all these long thought-out posts fail to mention that we got him for his tunnel dance leadership, which statistically is top 3 in the league
The primary problem with the Silas era isn't just playing all young guys. We had vets like Gordon, Wood, and Theis (before he was traded) playing significant minutes. The problem was the lack of system and coaching accountability, and the vets weren't very good. Morale was extremely low because of the bad culture. Jalen and Sengun can be properly called veteran now as they are entering their 4th season. Even without Brooks, 3 of the starters have at least 3 seasons of experience. And we have a coach that would not be afraid to bench anyone who isn't performing well. And we still have veterans like Jeff Green, Holiday, and Landale off the bench. It won't be as chaotic as 2-3 years ago with or without Brooks.
You do realize that 28 year old Brooks is the epitome of a chaos agent on Offense...... I cringe most of the time when his 3 point shot is not falling, he has a nice driving game to the rack but that is all. And that is not mentioning his Defense requires a lot of fouling and dirty fouls.
He would not get that kind of contract when the contender's 8 or 10 man rotation is set and he would only get paid less in this 2nd apron phase. He got his contract because the Rockets were not set 1 year ago as a contender but a bad team desperately trying to make the Play In. Personally I do not care if he gets 26 or 8 million ......but for the team's sake I would say I prefer the smaller contract.
wben Dillon puts the ball on the floor, I cringe. When Dillon dances I cringe at the over-choreographed nature. Line dancing ain’t cool..
Not a fan of the basketball reference overall player stats. EPM has Bridges as a vastly superior player. EPM is mostly right, IMO, for a player and his role (I'd guess on average a player is better than 90% of the players EPM says a player is better than). It isn't close to as good as baseball's WAR stats. I think the perceived problem in stats like EPM is : -that stats before it sucked hard and these older stats are still easily available. -fans tend to value a player's offense almost exclusively on how they would do with the ball in their hands. -stats like EPM are slow to detect a change in skill. I don't think teams are 100% infallible when it comes to their abilities versus stats. I think some teams are lucky it is really easy to see who the stars are in the NBA and that the stars matter so much in the NBA. Who will be stars is still a little murky. On Jalen Green, he's a person EPM has trouble with. He was not helping the Rockets much versus what most players in his role helped their teams for most of the year. Late Ferbruary through early March, he was debatebly the best player in basketball and he showed a huge increase in his EPM. EPM still doesn't have Green as a great player as it takes more than 15 or so games to accurately measure a player. I'd say EPM is still a good measure of how Green played last year overall (but not on how good he was as a player at the end of the year), but probably isn't very predictive on him as he could be great or suck next year,
To me the issues with these stats is just that the players role and teammates really affect these stats even if analysts are trying their best to suppress this as best they can. So I don't really think people can just use them and that's it. It's not something like rebound% or 3pt% where a good volume can mostly be enough to gauge a player's ability in those regards. And while you're right that NBA teams aren't close to infallible, they are the closest thing we can use to gauge "correctness" other than 20/20 hindsight. In regards to Dillon Brooks, back in his Memphis days was known as a guy who would take a backseat to Morant but thinks he's the man when Morant's not playing. In a way that looks like what happened to him in Houston. Where as long as the youngsters are cooking he's content with getting his 5-10 shots with half of it being open 3s. But when things bog down he thinks he has to take over, and he's clearly not good enough to take over. It's funny a while back I looked at his shot volume by month and it inversely correlated with Jalen Green's play. Basically in the months Green played well, Brooks shot less, and vice versa. So you're never getting the perfect snapshot of who he is as a player.
There's more, especially defensively. Brooks is hounding wings more aggressively than he usually does to discourage people attacking Sengun often. He doesn't have the benefit of funneling players to a rim protector. His and FVV's role is to jam the opponent's favorite plays and discourage the creator from driving. This is going to result in more risks and worse looking defense. Is it realistic to think this team is top 8 defense when healthy with these starters: Sengun (allegedly not a rim protector) Jabari (not an elite defender) Brooks (apparently not a great defender!) Green (negative defender) FVV (a good but tiny defender) Is there any chance in hell the best defender on a top 8 defense is FVV only? None whatsoever. Someone has to get credit for this championship calibre defense.
Some probably won’t want to hear the word luck when it comes to our defensive performance last season but The Rockets were number 1 in the entire league in opponents 3 point shooting. Something that most nba stats analysts will say is very heavily skewed by luck. On top of that Houston’s FT “defense” was second in the nba last year. Another area we might not be so lucky with again. Not saying this is 100% without a doubt the case, but it’s a possibility to consider when thinking about the teams defense. Some regression to the mean in those two categories could make our bottom of the top 10 defense into more a middle of the pack defense.
I believe this about FT defense, but I don't remember this being the case with 3s so looked up the numbers to make sure. I only glanced back 2-3 years and mostly honed on teams that didn't have much major personnel turnover (i.e. not the Rockets) and it's not nearly as erratic as you think. Furthermore, Udoka's 2022 Boston was also 1st in the NBA. https://www.teamrankings.com/nba/stat/opponent-three-point-pct?date=2024-06-18 Even if the Rockets drop off the way the Celtics did the year after Udoka, rising by 1.5%, and their FT defense revert to league average, that is still an average defensive team and it would also be a .500 team, since the Rockets also dramatically underperformed their point differential last year (pythag record of 44 wins).
Fair enough but I don't believe in luck. I think we perhaps have two excellent perimeter defenders and Jabari is great at challenging 3's. Btw I'm pretty sure Udoka's Celtics also got "lucky" with guarding 3PTers. Regression to the mean unlikely, the volume of easily achievable internal defensive improvement is too high. Unprecedented imo. I think the momentum of that internal improvement will propel is into the top 5 defenses next season. Not to mention the additional minutes Adams, Tari and Amen will give us compared to last season.
Shooting variance is always a thing, whatever you wanna call it. Luck/variance is a huge part of sports. You'll see in baseball some team just crush in 1 run games and overperform, people will try to attribute it to x reason or y reason, but of course they regress the season after. The 73 win warriors were the best clutch team ever, added durant, and regressed the following season. Till the samples get massive there's a fair amount of luck/variance in everything
Brooks can go as soon as our young guns show they're ready, but he's at least good as a veteran to show the youngins.
