Rockets: Mutombo, good fit for the team. Rockets miss Cato's shot blocking, and Mutombo can rebound and block. Guards: Sura and Wards should be able to complement each other well. Sura can rebound well (praise Steve as best rebounding guard), and Wards and Lue can shot 3. Yao: He should keep his weight at sertain level, big men are usually hurt easily. Yao is in Hawaii of China. Chinese team: there are 1.3 billion people, and they must find a good guard. Some stuff about baseball.
He said that Lue and Ward's strength is spot up shooting. He said Sura can create. He implicitly said that Lue and Ward are going to be the point guards since they have the skillset to complement TMac and Yao's games. He mentioned that China has too many people not to find a few decent guards to play on the national basketball team. He went a little bit into the problems of Team USA. He said there needs to be a few go-to guys, but everyone else needs to be roleplayers. There were essentially 10 go-to guys on Team USA which doomed it to failure.
The gloom and doom in JVG's voice wasn't present. It sounds like he is as anxious to start the season to see how his newly assembled team will perform.
He said that we have lots of power forwards that are good and can play. He then said that the rockets are always looking for moves until they can win championships. I'm not sure if he was implying that they are actively looking for power forward trades.
Thanks for the updates, guys! Minutes - my prediction if the roster doesn't change: PG: Ward 20, Lue 20, Sura 8 SG: T-Mac 40, Sura 8 SF: Jimmy Jackson 36, Boki 12 PF: Howard 32, Taylor 16 C: Yao 32, Deke 10, Taylor 6
funny cause the gloom and doom was just about to start at this point last year, complaining about players being out of shape or not doing some voluntary team stuff...what was it exactly?
Barring health issues, looks real accurate to me. What is nice the flexibility. Lue is young can play more 1 minutes if need be (rest Ward more), also Sura can get more minutes at the 2 with Tmac sliding to the 3 for an athletic line-up), and JH or MoT can give O punch in the back-up center position or if we want to save Deke. Honestly the only injuries that would kill us would be Yao or Tmac. JJ would hurt for sure, but Sura and Boki can up their minutes. Everyone else is fairly interchangable, in the short term at least. Padget & Spoon are even servicable at the 3 and 4 spots if injuries happen or if Boki is a disaster in backing up the 3. I like the roster, ready to see how all these pieces work now.
Very nice SJC. Hopefully Yao will get 35 Mins. I'm still waiting to see what Ward & Sura's contracts look like. Hopefully there are team options soon. Still can't believe Ward got 3 years.
Boki didn't get that much playing time in his 2nd year. I don't see playing time for Gaines unless it is garbage time. Of course, it is heavily dependent on their ability to shoot the 3. Shoot the 3 well, and anyone will get time on the court with TMac and Yao. That's why Padgett got resigned even though the power forward position is just jammed up with people.
I'm with some of the guys here in that hopefully Gaines and Boki will have a chance to develop nicely as role players. This would give the Rox a terrific core for many years with a young Yao and McGrady as the anchors.
Dikembo guards Tim Duncan really well. Would like to see our Twin Towers lineup against SA. Yao of Nesty and Dike on Duncan...
