The goal of this season is build continuity and showcase what we can offer to future free agents. It is inspiring to take an idealist's view and say we should be competing, but no other team has the same fire power as GS and CLE. This team has been competitive (saying much more than last season), so just enjoy the fast pace and watch Harden break records.
Enjoy this year's team much more than last. Severely underachieving like last year is the worst outcome possible for a sports team (sans being moved to another city haha), but I'm a bit skeptical of the overall plan. For the first time we don't seem to have a clear route of how to become a championship team. We don't have high picks, we won't have lot's of cap space, we don't have really valuable trade assets and we tied ourselves to risky long term contracts in Eric Gordon (though I'm really enjoying his game) and especially Ryan Anderson. Hope Morey or one of the young players surprise us!
Bottom line is that our rim protection is god awful. Until that is fixed we're going to be a team that wins a few more games than they lose. Sure it's possible to win 50 games with this roster but in order to really get going we had to have better rim protection. The perimeter guys have done decent enough. It's also hard to judge anything because we've litterly been on the road The Whole season so far not to mention a lot of preseason also with the China trip. Should we be 4-2 right now? Absolute te lakers loss was bad because we were winning the whole time but that's things happen. But I'll take 3-3 new coach and players all our games on the road so far. if we can get through the first 20 games with a 12-8 maybe 13-7 record Thai team will be a top 4 seed. The schedule really gets much easier after that.
OP from what you described your obsession with the Rockets in the past was unhealthy. Now you seem to have grown up and matured so that a sporting event doesn't affect your mood for days on end. But you absolutely are still passionate for this team. Because you are here, you have watched games even though you know we are not going to win a title. Being disgruntled or pessimistic or whining is still being passionate about the team. You don't have to be a Polyanna and just cheer on whatever happens to be a true fan.
Here's what you can do. instead of having an emotional roller-coaster game to game, watch ten games and then make an evaluation on the teams progress. Its way too early in the season to talk about being passionate about a team that has only played six games. I swear some of you microwave generation want everything right now now now. It doesn't work like that, there will be growing pains. We are six games into the season for Mike's sake, the knee jerk is real
We've had literally one home game. There are going to be ups and downs to the season. Don't get swept up with the result of each game.
Hang in there OP. This is a team in transition. Harden is playing some unbelievable ball and if nothing else enjoy that. This team is running real offensive sets and nice out of bounds/out of time out plays. Good stuff. No question the defense and the roster need upgrades. Team morale is good. This is a transition year, trying to make amends for the dumpster fire of last season. So, give it some time. Some progress has been made.
If you haven't loved a team enough to live and die with each game, you're actually missing something. Being at playoff games against the hated Utah Jazz, talking smack (in a nice way) to the Portland broadcast crew when we were putting it on them, beating on the hated LA Lakers with an undermanned team, being a little kid watching Mo Malone and the Twin Towers...those are the best sporting experiences you can have. I really hope you get to feel that intensity and joy sometime. It's really great.
Deuce, I hear you and you've been a fan as long as any of us. I do see the better offensive sets and Harden is better this year. I guess it just bugs me to see the depths to which our defense can sink with some degree of regularity. The effort tonight vs the Wiz in the first half has been good.
For me the biggest eye opener tonight was the defense, so basically what this game tells me is that defense is really more about effort and desire than anything else, we had Ryan ****ing Anderson at center at one point and was still able to get stops and it gives me a lot of hope for the Rockets this season. They can definitely play at a high level, just need to bring it every night. From what I've seen so far the Rockets need 3 players having a good game to get a win, tonight it was Anderson, Harden and Dekker.
I posted these in the game thread. Thought I'd put them here for you too, Rileydog. Nothing like completely stopping two Popovich out-of-bounds plays in the 4th quarter, within a 1 1/2 minutes of each other. We later got two more out-of-bounds play misses by Kawhi, on better looks, but maybe got him overthinking, due to shutting down these two.
Even though we lack defense , we will make it up on the offense . I think singing DMo back will be a good option . Rockets looking good till now , hope we don't swerve from our path from now on .
