It's not even worth the nitpicking, just replace him with a person you personally think is a better rim protector than Sengun and who can shoot. That's the only point of using that example.
Sengun was in for 2 of those games. Jalen returned to suckage after the streak against a bunch of tanking and sucky teams and Sengun was still out. The correlation between Sengun being out and Jalen being great is just the flower child of the Jalen cultists. Would Sengun having a 3 pt shot help free up space in the lane, of course. If he doesn’t I expect the Rockets to find other ways to improve their offense. Jalen’s streak also coincided with Amen getting starter minutes which led to a much faster pace and transition game. I am somewhat optimistic that Jalen has turned the corner, but if he truly can’t do it with Sengun on the floor then he just isn’t the answer. I look forward to a future starting lineup of Amen, Jalen, Tari, Bari, and Sengun. With a bench of Sheppard, Cam, Adams, and future additions. If Jalen doesn’t work out then substitute Booker.
Yes we achieved our defensive finish with Jalen Green playing more games than anyone on the roster. So if that lineup of Sengun/Jabari/Brooks/Green/FVV finished top 8 defensively (when Sengun was healthy) and you replace Sengun with Turner who has received DPOY votes in multiple seasons > you're going to improve a lot because of you understand basketball you know the C position has statistically the largest impact on defense.
OKC was one of the best teams with the best home records (Great road win). Cleveland was also solid. We were missing players like they were but won anyway. Tanking teams? Please explain Also teams started doubling Jalen at mid court forcing the ball out of his hands after the streak. How does a player that "sucks" get that type of attention?
We had an eleven game winning streak. Eight of those games were CLEARLY against tanking teams. Look at the games and tell me those aren't against tanking teams. We beat OKC without their MVP caliber player. When we played them with their best player in February they beat us by 13 and by almost 30. The Cleveland win is a good win. The Sac win is a good win. The rest of the games are teams that are fine with losing in that situation.
I'm sorry, but I thought this thread had something to do with the 2024 offseason, not last year's season. Is there a manager I can speak to?
Lol what defensive finish are you talking about? What metrics are you even looking at. Let's break down the months Sengun went down and see how our defense improved. Sure we had a good month in March. Where we finished 6th but once again we played like 10 tanking teams this month maybe that has something to do with our defensive rating going up because we just played against terrible offenses. And Sengun did play the first few games this month. Here is our ranking in April where Sengun didn't play a single game. Look at the Rockets all the way down at 26/30 teams. Hey guess which month the Rockets actually had their best rating? Both in November and December the Rockets had a top 5 defense. Just so happens November and December were the only months Tari Eason played, but guess what Sengun played all those games an anchored a top 5 defense, so this narrative you are trying to throw out is just flat out false. The Rockets absolutely did not get better on defense. In fact as the season went on they got worse. So lets stop acting like replacing Sengun with Myles Turner is going to magically make our defense better, when our defense was already really good. We finished the year with a top 10 defense. Our biggest issue is our offense. we struggle to score the ball and taking our best playmaker out of the game and replacing him with Myles Turner would be an absolute nightmare on offense.
What does it even matter the point is our defense wasn't better. Cuz we had a top 5 defense in November and December. But you can look atthe game logs. 2x San Antonio 2x Utah 2x Portland 2x Washington 1x Chicago makes up 9 of our 14 games that month. Maybe that would impact our defense rating just a bit.
You also have to add once the team found out they were out of the play-in for sure then the intensity of play cooled down. But I wouldn't worry too much. You'll never convince a Jater of anything good about Jalen.
The Rockets hot start on defense last year not only had some fortunate scheduling but some really lucky-bad opponent 3 point shooting - that normalized over the course of the season and the Rockets dropped from 2nd to 10th, iirc. Had nothing to do with Sengun really either way
