This. He is Melo to this team. He caused the problem. Just get all great shooters on the team and then we will win championship. Please Rid rid rid Westbrook and MDA.
Yep this goes down as the worst in Rockets History! It also doesn't smell like a Morey deal. That nerd would have never done this trade! Tilman However would!
I don't even care about the cap hold at this point. Just let him go straight up. Westbrook is more suited to start for the Shanghai Sharks than the Rockets.
unfortunately Russ didn’t keep playing like that. As much current Russ hate as there is... consider he got Covid right before the restart (some have lingering problems) then got a quad injury that took Kawhi a year to return from. i dont think Russ Is a GM great player. I said 4+ yrs ago Harden wouldn’t win a ring here. Etc. So I’m no optimist. Lol. But this was extra bad Russ. I think it’s less about the 3s. It was entirely about his athleticism, ball handling. He had not burst. Forget the missed shots. Just 4 months ago Russ was blowing by people. Even without the ball he wasn’t exactly outrunning folks here. Even if Russ was good though, I think they lose the series. Cause then you just guard straight up and the Lakers others were good and the Rockets others were open and couldn’t score. Even if Russ was good and House was there, it goes 7 and either way. but absolutely the leave Russ open to shoot threes defense was a danger, which is exactly why they went small. But if you make that change and the guy you make that change can’t do his part, which is finish at the rim, it’s all pointless.
Down 3-1 in the series, down 29 points in the game, and talking trash. I need this level of confidence in my life
I will always think the Barkley trade will be competitive for worst. Horry and Sam did so so much for us and had hundreds of miles left on their odometers when we traded for the Chuckster, entertaining though he was.
How ironic that my biggest concern with CP3, was him staying healthy. I thought there was NO WAY he would play a whole season plus the playoffs. Instead the reverse has happened with Westbrook. How quickly some of you folks forget Russ's.play where he took over during the season..cutting out the threes/ turnovers. The guy carried us. Again, he didn't just lose that! He wasn't right after coming back.
I never said he couldn’t take over, and be incredible. He can carry a team. He also can be one of the least efficient and wild players in the nba on any given night. Again my point was that we knew this about him and especially in the playoffs he’s not a player with any track record of reliability. In OKC in the finals vs Miami Spolstras gameplan was to put Lebron on Harden and double him at times to take his playmaking out of the game and had other great defenders on KD. That strategy was to live and die with Westbrook, and the other role players and it worked. I don’t see any reason why with the Harden/Russ team running it back next year that we’ll be in the same predicament in the postseason. Do you really feel that confident that next year with Harden getting doubled again, that Russ alone is trust worthy enough to carry the teams offense for 16 wins in 4 series’? Healthy or not Russ just has never been that great of a star player despite moments of greatness and a whole lot of triple doubles. I still think the trade was a massive mistake. We knew who he was and pushed all our chips on the table for him and him alone. It was a horrible trade at the time and looks even worse now.
Russ can't shoot and turns the ball over too much - he gets by in the regular season because teams coast....in the playoffs they leave him wide open. THEY LEAVE HIM WIDE OPEN!!!! For a reason - if you leave CP3 wide open, that is 3pts......just saying.....and Harden also turns the ball over a lot, you can't have your two best players being turnover prone......it is death. DD
It's just too difficult to build around a star that can't shoot. Westbrook is like a short Giannis and even Giannis' inability to space the floor gets taken advantage of in the playoffs. For as terrible a series as CP3 had against GS last year they at least had to guard him. The Lakers could double team Harden with impunity knowing that Westbrook wouldn't be able to beat them from range, nor score efficiently enough against their interior defense. For all of his talent Russ can't carry a team like his salary commands. It hurts knowing that we traded multiple picks and pick swaps as he's entering his mid-30's. It's going to be difficult to build around him.
Westbrook has always been an subtraction by addition kind of star player in the playoffs. You add him to any team, the team actually gets worse comes playoffs time. Because he is a star player, you cannot bench him. And because he takes up so much of your salary space, you cannot add quality players to improve your roster. Simply put, he is a dead weight you cannot just throw away. Sadly, CP3 was also a dead weight after he signed that huge contract. But at least he's not a liability on the floor, making your team worse by playing. Some people were saying that trading Westbrook extended our window of contention. In reality the only thing it extended was one more year of dead weight. The most sensible thing to do from the basketball POV was just get rid of CP3, buy him out or just waive him. Of course, Tilman would have none of that. He would never pay someone who doesn't work for him.
harden/cp3 would once again be the best backcourt in the league and it isn't close. what a damn shame
I don't see how buying out or waiving CP3 would make sense from a basketball POV. While he is overpaid he is far from dead weight. His issue was getting injured at the worst times, but he just had a completely healthy season while having near career highs in FG% and TS%. It wouldn't have made sense for us to buy him out or waive him as his salary would still have been on our cap for several years. Do you think OKC should buy him out or waive him? What would be the benefit?
I was under the assumption that we had to get rid of him because of chemistry issue with Harden. Waiving him gives you some flexibility to rebuild.
