Forgive me for this - I just got hit by a burst of optimism. In my opinion, the old Jeremy Lin / Parsons team & Kevin Martin / Luis Scola team were fun to watch because there were no expectations. Every win was awesome. The year that we had Artest & Battier & the corpse of Steve Francis, and TMac went down, was a gut check. Then last year, with Harden & Howard & Lawson was a gut check. It's nice to go in to a season where ALL of the focus is on the Warriors and we can just play spoiler. No more Howard-Harden tension, no more floundering coaches. Just a bunch of guys who know their roles and are playing for pride. I have a good feeling about this. We won't win the championship, but I could see a fight for a middle seed and a 2nd round appearance that recovers the team rep before the 2017 off season. Bring it on.
Harden's image is Harden's doing. the players know each other way too well for anyone to be fooled by any "branding" of Harden that the rockets do. Talk to players and they will straight up say "i want to play with that guy" or "i dont want to play with that guy". and generally people dont want to play with harden. not because of "basketball harden" but because of Harden himself.
Just pay Barkley his money and the rest of the media will follow. Houston's never been liked by main media, but this ****-show is worse than 94s SI planning on Knicks winning. It's like Houston is worse than a small market team now, and the media really showed it not voting Harden for all-team, that was absolute bull****.. because I guarantee if he's on LAL or another market he's guaranteed All-Team even with his lackluster defense. He's one of the best SGs in the game and did it solo last year, it's not like Curry is a defensive stopper, just ask Irving. People go out of their way on this, and that joke Shaq award was probably more to do with Howard signing with Shaq's agent... Lol, a guy averaging ~27 7 7 on a good team or a bad team is doing what he needs to, it's not like he was playing against D-League players getting those averages. His advanced metrics and ability to take hits/fouls Curry could only dream of should put him up there. If you remove Harden from the Rockets last year.. They're a lotto team. It'd be similar to when Bron left Cleveland (I'm not saying he's lebron, but he's certainly the Rockets whole team atm). I'm pretty sure Kobe was making all-teams even when the Lakers sucked and he was doing whatever he wanted (not talking about injury years).
Always good to confirm the predictable retreat from those who speak authoritatively out of their asses.
Which is not trying to win, apparently. It's not like the owner didnt throw a tantrum last season and claimed the team wasnt going to be a loser. Or like they skipped tanking and took the harder route bc the owner can't bare to lose. All of a sudden hes cool with being a loser.
btw lets not get it twisted. by "nope" i meant "your question is stupid and nobody in their right mind would ever answer it"
sorry for sharing the perspective of actual players with the bbs. yall always make me regret posting here.
Not winning as in not really putting together a contender. I thibk the Rockets will make the playoffs as 7/8th seed
They didn't really put together a contender bc they struck out with horford and KD. They ended up getting the best of the rest, which is just the natural thing to go for and do....it's not a rebranding gimmick.
