Honestly, the jury is still out on all this "franchise player" stuff. But more than that, there's room for multiple great players/scorers on one team. As Rockets fans, we tend to have a heliocentric mindset after winning our only championships under Hakeem and more recently building everything around James Harden's hero ball. But it's totally viable to have a more team-oriented, diverse offense, i.e. the 2008 Celtics or the 2014 Spurs championship teams. You don't necessarily need to have just one guy to make the shot at the end of the game. So far among all our young pieces, Sengun is looking like the best player. But I'm also not ready to write Jabari off. It's clear he has a lot of talent but it's also clear he's struggling to relax and let the game come to him. When he's able to just flow and play he seems to be a really good shotmaker, and we've seen that not just in nothing-games like Summer League, but also toward the end of last season when finally got past his nerves and got comfortable. I'm not surprised that under a new coach and new system and at the beginning of the season he's allowed his nerves to get him again. Hopefully it won't take 3/4 of the season for him to snap out of it this time.
Sengun could have won the game if only he hits his free throws. Plenty of blame to go around, but SOF finger pointing in mid season form. Shameless.
That’s ridiculous. Sengun played a good not great game and has been attacked more than anyone but Jabari, who missed 2 free throws that would have iced the game and then a wide open, Sengun created 3. It doesn’t take SOFs to point out his terrible game. I don’t see the value in the blame game, period. The fact is that the core of this team is still very young and we will be on a roller coaster again this year. Game 2 was an improvement over game 1. We are already seeing improvement in ball sharing and defense. As somebody else has said it will be a brutal start. It takes time to learn a dramatically different defensive philosophy and migrate from an insolation only offense to one that varies their attack. We are also missing a very valuable bench piece in Tari. Tari may have fouled out, but he would have been great harassing Wemby on double teams. Don’t underestimate the refs contribution to the Spurs win. Wemby is going to get call after call this year. The NBA has a huge interest in him becoming the new face of the league with James fading away.
People can’t play this “Sengun is a superstar” game and then make excuses for him when his play impacts a loss and then make dumb ass threads about random quotes that were not even disproven in this game. Stop with the excuses. You want to see what superstars do? Go check out Luka last night. We win last night if #1 we make FREE THROWS and #2 shoot better than 25% from 3. Regardless we go to OT and what happens? 4:34 Sengun turnover … 3:59 Sengun turnover … 3:40 Sengun offensive foul. Game. Set, Match. Don’t even get me started on his conditioning. “Superstars” should be held to a higher standard right? Yes Jabari played bad. Yes Jalen disappeared in the 2nd half (by design) but if we truly have a “superstar” on this roster we don’t lose last night.
Sengun played a good game and has been anointed Hakeem status by his cult. 6 turnovers & stupid fouls need to be addressed
There are only a couple guys that hold Sengun up as a superstar. Your crusade against them is getting old. Sengun is a good, very young player that has flaws in his game, but is getting better. Leave it at that and ignore the few guys that hold him in the superstar regard. We are a very young team and it may be an excuse, but a valid one. Why don’t you put a list of 19-21 year olds that were/are stars? It will be a very short list. Ime has been coach for one pre-season and 2 games, give the guy a chance.
... And among them there are several Turkish basketball fans, for whom this is an understandable bias. At least they are upfront about it. Same ethnic bias was seen with some of the most avid J.Lin OFs back in the day... What I don't understand is the Jalen Green ass slurpers. What's their deal? Are they ethnic Philippinos? Why don't they say so? Is it social justice warriors who see Jalen as potential transgender and want to protect him? Is it psychosexual closet crush? The JGOF are super wierd...
Alpi needs to fix his free throw shooting. Should have shot 2,000 free throws every freaking day during the summer. This annoys me.
