It’s called risk/reward. I’d do it in a heartbeat, as he is the ONLY addition (other than a 1 year rental of Durant) that can take us to the Finals. Otherwise just be happy being competitive and a first/second round loser the next four years.
Wait... Do I get it right, that you mean Zion or Durant are the only two players who can take Rockets to the finals? If so, is it because Rockets have no chance getting other players who have the ability to take them to the finals or there are simply no other players who can achieve that?
In what way is he Barkley? By this point in his career, Charles had finished top 6 in MVP 5 times. Zion has never placed. He has also made all nba 1st or 2nd team 5 times, zion has done it 0 times. Zion's rebounding rate is 11.5%, Barkley's was around 18%. Barkley was also a MONSTER efficiency wise. Is the only comparison that they weren't skinny?
Style of play especially when Barkley was young. Zion has that type of game, but he cant stay healthy.
The risk is way too high, there is no indication Zion can stay healthy for a full season plus playoffs. We should maintain flexibility and a longterm approach.
Problem I see with Zion is there would be offers from other teams pushing the price past what should be the Rockets top offer. I think they need to avoid the bidding wars.
...part of Houston being so good of a rebounding team now is that they miss so many shots on the offensive end so there is WAY more opportunity for our players. I appreciate that they work hard there - but personally I would prefer build around a team built to make shots on their end and force misses on the other end. In short there is one ball and ten guys chasing after it so the only way you get "historic" at rebounding is to force a lot of misses AND miss a lot of forced shots.
The Rockets get about 0.5 more offensive rebounds/game because they miss so many shots versus average shooting. They are the best offensive rebounding team by 1.4 OREB/game. The Rockets are historic at offensive rebounding because they have great offensive rebounders. The poor shooting only causes the margin to be greater. On building a team, I build it based on the personnel a team has and can acquire. The Rockets have Amen Thompson and Tari Eason. I'd rather add players that can make shots to them such that the TS% goes up without damaging the huge edge on the offensive glass. I think losing Adams will drop their edge some.
Part of staying healthy is taking care of your body. He doesn't seem to want to do that. Kinda like another overweight talent that just got traded.
Yeah - agree with you there. Focus on people who raise the shooting floor while doing your best not to negatively impact the rebounding advantage we have on most nights. Was doing some light reading on the team stats analytics people find that correlate to playoff success and it seems the good rebounding teams actually have positive correlation to real title contending teams so there IS value in keeping that edge to your team - but on the flip side, scoring efficiency also tends to be a strong correlation to title contending teams so the balance is really about raising our shooting efficiency floor while not doing that at the expense of percentage of rebounds obtained from the whole - not necessarily raw rebounding stats that on consistently poor shooting teams like ours can be overly inflated. In other words, if everyone takes a step up in their shooting accuracy next year and nothing major changes, on the surface our player's individual per game rebounding numbers could be down from this year without us necessarily being a worse rebounding team.
