Gasol would be this teams next Tracy McGrady. I don't want to go back 6 years. Find a better path. Which is why this deal sucks. Losing both Martin, and Scola really hurts the Rockets offensively. They are the workhorses of this team. This reminds be of the Barkley trade except Gasol is nowhere near as good.
Hill is useless, every time he stepped on the court last year I felt a sense of impending doom for the Rockets. Nene, Pau, Patterson and Chuck would be 4 guys. I think you need 4 solid guys in a interior rotation, particularly considering the risk of injury (this is the Houston Rockets we are talking about, so there WILL be injuries). Chuck might not play more than 15-20 mpg absent injury, but I rather have him ready to play 30+ minutes when needed than (shudders) Hill or Thabeet.
Your own personal opinion. Morey's orders from his boss are to make the playoffs. Besides, I think we beat LA with our roster. CP3/Kobe/Artest/???/Bynum vs. Lowry/Lee/Morris/Nene/Gasol. I'd wager we in a 7 game series against them. Besides they wouldn't even have a bench. Odom is gone and Shannon Brown is a Phoenix Sun now. If you were Otis Smith, would you rather accept an offer of an injury prone Bynum and some crappy 2nd rounders or a package of Lopez and 2 1st round picks? With CP3 going to Lakers, no way Dwight goes there unless Otis Smith gets high and swaps him straight up for Bynum. We would have the best froncourt in the league. I'd wager that we would get to the WCF with that squad. Remember, Mavericks will decline. No, Barea, No Butler, No Chandler, they are screwed. Thunder would give us problems but if we could somehow flip our young assets for an Iguodala or maybe a Granger, all bets are off.
The team that ultimately has the final say on Dwight Howard going to LA right now is the Orlando Magic and many have already stated that the Magic would be looking for more than Bynum and accessories. Howard has reportedly announced his intention to move to NJ. So we have two mobile seven footers who you can run multiple pick and roll, give and go, drive and dish plays on offense. And you have a solid defensive cast as well. The advantage of having mobile seven footers is they are not that opposing guards will not find it easy to drive or penetrate against them because of their mobility. And the mobility likewise renders them easily available to supply help defense.
You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't shy away from all star big men because they are owed a lot of money. Very good players get paid in the NBA, and Gasol is a top 20 player. He was a huge factor in the lakers beating the Celtics two years ago in the finals. Yes, he struggled vs Dallas, but the entire lakers team seemed disinterested in that series.
Leading a team? That's all semantics and personal opinion. Comparing Pau Gasol's contract to Joe Johnson's is plain dumb. Johnson is overpaid for his skillset. Gasol is a top 5 big man and is paid like one. 19 million for Pau is reasonable compared to what Chandler got. Look at him, he's getting paid 20 million a year. Dalember was getting paid like 14 million a year. Pau's contract is a bargain compared other big men. Hell, his little brother will get paid more than he will and he's not even the better Gasol.
Gasol/Gasol vs Gasol/Nene which is better? I think the brothers have a better combo of finesse and power. Not to metion the natural chemistry. Anyone know how they did playing together in the olympics?
If you were the Hornets and had to give up Paul, you as the owner would rather have scola and martin or hibbert,lowry,and hill in terms of long term and short term? If i were the hornets, I would take the 3 younger players with upside and the cap flexibility vs the older guys keeping me in the 35 win area without growth. Maybe this is where you and i differ. Yes i have watched Okefor play the last 3 yrs and he's not undersized and he doesn't suck. He's one of the best defensive centers in the league. He's basically a double-double with 2 blks and he hasn't reached his 30th birthday yet. Pair a lackluster defender like scola(david west and carl landry) up with him and it works. In Indy, it would work pretty good especially if they keep granger. They wouldnt win any rings, but they would have a good 3,4,5 combo along with the emerging paul george.
Not true. Mavs were never interested in CP3 as they did not have the cap room to keep him. As I understand it a major issue was what happens to the Hornets. With CP3 as the face of the franchise, they had already sold 10000 season tickets which the NBA considers to be the minimum level for a viable franchise. Now you subtract CP3 and replace him with Scola, Martin and Odum. That was bound to piss off a lot of folks in NO who'd most likely rescind their ticket order. The NBA is desperate to find ownership for the Hornets and this trade would have left them stuck owning a team that nobody would want to buy. That plus the owners wanting to stop players from dictating where they wanted to play - something I call the "Miami Effect" - was why they quashed this trade. Sucks for the Rockets but I never believed that had this gone down, they had a real shot at Nene anyway.
Pau Gasol is just as good as either Martin or Scola offensively. Lee and Nene would hold their own offensively, and the defense would have been drastically improved. Martin is not a workhorse either. He is a very good shooter that plays little defense. Pretty much a poor man's Ray Allen(when he was in his prime).
You got it all wrong, with all due respect sir. Hornets are pissed that this deal DIDN"T happen. Getting Martin, Dragic, Scola and Odom for a guy who's likely to bolt in the offseason was as good as it gets. Certainly the same, if not better, haul than what Denver got for Carmelo.
This reeks of a bad fantasy league where the majority of owners are stupid and think that the trade a brilliant manager made actually benefits the other team too much and vetoes it.
Almost 2500 votes? anyways good to see the GARM back up and running. I lurked most of the day until 7 then I had other plans and couldn't keep up with the action. Here's my .02 if anyone cares. If this trade actually went through then I figured that Morey would of had another plan already intact to do such as sign Nene or offer key money to restricted free agents such as Deandre Jordan or Marc Gasol. I liked the trade at the beginning but I believe that too many pieces were involved for just Pau Gasol. I really do not want to lose Kevin Martin. I think he'll be a key piece to a playoff run and has a great ability to score. Scola, however, is essentially replaced by gasol which I do not have a problem with. I wish that we could thrown in some 09ers with Scola in order for this trade to work. In the end, I believe that eventually the trade will go through. Hopefully Morey has another trick up his sleeve when it happens with the possibility of flipping Gasol for some more pieces to other teams, or using gasol to lure other free agents here. I'm going to wait to see what happens before the season starts before I yell for Morey's head or praise him as a god.
I've stated before I like gasol. Hell, i liked gasol when he was in memphis, but where this team is right now and what they're trying to do, i think its the wrong time. He is better suited being the 2nd option on a team. All the gasol-nene combo would do is keep the team too close to the cap to make any substantial moves and just good enough not to get a franchise guy.Gasol and nene would take up about 32m of a 58m cap and neither are superstars. Gasol isnt in the class of franchise type player and nene sure the hell isn't. Now under the old rules, you could compile a long list of high quality expensive players like dallas did last year, but all indications, thats not the case anymore. I think the only way the rockets will get out of this rut is to play the young guys and get them to develop. If they could find a place for scola, they should do it, but keep everyone else at least this year. If someone knocks you over with an offer, take it.
Nene was just using us for leverage to get the most out of Denver. I don't know why everyone's so devastated about not getting Pau. He's 31, he's not a superstar, and he'd probably just mail it in for us like he did for the Grizz. I'm honestly about as happy that this trade didn't go through as I was the day the lockout ended.
