hey man. I’ll just say this again. U conveniently ignore it. I wanted the Rockets to trade Harden somewhere else besides Brooklyn or Philly. I wanted as big of a return as we could get. I didn’t want to take less just to cater to Harden’s two desired destinations. I get that was nieve with the player empowerment movement being what it is, but that’s the context. You keep mischaracterizing. But regardless, I don’t think we’ve drafted great with all of the picks we’ve had. Two top 3 picks may be busts. One is a definite role player. None of the late 1st round picks panned out. I’m happy to acknowledge that Sengun and Tari were very good picks. I get that we disagree about the job Stone has done, and the current state of the team, but don’t make the argument about me. I’m certainly rooting for our young core to maximize their talent. But I don’t think we’ve done very well at the top of the draft, where it’s most important. And after 6 yrs of rebuilding our best player is a 37 yr old mercenary who talks sh#t about his teammates and destroys chemistry.
And 4 of those seasons included trading Harden and tanking for the worst record three years in a row. I bet you and @Nook actually believe that was Stone's idea! It certainly wasn't Tilman who didn't want to tank after just buying the team two years earlier.....(sarcasm btw, it was clearly Tilman who didn't want to tank). It's like you can't follow events as they unfold, you get mixed up in the order of cause and effect. Jalen Green never played alongside Olodipo or John Wall.... we had already moved on.
Having unrealistic expectations is stupid fandom. Being disappointed doesn't give you a pass to not get called out on a forum. For example: the GM doesn't get to decide who to hire or how much to spend on staff. You blame things outside of the GM's abilities on Stone. 'Nuff said.
no he stuck Jalen in the backcourt with KPJ, gave KPJ the car keys, and said “just figure it out”. Great player development with our highest draft pick since Yao.
LOL. Yep.... Stone definitely just said figure it out. It's just amusing how much irrational hate you have for a person.
hate is a pretty strong word. Pretty sure I’ve never said I hate Stone. I certainly dislike him as a GM. I’ve certainly made fun of him. I don’t know him personally. I certainly don’t hate him. It’s just sports fandom. I’m certainly disappointed, and frustrated, but I don’t hate. Let’s end it there.
Esp. if you see more creative GMs at work..... He is not my type of GM for certain......I mean there are more individuals worth hating in politics.
I don't like the rules changes. I think the problem occurred when they expanded the lottery draft pool, making it more tempting for teams in the middle of the pack to tank if a season isn't going their way. See Dallas in 2025. So their solution is to further expand it the lottery, meaning more teams can now be tempted into under-performing for a better pick. If the bottom 4-5 teams were the only ones who had a chance at top 5 pick, you wouldn't see teams deciding to tank mid-season. There would never be more than 4-5 teams tanking - and that's the way it's always been. And it was never a real problem until they expanded the lottery in my opinion. When you have a situation like James Harden demanding a trade here, or Giannis demanding a trade out of Milwaukee, your franchise is totally screwed. And the only thing to look forward to and to keep you interested, as a fan, is the hope that comes with the NBA draft. This strips fans of that. Imagine going through the post-Harden trade years if we knew we couldn't get #1 two years in a row and couldn't get a top 5 pick more than three years in a row and our chances of being in the top 5 were greatly reduced? We had top 5 picks for four years in a row. And look at us. Did it turn us into some power house? No. We're a mid-level playoff team with little hope of escaping the first round. And honestly, look around at this board. I swear to god there is more complaining now than there was when we were tanking, and that's because the hope is gone. We see that this team is now stuck in mediocrity. And we have little hope of a draft pick coming in to save us. It's going to take a young star breaking loose and becoming available for trade to save this team. And the odds of that are somewhat low. It happens. Harden to Houston. Haliburton to Indianapolis. Avidja to Portland. But it doesn't happen often and when it does, it's usually because nobody understands what those guys have the potential to be yet. This strips teams of the only relatively reliable means to build a team. And small market teams, in particular, are going to suffer for it. OKC and San Antonio can't build teams like they field now through free agency because what star, in their right mind, is picking those destinations over LA, Miami, NY, etc? The draft is the only way to build those teams. And I think the NBA will lose fans if you strip those teams of all hope of being relevant. I honestly can't begin to understand the thinking here. I think they're doubling down on their mistake instead of admitting they made a mistake and returning it to the way it was before they expanded the lottery pool.
Good post. I agree. I think they should have never even put in a lottery or at most made it 3 deep or so. Tanking has never really bothered me. It probably bothers Vegas which is why the NBA is so “concerned”. They’ve never given a crap about how the fans feel before, so acting like these rules are because they are concerned about the fans is just more BS. All this is going to do is put more teams in mediocrity hell and their fans with them. The NBA manipulates outcomes akin to pro wrestling or roller derby.
Feels like they are trying to avoid the real issue.... the long schedule. Tanking depends on the draft, there was no outcry of tanking for the 2024 draft when Zaccharie Risacher
I’m responding more to what I’ve understood your Stone criticism to be over time, but I’ll acknowledge I may not have read every post or captured every nuance of your position. A lot of times, when I say my piece on a topic and I am done discussing, I just don't come back to a thread for a few days. Other times, I get into it. I also understand your point on Harden better now: you wanted Houston to broaden the market beyond Brooklyn and Philly and chase the biggest possible return, ideally with a young blue-chip player instead of mainly picks. I don’t think that was an unreasonable preference in theory. My disagreement is more with how realistic that was given Harden’s leverage, the state of player empowerment, and how much a team was actually going to give up for a star trying to force his way to a preferred destination. The Harden trade was a big win for the Rockets, and the Rockets probably would have been horrible without it. It was getting low 30s approval at the time and was a 50/50 versus just the Philly offer before the trade.For something that was not universally considered a slam dunk, this trade is likely more positive in the Rockets' favor than every bust, wasted MLE, being close to the apron, underwater contract, or SRP spent by Stone that was negative. Where I push back is that I think the criticism of Stone often weighs the misses much more heavily than the asset accumulation that made the rebuild possible. Stone has absolutely made mistakes. Some of the top-of-the-draft outcomes are fair to question, and I’m not arguing that every pick or move was good. But with the Wall and Wood trades specifically, I think you often focus on the bad part of those deals — the Wood experience and the Wall non-experience, without also giving enough weight to the picks that came with them. Those picks matter. Yes, two of the picks connected to those deals ended up becoming busts. That criticism is fair. But one of the outcomes of that broader asset chain was Sengun, and that is a major win. Turning Russell Westbrook, arguably one of the worst contracts in the league at the time, and Robert Covington into the draft capital that ultimately helped land Sengun is a huge point in Stone’s favor, even if some of the other picks from the Wood/Wall asset path didn’t work out. When Stone took over, the Rockets were basically Stepien-rule constrained, had very little draft flexibility, and Harden was the only player on the roster who clearly had major first-round-pick trade value in my opinion (i.e., I would not trade a FRP for any of those players to be on the Rockets now). Through that lens, I think it matters that the Rockets now have a real young core, have added more first-round value than they started with, and are in a much better overall asset position than they were when he took the job. That doesn’t mean Stone is above criticism. He isn’t. I agree that the Rockets needed to hit better at the very top of the draft, because that’s where rebuilds are usually made or broken. But I think it’s hard to call the overall job below average when he inherited a team with limited picks, limited young talent, and one disgruntled superstar, and the organization now has Sengun, Amen, Tari, Jabari, Reed, plus more pick equity than it started with. So my issue isn’t that you criticize Stone. Some of the criticism is fair. My issue is when the criticism focuses on the busts and awkward moves without giving enough credit for the asset management wins that created the current young core (i.e., the Rockets clearly won the trades involving Wood and Wall even if Wood and Wall aren't the reason). Sengun alone is a pretty major example of why some of those ugly interim moves still had real value.
It was a problem before they expanded it. Doing nothing would have led to things getting worse as well as teams were more willing to tank for floor (5th -8th picks) and not just ceiling (1st or 2nd pick only). There will still be some tanking, but thing it will be isolated around the playin spots. This rule change will increase the number of games I want to go see in person, as there are generally about 10 teams I will not want to see due to tanking/injuries. I limit myself to games F-Su as dragging at work the next day is just not worth seeing a game in person over on TV. To me, the big con is more about how this affects trading. With flatter odds, ending 9th to about 13th in a conference yields better ping pong balls. and it is harder to tank one's self into keeping a pick with protections. I could see this making trades more difficult.
I don’t see how the lottery has had much of an effect on tanking and I really don’t think tanking does that much damage to the sport. It does make some games in the latter part of the year less competitive, but probably doesn’t change the outcome for the top teams during the season in any huge way. The good teams were probably going to win those games anyway. I also don’t think attendance is much of a difference maker in one season for the owners. Their money is made by television and playoff appearances. Giving up attendance for a playoff bound team or the tanking team doesn’t really affect the owners very much at all. The tanking team may see it as robbing Peter to pay Paul. Bad attendance this year for better attendance next year. Overall, allowing the bad teams to get the best players in the draft promotes a more competitively balanced league which benefits all the fans. It definitely is going to hamper trades, which is a bummer for the fans.
Net effect for 2027: Nets have no three consecutive top-5 picks (only one recent top-5 in 2024, followed by non-top-5 in 2025 and 2026). No #1 back-to-back issue either. Their 2027 pick (or the swap rights Rockets hold) enters the new system completely unrestricted. Nets remain a prime lottery team in 2027 (ongoing rebuild), so this pick has maximum upside under the new flattened odds. interesting means both the suns and nets picks are unrestricted and unprotected
The tension will always be there. You want the bad teams to have a chance to rebuild through the draft. But you don't want teams to be intentionally bad. The only way to stop intentional losing is to (1) clearly define "intentional losing" and (2) punish it. Teams that are organically bad (e.g. losing a franchise player) should not be punished by reducing their odds to get back a franchise player through the draft. Or they can punish players who force their way out of their teams before their contracts expire.
I think that’s a reasonable take. I’ll flag that just because Stone used two crappy picks to get Sengun (one from the Westbrook-Wall trade) doesn’t mean he got a good return on Westbrook. I always thought the Cov trade was a good return. I’ve never raised that as a criticism. The vast majority of rockets fans thought that was a good trade. But the two lotto-protected picks that got us Sengun could have come from anywhere. It doesn’t change the fact that Wall was a negative asset with his contract, and a protected 1st isn’t much of a return for a guy who a year later was traded for two promising young prospects at the time (KCP and Kuzma) and the 22nd pick. But honestly, I don’t think the Wall trade is rises to the level of my bigger criticisms of Stone. So happy to brush that under the rug. Does the Covington trade cancel out the poor decision to cut IHart that yr? Who knows. As for the Harden trade, it turned out to be a good trade for Houston and that’s super important. Totally agree that the org didn’t have better options given that Harden killed our leverage by going public and the player empowerment being what it is. I didn’t like the Olidipo return, couldn’t understand that given his health, but otherwise it was a really good trade for Houston. Stone absolutely deserves credit for getting the return we got. But I can criticize what Stone has done with those picks, converting the 2025 and 2026 picks/swaps into future assets. Yes Tari was a good mid-round pick. The verdict is still out on Reed. But I would not have foregone the chance to take a swing on the franchise changing prospects in those drafts, to have future picks that are much more volatile and less valuable. But I hear you that we should all try to balance criticism with acknowledging the good, to be fair. I just think Stone’s record is very mixed, with overall more poor judgement than good.
curious how this potentially devalued teams we might compete with stockpile of draft assets like the spurs or the thunder ...hawks...ill see if AI can figure it out ha
