When is Morey allowed to suck enough to get the #1 pick in the draft? When will a #2 pick once again refuse to go to Vancouver? Maybe Morey should go the CD route and burden our team with mediocre veterans to full MLE and sign washed up veterans. That way he'll lose the flexibility to field competitive teams and be able suck his way to a superstar.
CD: brought in Steve Francis, Yao Ming and TMAC. got huge revenue for Les. Rockets were the favorite on TV. His biggest mistake was hiring JVG. second mistake was not tank after drafted Yao. Morey: no mistake. genius. saved huge amount $$$for his boss. results: Rockets have no star. Rockets stuck at pick #14. Rockets were a forgotten team anywhere.
If we had CD we would have Amare, Stephen Jackson, and a really, really bad point guard. Also, if Rudy was still coaching with free reign the rest of the roster would be filled-out by CBA players but the team would still get 54 wins.
Thanks for posting that list of transactions - The crowning glory of the Rudy-Carroll era are the superstar-oriented trades, (Francis trade, McGrady trade, Pippen signing, Barkley trade ) Credit to them for pulling it off, but then, as now, lot of the heavy lifting in that situaion is being done by the superstars themselves by virtue of simply being there and being a credible option to form Superfriends groups. The rest of their transactions were completely unremarkable to downright bad. I guess signing Chuck Hayes from obscurity counts as a win, as did gambling that Mutumbo had something left in the tank (it seemed like he didn't...), signing sura, and grabbing Mobley out of the 2nd round. Drafting Kenny Thomas? Pretty lean pickings after that. The rest (and there's a lot...) were either neutral or bad. Stromile, Rafer, Shandon, Bonzi, years of poor drafting....ugly.
You weren't able to digitally erase---is that Matt Baloney?---from that picture? I mean, talk about an easy "point out the dude who doesn't really belong" picture. In all fairness, he did what he could and CD gave him some fair coin to do it.
CD was a great assistant coach, no doubt about it. As a GM he had one glaring problem, he spent too much money for too little talent.
Since everyone likes to make the caveat for Morey, I'll have to throw it out there for CD. I think this was a Les Alexander move. That is, Alexander wanted to cut costs immediately, so they gave away talent in order to minimize the payroll.
It was definitely a luxury tax move, but it was weird, we believed at the time that Rice's expiring was very valuable to lots of jockeying-for-space teams. Not a liability that you had to give away draft picks to get rid of. I'm sure clutch's old article is archived here somewhere on it.
1. Barkley trade happened before CD was GM. Did he have some small influence, but he wasn't the GM. Also, Houston was Barkley's top destination. ( 2. Francis' Agent and Confidante wanted him to go to Houston. It was THEIR top choice destination for the Rockets. A lot easier to get a disgruntled #2 pick when he and his advisors want to come to your team. (http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/selling-steve-francis/) 3. It has been noted numerous times that Houston was T-Mac's first choice in a trading location. During trade negotiations, the only team he told he would sign an extension with after a trade was Houston. So my point is that while CD should get credit for actually making sure certain things happened when the opportunities presented themselves, HE DID NOT CREATE THE OPPORTUNITIES. All these stars wanted to be in Houston to play with Hakeem, Yao, or whatever. Having CD as GM had little do with their reasons for wanting to be here, and any average GM would have made sure not mess up these chances.
All good points. The complementary moves are where the GM has the most control, and we made some awful ones under the Rudy-Carroll tandem.
Those guys wanted to come here because they saw the contracts we were handing out to guys like Matt Maloney and Moochie Norris and knew they'd get every possible penny out of us.
How did that work out for Charles Barkley? Isn't he still complaining about the Rockets owing him $3 million from back in the days?
Im not sure if you remember how bad Glen Rice's knees were at that time. His career was overwith, and the fact that they were able to get multiple picks for him at that point is pretty good. Remember that expiring contracts didnt necessarily start carrying high value on the trade market tilll just a few seasons ago.
