DM the GM is a keeper. If (such a big fulla crappo word that is) we wuzz in the East DM the GM and coaching staff and players would be lauded. 6th seed? Possibly higher with reversed schedule, and expectations. Instead the moral victories go to pacers for giving Bulls a couple of games. Yes, Les - - we understand: 'they' are ALL assets. Next season? Yao (the proud/with a cloud) will be back and that will help some. An FA will come and that will help some. If (when!) an 'amnesty' manifests itself that will help a lot. With all that, and all those, Rox need a young TMac walks thru the door. He just doesn't exist (alas; sigh).
I expected more of a logical approach from you DD. The guy has been working off someone else's game plan, with someone else's players and has been toiling away trying to overcome critical injuries. Now that we are in the process of starting over and rebuilding a bunch of fans with overly high expectations feel wronged. Their feelings and hostility have no merit. They are blaming the wrong person/people. If you ask me, this isn't Morey's last chance, it's really his first real chance. He finally gets to play with real money and make real decisions and not try and maintain someone else's pet project. Don't get me wrong, I don't like the whole "asset" approach, but at least I'll be fair and give him the credit and respect he's owed. This whole issue of "no-confidence" BS comes from fans who are irrational and borderline idiotic. Useless thread is useless.
Luckily, most of us are not blind followers of Morey. He is definitely showing signs of incompetent...but he speaks with a great tongue, and like all great talkers can hide their mistakes with great sale pitches. He has made all these changes to the roster, and all of a sudden, say he don't like the team's direction. What? He didn't like the trades he has been making? Like most failed GMs, he doesn't have the skills to get the key players to build a contending team, so he is going to tank believing he has a better chance of landing the no. 1 than other Clippers' like teams.
Don't ask why. They didn't make the playoffs and fired their coach. That's all most people need to be negative enough to fire the entire organization. Ridiculous. It's a poll asking people, who don't know as much as those making decisions, to make decisions about said persons competency. Good social experiment, maybe, but not sure it's any indicator of the job Morey is doing or will/would do if he stays.
Morey gets an "incomplete." Until the team becomes a contender it is all sound and fury signifying nothing. Not sold on MoneyBall, he will have to prove it works. All I see now is that it saves money. If Morey lands Dwight Howard then he will be the greatest GM ever because with this supporting cast the Rockets will be scary.
I just don't understand why you loud mouths always believe you know basketball better than most fans because you spend most of your day on these boards. Fact: GM picks the players...coach works with the players GM picked. Consensus (local and national): Adelman did a great job with his limited talents Now, Morey is saying he doesn't like the team's direction. WT....???
I think your 2 cents are well placed, Leeb. Adelman did an incredible job, given the circumstances, and free agents are going to look at two things, putting aside the money and the relatively new "media market/superstar buddy" melodrama that's popped up lately... that's the coach and who's on the roster. Morey is pretty far down the list, probably somewhere behind the weather in the city they might sign with. Fair? Maybe, maybe no, but that's my opinion about what you brought up. You are exactly right, DD, and I bet Morey knows it. This is a new situation for Dork Elvis to deal with, with the crosshairs now squarely on his back, far more than before, and the biggest decision a GM makes confronting him, hiring a new coach. I suspect that he may have preferred keeping RA. He worked hard enough to aquire players that fit his system, moves that led to that system clicking like a thing of beauty at last, with just a couple of obvious holes remaining to be filled to balance the defensive side, but Alexander was ready for a change, logic be damned. The Rockets are his hobby, he owns them, and he can do whatever he wants with them, given the limitations placed by the league's front office, such as they are, and the whims of Stern. Yeah, Morey is an asset and he damned well knows it. That hot seat's temperature is warm and rising fast. I wish him luck keeping his arse intact, because success and failure are now right on his plate, and Les is juggling the china.
Morey Ball doesnt work, cant remeber the A's winning the Word Series the last 10 years or even being in the playoffs. Not getting along with RA and forcing to showcase assets, I'm surprised the Rockets even got 43 wins. Money ball this, is there any potential coaches out there that are even gonna get the Rockets to a .588 winning pecentage?
Agreed. Basically, Adelman cleaned up Yao/TMac injuries mess, got the team going in the right direction, and was blamed for failed trades (TWon't and Thabust).
Geez dude, you keep saying the same crap over and over that is just completely FALSE. Morey DOES like the direction the team is going, but it is NOT a finished product. A championship is NOT built in one year. It's not usually built in 2 years, either. It takes time. It's a process. Morey plans to CONTINUE building the team he's been building for a while. He is NOT trying to go in a completely different direction, he is just saying that the process is not complete yet and he still has MORE moves to make before the team is ready to contend. Many of the moves he has made in the last two years were NOT expected to be part of the final solution, they were made to improve our assets to better position ourselves down the line. Just because he brings a guy in and then ships him out, it doesn't mean he didn't like the initial move. For instance, let's go back to the 2008 draft. We started out with the 25th pick. Through a series of trades we turned that pick into Donte Greene and an extra 2nd round pick. About a month later, we turned Green and junk fillers into Ron Artest. Does this mean Morey felt like taking Greene was a mistake? No! He had a chance to upgrade and Artest was a better fit for the direction of the team at the time, so he made the deal. A year later, the trade for Artest had been a success as we finally got past the first round of the playoffs, but with Yao's injury we needed to go in a younger direction and spent the money we could have spent on Artest on Trevor Ariza instead. Is this change an admission by Morey that trading for Artest was a mistake? No! It was just a change that made more sense for the team at the time. So in two years Morey turned the 25th pick in the draft into a good role player from a championship team. A year later, Morey is given the opportunity to flip Ariza for Courtney Lee, a player who is better and cheaper, so he makes the move. Is Morey saying getting Ariza was a mistake? No! He had a chance to upgrade and he took it. So in 3 years, Morey took the 25th pick in the draft and turned it into the 22nd pick from the same draft. Now that's alotta moves for a minor upgrade, but it's still an upgrade nonetheless, and that is NOT a bad thing. You can't look at a single trade by Morey and expect that that moves represents his final product. He's not changing directions, he's just continuing a process of upgrading the talent. Who knows if Courtney Lee is the final link of that process of trades? Morey's just going to keep making moves that make us better, not giving up on the direction he's been going, like you repeatedly say. And once again, MOREY DOES NOT PLAN ON TANKING. TANKING IS NOT MOREY'S PLAN TO REBUILD. THE ROCKETS WILL NOT TANK TO GET THE #1 PICK. Morey's stated plan is to improve the team through TRADES, and selling off our talent to get better through the draft is NOT what he wants to do.
You've typed at the end of pretty much every single one of your posts that Morey said he doesn't like the team's direction. Can you point me to a quote from him that either explicitly states this or atleast implies it, please? All I have heard from him is that he IS happy with the direction the team is going. He has admitted that he and Adelman had philisophical differences about the direction of the team, but at no point have I seen Morey say he doesn't like the direction he is taking the team.
Friend, I seen and heard all kinds of sales pitches...and Morey is very good with we're building a championship team talk. I mean, honestly, which GM is stupid enough not to say those same ol' promises year after year. Actions speak louder than words. Morey is going to get a coach who is going to play TWon't and Thabust. Most of us are not naive enough to believe that's building a championship team.
Wow !! were becoming Knicks fans !! Morey came here to a team with bad contract all around he needs more time to fix this and he will
An extremely high percentage of his moves have been good to great moves including both trades and drafts. These facts are not disputable.
Alright, well atleast we've gotten down to it that you think Morey is a lying idiot and I think he's an intelligent guy with a real plan. Neither of us know what moves he will actually end up making, but I will readilly admit that I think Morey is a very, very good talent evaluator. His number crunching and talent evaluating brought us Lowry, Scola, Lee, Dragic, and PatPat. If his number crunching and talent evaluation tells him that Terrence and Thabeet can be valuable contributors like the others mentioned, then yeah Id like to see them given a shot. And I honestly don't believe that sending the same group that we had last year out there with Rick Adelman again next year and the year after that will build us into a championship team either. We're more than just a defensive center away from contending, PLUS that defensive center is going to be real hard to obtain. And from the sounds of things, Adelman wasn't willing to coach this team if Morey kept tinkering with the roster and taking away his experienced players, so if we kept Adelman we'd be forced to send out pretty much the same team again. And that won't get us to a championship, so a different direction on the coaching staff was the only way to go.
The honeymoon/grace period is over. But "One more" shot? When did his first shot begin...? The Ming/McGrady era basically turned the last 4 years into a mulligan.
Like I said. Morey deserves at least one full season before we can evaluate his moves. The Yao and McGrady era is finally over, their caps are off the books. Morey has a chance to make moves without an anchor holding him back. The least we could do is at least wait until the new coach is announced.
GM is not a PR guy, nor marketing people. First and foremost, a GM has to be realistic. He has to know the market and know his position ON THE MARKET, not perceived one in fans' minds. Talking about best city or best fan base to pump up moral is fine, but you can't rely on that in negotiation. We are NOT LA or New York, it does not mean that one should not be proud of his own city or club. But we have to realize that Market Value is ALWAYS Fair Value. All things equal, you have to "overpay" to attract the same player over those big market teams. That's the reality, and that is the FAIR VALUE for us. It's been years since our hopes were set high that we were fully capable of landing one or two big stars in off-seasons, and we ended up with average or above average players in and out wash trades. If you don't want to "overpay" for quality players, we are most likely not going to get them in the open market. I would not fire DM before I find a better candidate, but something is gonna change. Otherwise, we will be doing the same thing again and again, year after year.
I hope this new CBA makes it fairer for all small market teams to build franchises from the ground up. Because right now I feel like Morey did his job last year and had all the assets in place to make a move for a superstar. It's just that the climate of the league changed, superstars decided to go wherever the hell they wanted to go, and we took the brunt of the punishment for it. If the NBA wants to survive it's going to have to return to some level of parity. Let's give Morey a chance to exploit this before calling him a failure instead of blaming the system which failed all of us. The new CBA hopefully will: 1. Put a harder cap on teams, especially playoff teams that have blanket freedom to re-sign all their players for tons of money without recourse. 2. Make teams that give out bad contracts actually suffer the consequences for them rather than just writing off the check. 3. Have mechanisms in place for teams to keep their stars, so long as their fiscal decisions have not handcuffed them in other ways. If all that happens, all of a sudden Morey gets that much better because he does happen to be a guy who doesn't give out bad contracts and is a very strong negotiator. And lastly, don't try to rationalize DD's anti-Morey sentiments. He was all over Morey's jock last year, and now he's bitter because Brooks didn't pan out and we were right not to extend him.
Who plan was he working off of when Yao limped off the floor 2 yrs ago. That was his chance to rebuild, but he chose not to. Remember him talking about reloading vs rebuilding? If you think about it, yao was going to miss and entire season, Shane was known as the Kobe stopper. To me,the decision to rebuild should have been right then, right now. Trade shane that summer and I guarantee they couldve gotten more than what they did. The following year as the league started see the decline, they couldnt give him away,nor scola,which they tried to do. They shouldve traded scola vs landry last year, but none of the younger teams didnt like his age despite his production. I could go on and on, but I won't, but let me say this, how many good teams have made multiple player,in season trades? Thats what really got adelman pissed. Its one thing to make that trade in the offseason because now the coach has the summer to work thos guys in,but mid season? Tracy and landry out one season, martin,jeffries,armstrong in one year. The next year brooks and battier out, thabeet,carroll,williams in. These are all in season moves. I can also say this, I can see what morey is looking for. He's looking for the next jermaine o'neal. He's trying to find that undeveloped guy on the bench and he turns out to be a 1st team all nba or all star. I get that and I don't have a problem with that. I just think thats something you do in the offseason. Its his plan and whatever it is, he will have to stick with it or get fired behind it. Pritchard was on cloud nine, then he was canned. It happens and it happens quickly.
