[IKO] Amen Thompson to undergo MRI. Left arena in walking boot and crutches.

Vegas is as accurate as it gets when it comes to understanding the collective expectations - no one can predict exactly what will happen, so of course you can cherry pick places they got it wrong, but as a measurement of expectations it is as good as it gets. If it isn't, people bet and the line moves. It is just silly to say otherwise. Regardless, no one - probably even you despite what you say - predicted 47 wins. If you really expected 47, you should have bet a lot of money. I will go out on a limb and say you didn't.

"On pace guy" stats are even more silly than blithely saying Vegas is wrong all of the time. The sequence of the wins doesn't matter.

And most silly of all is to say that if only people didn't get hurt and the team won every game against poor competition (while of course still winning all the games they won against better competition), they would have done better. Every team has injuries and every team loses games they shouldn't and wins games they shouldn't.

They will win 48+ games. They will make the playoffs without a playin series. They just easily beat another young team that most observers had as better than the Rockets when the year started. Even with that, they very well may lose in the first round, as almost every new playoff team does.

I'm sorry if it doesn't meet your expectations, but it is the silliest of all to say that a season like that will be a disappointment.

 

Vegas odds are determined by the bettors. They don’t have a magic crystal ball that can see the future.

I said it would be a failure if they lose in the play-in, not the first round of the playoffs.

 

Great post!

They must qualify for a 7-game playoff series or the season will be a huge disappointment. With Amen's injury, I'm not quite ready to take that for granted. They don't have to win a series, just be competitive and hopefully win a couple of games.

 

Agree that it is possible that someone on the roster turns out to be a high-end star - but right now no one is playing like one, and I think the odds are such that there is a good chance the Rockets next superstar isn't currently on the roster.

I have said that it is possible that Thompson or Green or Sengun turn into a superstar but not with enough confidence to forego looking for a star player.

Until the Rockets do get a superstar, it will be hard to go really deep in the playoffs.

By the time that Shai was the same age as Sengun, Green and Thompson - he was averaging 24/6/5 and shooting over 40% on 3's. It was pretty clear early on that Shai was going to be very good.

By the time Jokic was the same age as Green and Sengun, he was finishing in the top 5 of MVP voting. This was before he had ever even made the playoffs.

By the time Giannis was the same age as Amen Thompson he was 7th in MVP voting and Second Team All NBA. Giannis had never been good in the playoffs before he was Second Team All NBA.


The development of all of these players started early in their career - and it wasn't in the playoffs, it was the regular season and carried over to the playoffs.

Do you see a player on the Rockets at 22-23 years old as good as any of these guys at the same age?

Sam Presti had to trade Harden - because ownership wanted a post player and the Thunder could not afford KD, Westbrook and Harden. Also - Harden was traded as a 22 year old coming off the 6th man of the year award and one of the most efficient seasons in NBA history where he shot 58/39/85 from the floor. Presti knew damn well he was very good. Did he know he would end up being better than Westbrook? No - but he knew he was a player with franchise type potential.

So again, I ask -which player on the Rockets at age 22 is as good as Harden was at 22 years old?

First off - of course it is my opinion and it is on a message board. So I don't know where that is coming from.... anything can happen and I have said as much NUMEROUS times.

What is an objective truth is that not a single player on the Rockets team has been as good at 22-23 years old as any of the players you listed, none - not a single one.

Also - you tend to like to point to the exceptions to the rule, but not the voluminous number of players that prove the opposite.

You are right - anything is possible, next year Aaron Holiday could turn into a 30 point a game scorer..... you don't know.... however, we know the odds of that happening are short and not worth counting on.


I'm not excluding Tatum - he is a top 5-10 player in the league..... by the way, do you know what Tatum was doing at 22 years old? He was averaging 26/7 a game.... and by the age of Jalen Green, he was 6th in the MVP voting.

As for Jokic - by the time he was 22, he was top 4 in the MVP voting and hadn't even made the playoffs before. He was clearly on his way to being a franchise player, if he wasn't already one.[/QUOTE]

 

You absolutely are talking about polar ends of the spectrum.

There have been at most 2 teams without a clear-cut franchise player win an NBA title in the last 45 years. That is about a 4% chance.

Even those two teams - the 4%, they had a total of 5 Hall of Famers on those two teams (Pistons and Spurs)

What is illogical is looking at 4% and saying that is the way to go.

No, having a franchise player being necessary to have a good chance to win a title isn't a myth - the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of that reality. Of course, having a franchise player isn't enough, but you aren't likely to win a lot without one. No one has said just having a franchise player is enough to go deep in the playoffs.

Giving out max contracts to a player isn't a measure of whether a player is a franchise player or not.

Let's keep it simple.

You tell me on March 11, 2025 what player on the Rockets is as good as Jayson Tatum was at 22 years old.

I am using Tatum because he is your example and you seemed to think I was avoiding using him.

Please tell me what player on the Rockets is as good or as promising as Jayson Tatum was at 22 years old when he averaged 26/7/5/1 on 46/40/86 shooting and already was a two time all star with a top 12 MVP voting finish.

So - COULD someone on the Rockets become a superstar? Sure, it is possible - but based on the very examples you provided, it does not appear to be a great chance percentage wise. We can argue over what that percentage is, but the point remains that it isn't a high enough likelihood that it should prevent the Rockets for looking for a star player in the draft of trade.

Further, all of this irrelevant to the larger point - the Rockets team right now lacks a star player and that makes the game a lot harder for them, it limits their upside this year and it means that the most likely outcome is that the Rockets make the playoffs and lose in the first round..... which was my wider point before it was brought down a completely different path.

I get it - you are attached to the players on the Roster, and many of them ARE good, but they still as of March 11, 2025 lack a franchise player and there is no one right now that looks like the overwhelming majority of true franchise players looked at 23 years old.

Also - I hope at this point it goes without saying, but I respect you and your opinion - I just don't agree with it.

 

Always respect from me too.

Here you are defining it post-championships and ignoring context though, that's the whole problem I'm talking about. It's a total myth, you're selectively defining a franchise player to fit your definition. Playoff victories create stars just as much as stars create playoff victories.

I'm not saying we should win without a franchise player, not interested in that. So you're actually stretching what I'm saying and the definition of a franchise player. I'm saying we have franchise players whose stats are artificially deflated because of truly unique and outlier circumstances: 4 years with 25th-30th worst spacing. I'm saying flat out saying our players are offensively better than they look.

If you want to know what spacing does to people, check out the Magic. If you want to see what good it does for teams, check out the 2018 Rockets bringing Kevin Durant and Steph Curry's most talented team in NBA history to its knees only to be bailed out by CP3's hamstring. In case you don't remember, we were in those series because of 3's - against arguably the two best shooters of all time. Think about how impactful spacing must be that Kerr under-using 3's at that time actually allowed us to practically beat them.

What's very odd here and I'd love to hear your answer: you are the one that hammered me about culture when Silas was here. If the only downside of that is that we lose more while it's happening, then who cares about culture? You were talking about how we could have a better culture like the Spurs and it would lead to better development. The fact that you're forgetting is if our culture was as bad as we believe, there has to be a delay in development. And I'm not saying this for a debate - I've been saying it for 2 years. We are on a delayed timeline. I've serially called Jalen the best late bloomer story of all time. I've been consistent on that. The culture must delay out development, mathematically something has to be lost in that lost time and in the need to take months and years to get rid of ingrained bad habits. Tari is the epitome of this issue - because he's been injured a lot during Udoka's tenure, you can see very clearly he has barely improved at anything since a few months into his rookie season.

Here it is very simple: I define basketball always as half offense and half defense. Amen Thompson today is a better basketball player than Tatum at 22. Tatum at 22 was a useless defender on a good defensive team. Amen is an all world defender. Amen is as good at defense as Tatum was at offense at that age. Tatum was not a better defender than Amen is an offensive player. Very very simple one. Tatum has been on a stacked team with an excellent coach from the day he entered the NBA and still has has never finished higher than 4th in MVP voting, never a Finals MVP and he still needed 7 years to win a title. Jaylen Brown was the most important Celtic at the end of the day and he had no MVP votes in the past.

Btw, if you trade Sengun for JJJ, Green joins that tier. If you trade Green for JJJ, Sengun joins that tier. If you put Sengun or Jalen in place of Tatum in his career, you are looking at totally different careers for these two. In trying to make comparisons we can't achieve perfectly similar situations, so you have to address context.

Going for the max to any team in the open market is the most objective measure of a star player, that's why I use it. Not perfect, but a trillion times more objective than me saying everyone I thought is a star is a star. I didn't say just receiving a max makes you a star. It should be clear that most teams would give you the max. A guy who's just getting extended and the team doesn't want to lose for 5-10m doesn't fall in this category. For example, there's no doubt that even in this down season, if the Pacers waived Haliburton, most teams would offer him the max. Very simple measure. The reason I use this measure is to avoid the subjective twists and turns jumping pre and post championship, who are the sidekicks, ignoring whether a player was on a tanking team their first few years or slid into a championship calibre roster, that kind of stuff. Two of these players and 3 excellent role player like the Celtics have - and you have a title. Even if your two guys like Tatum and Brown are questioned for 7 years about whether they've got it, one of them will win Finals MVP and the rest will be history. No one questions Brown's supermax anymore. Worth every penny.

Here's another prediction for you: we're going to win our first round series, whoever is our best player in that series will be considered a star by the media, NBA fans and most of this board. That's a prediction we can verify in a couple of months. Let's find out how on earth I knew that, but promise right now you won't say it's lucky. I'm very clearly stating: it will be in a couple of months if we win just a first round series. That is a more committed prediction than you're willing to make.

Btw I'm not attached to this roster, if they disappoint I'm inviting the axe on the core. I acknowledge there's a chance two negative shooters cannot coexist in the modern NBA. I just see on the positive side an extremely outlier situation that we've not seen before, and when I compare to the handful of teams in the same situation, the outcomes are excellent for us. While I think Amen and Sengun will improve their shooting, they very well could come out shooting poorly again next season. At that point it's over for me, we have to decide between the two. Not saying that because I'm a Green fan, I just think cost-wise and logistically, that's a far bigger clog in the system. Jalen barely needs to improve to be a 37% shooter on like 8+ 3PA next season + above average defense = that's a functional net positive in any system, whether 3rd scorer or 1st scorer doesn't matter. I have serious reservations about how two negative shooters is affecting the entire roster and the coach's options and each other - despite them connecting on some cool plays. As you know I'm also not sold on Udoka anymore. Have major reservations about whether he's our Mark Jackson or our Rudy T.

 

You’re misremembering why we almost won that series against the Warriors. It was our defense ironically that won us games 4 and 5. Our 3 point shooting in that series was atrocious. We scored under 100 points 5 times in those 7 games.

 

Lots of teams have a great defense, that's not expensive to build. Anyone could have brought an awesome defense to the playoffs. They had an elite defense in the playoffs too so that wasn't really what we warped.

MDA and Morey both spoke about this, we took 23% more 3's than the team featuring Steph Curry and Klay Thompson. MDA truly schooled Kerr, daring him to shoot more in an era where it would be crazy to take more than us. Kerr did not oblige and was about to be totally embarassed despite having the far more talented roster.

Ironically, this is the very strategy Kerr used to BBQ Udoka in the Finals. He invited Udoka to take a ton of 3's and despite his team making them at a stunning rate (40% from 3 vs Warriors' 37% or something), Udoka kept pushing his players to take tougher shots for reasons that I still don't understand. Kerr pulled off the MDA strategy here, knowing that his team taking more 3's would result in an insurmountable gap.

 

[/QUOTE]

I don't know if there's any value in us nitpicking at each other's list, especially since an assumption I have annoyingly invalidates a lot of the work you did (appreciate it). I'll have a go in case it's interesting:

- There's no reason to forgo a superstar. We can just wait till we see these guys in decent spacing, the same way Magic will do with Paolo. There's no rush except Udoka's obsession with Mazula honestly.

- We don't need to go deep into the playoffs to know who's a star. You have to go not-deep in the playoffs before you go deep in the playoffs anyway. If we stick with this roster and change absolutely nothing, I'm sure we can achieve a Blazers-like WCF appearance or something. However, the best course of action is to ride that momentum and upgrade assets based on playoff performances. We need elite role players to win a title, like any average champion.

- Re: Shai/Jokic/Tatum - I discussed that in my other post to you. Comparing age won't work if you believe culture affects development. My point is: the Clippers did not know they were trading a future MVP. Same goes for Jokic, etc. Please keep in mind that my position is that we are in a uniquely different situation than normal, thus development will not be on a normal curve. There have been 2,370 opening rosters in NBA history. We tanked and forced losing harder than literally 99.9% of those teams (3 worst ever). Other than Hinkie's sixers I can't think of anyone remotely as r****ded. Show me a roster with no redeemable mentors, a PG who's violently abusive to coaches and romantic partners alike, a GM coming down to practice in order to gaslight people into a losing strategy, and a coach who is universally considered to have been atrocious for development. Tanking teams usually have something redeemable - like a good vet here or there who's given a voice. Or not being good but still holding players accountable for one thing - either defense or bad shots, something or the other being taught. Ours was so brutal, so there must be an effect. My first prediction about this was: we will have a major turnaround under any coach.

To free us from this loop: I really do not believe we're in a situation where we can compare players at the same age. I believe you should apply 1.5-2 years of delay in development. Yes I'm 100% aware that this is the perfect excuse if I were someone who's trying to stretch things to look a certain way. Believe me, I'm fully aware how outliers sit in the context of reality. In fact, I hate excuses and this is really an annoying position to hold. However, I am so willing to bet on this being a very strange situation that ends up better than we expected. I'm not gaming this debate, I genuinely believe there's an amazing arc that will come through going from the worst development situation for 2 years to one of the best developmental coaches for 2 years - factoring in Udoka's own assessment that ingrained bad habits is a months and years thing.

Think about it Nook. We've never been fully healthy with Amen online and Green's 3PT shot not broken and FVV healthy and Brooks' new-found shooting stroke. There is reason for optimism here. We haven't seen this thing for a 20 game stretch yet.

- How it relates to comparisons is: no matter where they finished and even after getting whatever accolades, all those guys were questionable as stars before their playoff victories. Isaiah Thomas the former Celtic also finished 5th in MVP voting once upon a time. That kind of stuff is not definitive. You're ignoring an age 22 all star appearance by Sengun and an All-Defense season from Amen - who is no slouch on offense - which are going to be the catalysts for "we should have known".

- James Harden was averaging 10 shots a game before we acquired him Nook. He was clearly a highly efficient scorer, but if he knew Harden was better than Russ and almost as good as Durant, he never would have traded any of them just for a post player or savings. A semi-dynasty is highly profitable. He just didn't know. Nor do I think Morey knew. We knew he's great but not that great. Nor did most of us think he's an MVP. That's - come on -the quintessential "99% of people didn't know" story.

 

This is a new era in the NBA. History says you rarely can win without a superstar, but the new contract rules have fundamentally changed how teams will have to be built going forward. Old norms may not apply going forward and teams will have to build from within. Phoenix is a good example of what will occur to teams that try to load up on max players.

Because of the new rules, teams like Phoenix will not be able to build a roster around their stars that can successfully compete against teams with 7 or 8 near stars. With the incredible athleticism and the dominance of the 3&D archetype, it becomes more and more difficult for star centric teams to dominate against more well-rounded deep teams. Draft picks will become more and more valuable as teams that want to remain competitive year over year will have to continually take an out with the old and in with the new philosophy analogous to what the Astros have done. The Rockets should continue to build from within and add role players that will give them a good balance between offense and defense.

 

Agree with this. Top heavy star studded teams are on the outs. Between the Celtics, Cavs, and Thunder, how many surefire top 10 players between them? SGA and possibly Tatum? The Cavs don't have any. Their best player is a fringe Top 15 player. I have grown weary of the "need a Top 10 player" trope. For what? What does that mean? I know what it means. Player that can create his own shot and make it against a set defense in the playoffs. Or a two way demon (Giannis). The Celtics have two such guys. Neither is a surefire Top 10 player and for sure don't have a top 5 player. They just won a title because both Brown and Tatum could handle such duties.

The Rockets hopes this year begin with Sengun but end with Jalen. Teams know who's going to be tasked with getting us a bucket at the end of games. Do we have someone else that can? Amen has shown flashes (as his game winner can attest). Jalen is probably second on the team right now but his percentages are too low to be depended on. The reality is that we need someone other than Sengun that can reliably hit shots in the clutch. That's it. I trust our defense with Dillon/Jabari/Amen/Tari to stop any opposing wings and guards. But outside of Sengun, I can't fully trust anyone else to exchange baskets with SGA/JDub or Tatum/Brown. It's why ultimately the Cavs are doomed. Who outside Mitchell can score in the playoffs?

 

Kobe Bryant thought Low Top is great for his feet, he was wrong and had a Achilles injury at 34 years old. He needed Surgery. Out for the Season.

Low Top Shoes exposes Achilles Twist and tear. It is dangerous for Basketball Spin moves, lateral defense etc.

 

Very fair point (please consider too @Nook).

 

Agreed.

I am not advocating just collecting a bunch of various stars at all costs. History has shown that can work but usually doesn't.

My larger point is that you have to have an elite player if you want any high probability of success in the NBA.

The question is whether that player will develop from someone on the roster or will they need to come from somewhere else.

The ideal is to draft one - it just may not have worked out that way for the Rockets, time will tell.

 

Remember, y’all — @Nook said the Nets/Rockets pick trade was really a three for two rather than a four for two because the Suns swap “wasn’t worth very much.” He has an antiquated mentality that the team with “stars” will be de facto better.

 

Again?

Okay - right now the Nets are 5th in the lottery with a 40% chance at a top 4 pick and a 10% chance at Cooper Flagg.

The Suns are sitting 12th in the lottery with a 1% chance at Cooper Flagg.

The Suns also have the Mavericks and Magic breathing down their throat.

The Rockets are also losing their own 2025 pick to the Suns.


I prefer the Nets picks personally.


There is nothing antiquated about my preference for the Nets picks.

 

The vast majority of this board was saying this. I was one of the few in that thread that actually liked the trade and even then I didn’t expect the Suns to implode this year.

 

It was always possible they would struggle because of injuries - but even with imploding right now the Suns are at #12 in lottery position with the Mavericks and Magic behind them with a heavy incentive to lose.. so a lot of it depends on where they end up and what players are available.

 

It hasn’t really even been injuries though, that’s what is surprising. Yeah, KD missed some games but they’ve been losing to bad teams fully healthy. Their team defense and effort is just atrocious.

There’s still a good chance they pass the Mavs. If that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter what the Magic do though. Two of those teams have to make the playoffs from the East so whether it’s the Magic or not doesn’t matter. You’d swap the Magic with the Bulls or Miami and the Suns would still be 12th.

 

Maybe I misunderstood your post but to clarify in my own mind, Vegas does understand the likely outcomes of games better than most - but the betting lines are NOT a direct reflection of that. They are a mix of likely outcomes and public perception that they exploit by shifting the lines to make sure they win more than they lose. In other words, betting lines are a series of favorable financial calculations for casinos (based on how much money is being bet for each side of the line) more so than an attempt to predict the outcome of games. That's why they are able to build HUGE buildings of expensive materials like marble in the dessert like some ancient Egyptian pharoah because they make A LOT of money. The fact you think it's a prediction of outcomes, is the ruse they are trying to get you to believe when you bet.