If I'm Amen, I pretty much demand this or tell the team to trade me/do not match RFA offer. Talent needs opportunity and Ime would rather have FVV shooting grenades than having Amen develop a shot. There are a bunch of NBA teams that would salivate at the opportunity to give Amen Thompson the opportunity.
Come on now, the Rockets have given Amen plenty of opportunity to improve / develop. Hell, he was the league leader in minutes played?
Senguns atrocious defense alongside his inability to hit layups is worth significantly less than anything Amen will be asking for. Amen actually shows up
Only happened by force this season that he was given a lot of playmaking duties. FVV went down after they stupidly hard capped us with DFS. Giving him the most minutes is a favor he does for us, not a favor to him. Opportunity is about the 4 guys you put around him and the plays you run. Not about minutes. Whether you believe in his potential or not, it’s clear we’ve asked him to excel while another non-shooter or two are on the floor with him and the paint is crowded as F. Durant, Green, FVV, Whitmore, Sheppard and Sengun couldn’t meet our expectations on drives either. Literally everyone we ever tried under Udoka was either very inefficient or turned it over a lot. That’s a Rockets problem, not an Amen problem. You can’t build an offense that only an elite PG can navigate and then blame it on your developing playmaker. His defender can’t just sag if your 5 can set a pick and pop out for a 3. That’s how you solve it. That’s been obvious for 2 years. If you can’t shoot and the paint is a nightmare, what on earth can you do but transition and midrange? No one will be open except the other non shooter. It’s on the team to make life easier for their players so that we can reap the benefits. It’s weird to me that this concept is so alien here. Make it easier for the players whose future matters most. The least bad solution would have been Sengun taking more 3’s at 31% (equivalent to making 2’s at over 45%). The best solution would have been to stagger him with Sengun, have them both accelerate their 3PA and get a backup 5 who can shoot. If we were having this conversation after Amen and Sengun took 4+ attempts per game on the season for 2 seasons and there was no improvement, I would be agreeing with you right now. Instead we’re sitting here with them taking limited 3’s and having taken inefficient midrange jumpers for 2 years (and they seem to be getting worse at it). Honestly just bad player development from a coach who himself could never figure out his own 3PT shot when he played. There’s no conspiracy, it all makes sense.
I agree with all of this. Let's be clear though, even if we follow this type of gameplan, there's no guarantee Amen or Sengun will figure things out and become top 10 players, or whatever you imagine their ceiling might be. In fact, it's probably more likely that they don't, and that the haters end up being "correct" about them. It's very hard to move up into that level as a player. You're talking about being in roughly the top 2% of the best 500-something basketball players in the world. But there's still a chance they could get to that level, and however slim you might think it is, they're the best two chances we have right now. And we seem very determined to not build a roster and gameplan catered around finding out if one or both of those two guys have "it". It's very frustrating. I don't even care that much about building a "contender" right now, I think it will be very hard to break through the OKC/SAS wall over the next few seasons. I don't mind letting the defense slide. I just want to see what these two players would look like with high-end shooting roleplayers (even if they're bad defensive players) all around them. So that we can know for certain one way or another, which would then inform our decisionmaking moving forward.
I don’t disagree you but I’ll make two minor points: 1) Some skills in basketball are levers. The ability to shoot opens up the ability for easier drives and those two things then open up the ability to kick out for assists. Big jumps happen in a players early 20’s although I wouldn’t call them common. I do think Amen’s psychological attributes lend to more optimistic progression. Sengun I’m not so sure he’s sticking to his training when the coaches are not there. When I’m sure is practicing basketball when no one is watching. 2) Regardless of whether they can reach that top ten status, it’s on us to optimize them if for no other reason than to get the best trade value out of them. Even if these are not the guys for us, it’s a disaster to trade them after we made them look worse than they really are.
Jalen Green was given the green light to be a chuckomatic for 4 seasons. Amen appears to have been specifically told to not shoot at certain times (he didnt take a 3 for months unless it was an end of shot clock situation). Obviously you are in one boat or another with Amen. He is either the chosen one or just a gadget pseudo center that is a free safety on defense. My curiosity lies on what Amen thinks. He has a contract to sign and he's the most important one of the players we've drafted. If he wants an expanded role then how does that get negotiated? Does he even trust this front office and coaching staff? He sees himself as a point guard. Thats what he wants and what he's said. If he doesn't get that, then he should seek it elsewhere if the Rockets dont want to guarantee him that. This coaching staff and management has done a piss poor job of maximizing these players abilities.
The Rockets signed Durant, FVV, and DFS, drafted Reed, while they had JSJ and Tari. It didn't work, but saying the Rockets are determined not to build a roster with one or both is at best being disingenious. The roster was built that if one of Amen and Sengun had a breakout year, there would be vets to support them. The vets got hurt, but even worse was that those two regressed (mostly Sengun).
The lack of a stretch 5 is my biggest issue from a strategic perspective. We didn't have to re-sign Adams and sign Capela and go all in on the "big rebounder" archetype. Having a stretch 5 would allow us to stagger Amen's and Sengun's minutes somewhat and see what each of them look with four shooters around them. The DFS acquisition also turned out to be terrible, but I'll grant that it's not as bad of a strategic blunder without the benefit of hindsight. I still do think though that we could and should have prioritized getting a high-end movement shooting guard in the Luke Kennard archetype over a 3nD forward who has never been an elite 3P shooter, just a pretty good one (and unfortunately wasn't even able to be that). Lastly, there's the KD thing. I was never in favor of trading for him from the beginning because he doesn't fit the timeline and I didn't think he would push us over the top. Yes, he spaces the floor, but again careful study of his tape would show that he also loves to take a lot of midrange shots as opposed to running his defender around and seeking C&S three pointers. I don't think he's a terrible fit with Amen and Sengun, but I also think a lot of us greatly overestimated how good the fit would actually be. A guy like Lauri Markkanen might actually have been better in hindsight; probably not as good of a player as even this late-30s version of KD, but he plays faster and takes more threes. I will agree with you that I can see what the vision was and it's not entirely accurate to say that they didn't care about three point shooting and building around Amen's and Sengun's weaknesses at all, but I still think there's significant room for criticism and I do think they over-prioritized defense and the possession battle in what should have been considered another "phase 2" season, not a "let's be a contender" season.
Always amazed by folks who think Amen would be an all-star if we paired him with a stretch 5. Like there are all these stretch 5s out there available - oh, and they have to defend too. It's like, we tanked for 3 years so now we have to build around the best player we got out of all that, even if that player is 6'7 and can't shoot. It's the sunk cost fallacy. Just wake the f**k up. Nik Vucevic isn't going to fix this for you. Quinten Post is not the answer to any question. Instead of bringing in the corpse of Brook Lopez to make things easier on precious Amen, how about you (i) not pay him until he learns how to shoot like every other wing in the NBA except his brother, or (ii) not pay him at all?
I think the biggest thing here is that the team expected some improvement year over year from Amen. 13%, 27% .... maybe to 30ish% which is almost passable, to the point where defenses have to respect that shot, rather there was regression as a shooter to ~21%. Amen and Alpi have to be able to play together if this rebuild is to be considered successful. The idea of staggering their minutes just isn't a viable one when you are paying Alpi 30something million and Amen is to get that or more in an extension. I agree a stretch 5 and another guard would have been better use of the cap - I wanted both last offseason, was beating the drum for Ty Jerome who went to Memphis for $8m which would have left some room between payroll and the 1A instead of DFS which locked the door cap wise. Hated the Capela signing but understood it was just bringing back extra salary - would have preferred someone at another position, particularly a shooter. I've been asking for a stretch 5 since Dwight Howard was a Rocket - still don't have one .... Had you made all those moves to accommodate Amen / Alpi, the bottom line is that they have to be able to play together or one of them has to go (Maybe both). On the KD trade, it didn't bother me. I don't believe it hurt our timeline at all. What it did was give these young guys a veteran to lean on in the now. The problem was asking KD to be the point guard. That was a failure of coaching and inactivity on the part of Stone. When KD expires or is traded, what will be left is the same thing as otherwise - the bottom line is these young guys have to improve significantly to compete with OKC and SA. Durant opens the window but doesn't shut it - unless they don't improve. The thing here is that the roster was built to contend this season - then they lost a player at the one position they didn't have a contingency plan at in FVV. Rather than throwing assets at it, they punted and turned it into a phase 2 season. The worst move they made was not having a contingency plan for Fred - ether thru the Durant trade or the MLE signing. Either way, you bring in a competent point guard and I think the season is more successful than the disaster we saw. KD isn't playing point guard and we're not b!!tching about him.
"Eligible to sign: July 6 Extension deadline: Last day of the offseason Kevin Durant's sub-max extension last offseason has given Houston the flexibility to re-sign Tari Eason and sign Thompson to a lucrative extension. "I fully expect they will be with us for the foreseeable future," GM Rafael Stone said, referring to both players. After earning All-Defensive first-team honors in 2025, Thompson averaged career highs in minutes, points, assists and rebounds, and he trailed only the 76ers' Tyrese Maxey in minutes played this season. In Thompson's final 22 games of the regular season, he averaged 20.8 points, 8.2 rebounds and 5.5 assists per game. (For the season, 70% of his points were scored in the paint.) Defensively, opponents shot 42.8% when Thompson was the closest defender, per GeniusIQ. That ranked 15th among 188 players who defended at least 500 attempts in the regular season. The next contract: Thompson's defensive prowess and upside should have him at or close to a five-year, $251 million extension. In a max extension, Houston will need to be careful of negotiating 30% language if Thompson is named Defensive Player of the Year next season. For example, with his selection as DPOY a year ago, Evan Mobley's extension increased from $224 to $269 million." If Amen somehow gets a DPOY over Wemby then he deserves the increase.
Depends on what's considered near the max... Sengun's deal is fairly close. Anything too much over that is a concerning level of risk, anything under that is team-friendly IMO.
We need closer to 30 per than 40 per (happy with 35 at the absolute max if you put a gun at my head) but you know Stone's weak ass gonna pay him to appease Ime.
If he does get near the max, I would package Amen, Tari, DFS, and a PHX and BKN First Round Pick for Jaylen Brown. Rockets wouldn’t have to give up a lot of Assets and we can still keep Sengun, Jabari, KD and Reed and retool by getting more shooters Celtics: Giannis Bucks: Amen, Tari, DFS, PHX 2027 First, BKN 2027 First Rockets: Jaylen Brown
