher Likelihood of Star" formula, you do have to separate your feelings on quality or likability of a coach, and throw ALL of your chips into giving what your lottery picks need to be the best version of themselves they can be as early as possible.

The fact is the Houston Rockets have been freaking LUCKY to get the crack at two years of top 3 picks. Most rebuilding teams don't get that luxury. It's such a huge investment that you just have to separate your feelings and in every situation say to yourself "what does my top 3 pick need" to be successful?

To your last point, everyone here is fans more or less of certain players whether it be Sengun, KPJ, EG, etc. I think people need to wake up, and like you mention, realize that while we might love these guys, the reality is... yeah... they are "pieces" and if they were as good as some only fans think they are, the team wouldn't suck. So as objective fans... gotta be okay with the reality that Sengun could get traded, EG could just get waived, KPJ could be waived or traded when his contract is up, etc. etc.

 

I really think this team is an actual STAR away from being a playoff type team, but I want to be more than just a team that makes the playoffs that's why I am ok with the losing but if we are lucky to get a top 5 pick again he has to be a real difference maker and then we can start getting veteran type other pieces.

I hope we can be more Cleve that Orlando, Charlotte and Sac they were only terrible for ac couple of years and just needed a veteran star type to propel them.

 

Absolutely.

 

I think in the moment I was annoyed we didn't get Allen as well. Multiple people here told me it was the right move because Allen would have potentially improved our record that year just enough to lose out on the #2 pick that would have been owed to OKC. I can see both sides.

Again, I'm not talking about using hindsight here. I'm talking about given the information of that time period. No one was taking Wagner #2 that year. If you saw Wagner being better than Jalen that year you need to be in a front office right now because you see things no one else was seeing then.

I also don't think a single GM would have the balls to draft Mobley at #2 if he had Allen and Christian Wood on the roster (who at the end of his first year had a very different reputation around the league than he had last year).

 

Sure, great question.

Most of the big moves seemed defensible at the time, some of them didn't though; based on what I know/what was known at the time:

1) The fascination of "reloading" around Oladipo, which meant passing on Allen was kind of odd. I get the Rockets already had a new big man in Wood but now, obviously, among Allen, Oladipo and Wood, Allen was the right one. I know the Rockets didn't want to pay Allen and wanted guards but seems like they could have gotten more if only in draft capital for him than a rental of the shell of Oladipo. Also, the apparent big $$ contract offer to Oladipo was a serious bullet dodged. I don't know if this was Stone or coming from above.

2) The unconditional handing of the keys to KPJ for the last 2+ seasoms- KPJ's punishment for his halftime Denver drive was literally almost nothing, fine, but pretty much just carrying on with him like everythings fine and doing NOTHING in the offseason to bring in any serious competition for him (other than, lol, Daishen or TyTy? come on) or add any type of stabilizing presence to distribute the ball is a huge, obvious flaw. I don't want to relitigate the KPJ stuff, but even Dennis Schroder made the Rockets offense, such as it is, run better last year. You can see the problems with this move as recently as last night, sure KPJ puts up a nice scoring game on decent shooting, but how many possessions did he stunt in order to get there?

3)The Gordon non-trade - i've said this many times, if the Rockets really did get a first round offer for Gordon last year, and then opted not to trade him because it would have been too many first round picks and then turned around and traded Wood for another first round pick - I don't really get this at all, unless the only offer for Gordon was attached to a killer contract that nobody wants like Duncan Robinson or whatever.

4) KMJ or Tate - I was a vocal fan of opting for KMJ over Tate, I agreed with Clutch's "Time to Trade Tate" article, and Tate's extension seemed like a really bad idea given that he was wearing a sweatshirt on the bench until Thursday. However, he's obviously still a possibly valuable contributor from these last 2 games, so maybe this one works out for the best and the Rockets move him for positive value - I'd still prefer they move him rather than KMJ but it's not a bad problem to have, though again, see #3 above, getting rid of Gordon clears this up a bit.

5) Draft - ok it's unfair to nitpick this one especially with no hindsight, but obviously we don't have a franchise level player. Maybe no one was available and there's nothing you can say about it. Right now Franz Wagner is probably the best player from the 21 draft.

One thing that's weird to me is that people bought in to the concept of a draft "Big 3" of Smith, Holmgren, Banchero last draft when it seems overwhelmingly obvious that Banchero is a Big 1 with Holmgren TBD, and Smith seems destined to be a complementary player rather than a lead dog. This may not have been unforeseeable in college too. Again I'm not a scout and I don't know jack, but I'm just surprised that the obvious issues on Smith (his low at rim %, his slowish release) were not picked up beforehand by the pros - the at rim thing was called out a lot before the draft IIRC

As far as the lack of balance/fit, you can see the ROckets attempting to compensate for this with Bruno the Lob Threat to try to help out Green and Porter, but this is just window dressing. I truly do think it comes down to having no true ballhandler which relates to #2 above, which combined witth the lack of accountability (Green and KPJ NEVER have to worry about sitting no matter how bad they are) results in the present mess.

 

Thanks for responding in detail, and I 100% agree that these were all mistakes.

I just think 2/3/4 are relative non factors for a long term contending goal.

Signing or trading for a competent PG, dumping Gordon for a late 1st, and prioritizing KJ would be better. But, those moves would most likely just lead to a more fun team to watch with slightly more wins but still nowhere near being on the path to contend with no Star.

I agree that your #1 was his biggest miss with knowledge of that time. Allen would have been our best player.

But, #5, the draft, has BY FAR the biggest future implications. My point is that has mostly been a bad draw. Even if he did everything else perfect given the knowledge of the day (trade for Allen, trade Gordon, and play KJ more) we would still suck and not have a star.

 

I don't think it's a coincidence that this is happening during the year with two highly touted draft prospects. We could have made moves on the margins this past offseason, sent many of the rookies/sophomores to the G League and added several competent, low level vets in order to get close to 29 wins while still getting a top 10 pick. Instead, we went even younger.

I don't disagree that there doesn't appear to be any superstar level talent, but the truth is Green, Jabari, and the 2023 FRP pick can either partially and all used be used to get a superstar or even star.

I will save my doom and gloom for the off season when we will have a clearer idea of the future. I can't deny the Rockets look like an amorphous blob but how you interpret is something else.