[BS Report] 03/09/15 - Kevin Love to Houston, Harden MVP

I'm not saying you throw in the towel on the defensive end. You still have Howard to protect the rim. Even if TJones and DMo are better defenders than Love, I wouldn't call them "worlds" better.

 

His defense is not statistically different from Dmo. You would not lose anything on defense if it were a straight swap, however it would be a monumental upgrade offensively.

Kevin Love's Box +/- last year was in the 8s. That's Harden/Curry territory. With Lebron/Irving, he was pushed out to the perimeter and changed his game quite radically. The Cavs simply don't know how to use him properly, while the Rockets do. (Thank you analytics)

Yes. Putting arbitrary criteria such as "can't carry a team" is r****ded. You add talent to your team, whether they can "carry a team" or not. We don't need someone to carry a team, we already have that. We need talent who can take the pressure off Harden and preserve his career.

 

Stop making too much gawd damn sense and start using stats to back your claim

 

i was under the assumption that it was Dwight for Love. If the situation is Love next to Dwight, then I'll glady take love here haha

 

Not just Parsons ... they've also added Tyson Chandler, Devin Harris, Ray Felton, AF Aminu, Rondo.
Not really accurate to give Parsons all the credit for improving 2 places, especially when Tyson is their best defender, and now (with Rondo) Parsons is often the 4th option on offense

Again, crediting only Asik with this improvement is unfair.
Everybody knows the main reason for improvement here is The Brow's ascension into the NBA's most dominant big man in over a decade since Duncan & Shaq were in peak form and winning rings.

Ariza to Parsons has become a dead horse around here, but IMO, this is nearly a wash as Ariza's addition has improved the perimeter D as much as Parson's subtraction has hurt the perimeter O.

Also the loss of Asik and Lin from the bench have been more than offset by the emergence of DMo as a good starter at PF and the additions of TJ, Josh, Brewer and Terry to the bench.

If anything, I would say the Rockets improving to #3 this year is the most impressive improvement of the 3 teams you listed.
The West overall is even better and deeper than last season, and Harden has been carrying the team with Dwight missing over half the games.

Growing from good to great is the final, most-difficult improvement a team can make, and can sometimes take years to accomplish (see: Dirk's Mavs).

Harden's ascension from All-Star to MVP Superstar is the biggest reason we have improved at all.
And it's the only reason this team, IMO, has moved from perennial playoff underachiever to legit Finals contender.

I'll take that improvement, even if it's only from #4 to #3, over a jump from average to good (Mavs) or bad to average (Pels) any day.

 

All of this debate. In the end, Morey is gonna Morey. I'm not going to pretend to know if he thinks Love would be valuable to this team. If he does, he'll try to add him. If he doesn't, he won't.

 

When we realized we're not only going 5 on 8 every night on the court, but having to defend our team from blind hatred, and vitriolic nonsense off of it. There isn't a single other team right now that has to put up with the complete and utter disdain of not only the national media, but other front offices, players, and fans from everywhere. We're not being sensitive. We're being protective.

 

I see Klove and Dwight as two sides of a coin

GREAT OFFENSE / Poor Defense
Poor Offense / GREAT DEFENSE

At this point I think we need the Defense more than the offense
And I think Dwight's Offense is better than KLoves' defense

Rocket River

 

I think the ultimate complement after Zach highlighted the Rockets fans sensitivity was when Bill then said "come on Toronto, come on Portland.... your slacking".

The fact that we are annoying the national media guys (bloggers) means we probably care a hell of alot more now about our team.

The Vilification of the Rockets really has brought the fan-base, the city, and the team itself together more.

If we are now on par with Toronto and Portland fans with our craziness than that's actually a complement.

 

But at the same time its so incredibly funny how hypersensitive these media NBA bloggers are with this crap.

@hoopscritic
@AminEspn
@Hpbasketball
and now
@samAmick

etc. etc. etc.

are so stubborn with their opinions that they thing as gospel truth that they just can't handle EVERYONE agreeing with them 100% of the time.

I tried to engage with that Amin guy once and it was seriously like arguing with a 2 year old. When I caught him in a blatant straw man argument, he resorted to calling out incorrect grammar ..... ON TWITTER.

This is the world we live in now as basketball fans. Give an idiot with a Twitter account ESPN on his title and out comes the god-complex.

Keep fighting the good fight Clutchfans. We are getting somewhere.

 

I don't think most people get this. The Cavs play at an average pace, and almost all of their playmaking is handled by Kyrie, Lebron, and even JR Smith. There just simply aren't enough balls to go around to feed all of them, so Love is the one standing out on the perimeter.

Love fits with the Rockets like a glove. He would get the rebound when Howard (or TJones, Smith, Capela) goes for the block, facilitate our fast break, PnPop with Harden, post up when it's advantageous, play inside-out with Howard, etc. We will rely on him to create offense.

 

even dwight at 70% is still better than k-love at 100…….the key is getting a legit point guard who can help shoulder the offense and get dwight more easy dunks

 

I know it looks like it from the presentation, but I'm not crediting a single player for the needle movement for any team...just showing how the needle has moved since the acquisition, and in simple terms showing the relative movement of all the teams involved.

The fact that you're arguing that moving from 4th to 3rd is a bigger leap than moving from 12th to 9th, though the simple math says otherwise, should tell you how difficult it is for the media to conclude that the needle hasn't moved for the other teams and has drastically moved for Houston.

That said, I do agree with you. Moving from 4th to 3rd is much more difficult to do than moving from lower middle to upper middle. Our record oddly doesn't tell us how well we're playing versus last year, as the eye test tells me this team is much much better than last year's team. I think it's the depth we have now that is compensating for the losses due to injury this year. Because when I watch this team play, for the most part, I really like what I see.

 

Oh, Gawd, that guy. Ever been in his chats? Intolerable, self-righteous jerkoff.

When someone tried to give him some numbers and how Harden has less of a team around him and has to do more than Amin's preferred Curry, Amin brushes it off, "Curry is far and away the MVP and, oh, let me guess, you're from Houston".

Then later answers another question with "I've followed and loved Curry since he was 17, 18 years old"....

I wanted to post, Dude, you finally gave the real answer: you have your mancrush and nothing will sway you.

He's so dismissive and divisive. If you actually think Curry is MVP, fine. But "far and away"?

But remember, these are the jock-sniffers who ranked Kevin Love #8 because he's with media-obsessed Cleveland and dropped Harden to #9 and called him overrated.

 

I would want Kevin Love to form a big 3. I really would. But that is not adding another top 10 player to our already 2 top 10 players.

I agree that Dmo is overrated on this board. I agree that Love would be a monumental upgrade offensively. But you severely overrate Kevin Love's defense. There is a reason the Cavs got Timofey. Does Harden's win shares mean he is a good defensive player?

And that 24 PER really lead the Wolves to a great record! Man, 17-65 ('11) is exquisite.

So what's the difference between him and Harden? Why were the wolves the joke of the league, yet neither the Rockets nor the Warriors were?

How would the Rockets use him differently? What evidence in his career illustrates that he would flourish? Lebron is as good a passer as any. If your argument is that more touches are given to Irving than Dwight, well, ok. Point taken.

But it is not an arbitrary criteria. "carrying a team" illustrates that a person does the little things right to win games. Kevin Love, well, doesn't. For example, Hakeem could guard guards. This is a "Little thing", that is actually a huge thing, but can't and won't ever be expressed in stats. Screen setting, not going for the rebound before the shot is actually taken, etc.

The Cavs didn't get better because Love started turning it around. The Cavs got better because of Timofey coming in and Lebron turning back into Lebron. There is nothing that shows that Kevin Love is a top 10 player. Those players actually, if anything, keep their team from deep in the lottery.

Since when is a 20/10 on 60% shooting bad offense? I just don't get it.

 

Agreed

Bottom line for me with Rockets this yr and going forward is this:
Morey has acquired 1 of the rare 4-5 superstars in the league at any given time who is capable of carrying his team to a championship in Harden

That doesn't mean he WILL do it ... plenty with that kind of talent never got there (Mailman and TMac) ... and several more have yet to do so (Curry, Paul, ADavis)

But the past 30 years makes it obvious that if you DON'T have 1 of those guys, you're chances of winning a ring drop to almost nothing (1 of 30 - congrats 05 Pistons on being the obvious anomaly)

In fact, you can easily handicap the championship this year by the same rule:
GS - Curry
CLE - LBJ
OKC - Durant/Westbrook
SA - Duncan
HOU - Harden
LAC - Paul

If 1 of those 6 teams are not holding Larry O'Brien in June, we will have our second anomaly of the past 30 years ... I'll take those 6 versus THE FIELD though

Sorry ATL, MEM, PORT and others ... not sure Teague, Gasol or LMA will ever become that kind of player

 

to me Mavs is still 8th place
without injuries Spurs and Thunder aren't 7th and 8th seed

 

Case in point -

Hardwood Paroxysm @HPbasketball · 27m 27 minutes ago
ATTENTION HP WRITERS: NEVER WRITE ANYTHING THAT WILL SICK THE PYSCHOTIC LEGION OF ROCKETS FANS ON ME

Hardwood Paroxysm @HPbasketball · 28m 28 minutes ago
Lowe and Simmons mentioned the Rockets as the surprise most defensive fanbase this year on the podcast yesterday. so true.


Look at me. I tweet nonsense about basketball, want to be viewed as a professional "journalist", really just spew opinion pieces all over the internet like I'm basketball-god, and then I get angry when a fan-base sticks up for their team, and disagrees with your un-abashed opinions and straw man arguments.

Woah is me.... and I am now turning off 1/30th of my potential customer base (yes we SHOULD BE viewed as customers if you want to be viewed as a PROFESSIONAL)

 

I can see Atlanta winning the championship, or at least easily getting to the finals. Cavs don't scare me at all. And I think we're only labeling Duncan as a superstar player from an after the fact perspective here.

I wouldn't put 99 Duncan nor last year's Duncan as the same tier as this year's Harden/Westbrook/Davis or even LeBron.

 

"Sensitive fan base" is code word for "fans that given enough of a damn to point out inaccuracies in reporting." Most of national reporting are weak and shallow. Makes sense, as they cover the entire NBA and don't devote their time to just one team. But don't act like like you know as much of each team as their respective hard core fans.

National writers serve a purpose for sure. They help give fans tidbits of other teams that otherwise may go unnoticed. But don't assume those tidbits are both indepth and accurate when they tend to be neither.