I'm talking about Stone not giving a F, I'm sure Stone gives a little more of a F. Let's study the Stone angle. I don't think his actions necessarily say what you implyl. If a person was hoarding, they would make those very same statements. Look no further than Danny Ainge who hoarded his assets so long and bargained so hard that at some point he had to be replaced for the team to win the title with the remaining assets that Ainge was not willing to give away unless he's blown away. In real life, the person doing a stupid thing always has a good reason on the surface. "I'm not hoarding and waiting for a trade that makes me personally look good, I'm doing this because I love the players so much!". So how do you fish out the person who actually cares about the young players vs a hoarder if they say the same things? Well, you can only build evidence along the way, note down the actions rather than the words and reach a subjective decision before it gets out of hand. When you're running an organization, you can't wait till things get out of hand to catch such a thing. My evidence with Stone is: (1) we're one of the worst offensive teams among non-playoff teams - except for rebounding. This should sound the alarm for him. People rarely improve from like 28th TS% (at the deadline) to top 10 organically, that's too big a jump to just expect. Having been around for the Harden years, he should be fully aware that he's heading straight into a situation where all his stats are offensively artificially deflated and thus their trade value deflated and their assessments at the end of both seasons will be riddled with noise. (2) It has been discussed a lot that Stone has hoarding habits. He kept holding onto KPJ for reasons no one can explain, we know now he knew what KPJ was like off the court and still chose to dump 3 low salary FRP's instead of just declining KPJ's option. He also held on to Gordon WAY too long and ended up getting way less than what he held out for (a swap). (3) I'm not willing to believe every report, but I am not willing to ignore all the reports either. The team to me has clearly sought to make a trade for a big star. I do 100% believe our insider on the board who has relayed that the front office and the head coach think what we're lacking is a big superstar and without that we're largely going nowhere, just minor development. The logic you're painting doesn't fit here. If he's sitting and watching this he must think the shooting will improve. If Amen and Sengun improve are expected to improve their shooting, then why believe that there's a low chance we have a star? Some considerations: - Why should we be blown away by an offer? That's a totally unreasonable expectation. That's just waiting for another GM to make a trade that is a massive home run for us. Great trades are not always wins on asset management. Sometimes you just need to give up a defender for a shooter of equal value. Why do we need a home run? That's another one of those things that tips me off to there being something else (Stone's ego) involved. - I'm not pro trading the core players. I would leave that as a last resort, unless we're deciding between trading say Cam Whitmore and our best draft pick, then I would have to consider Cam. You're saying he's loathe to give up on his promising young players. That's fine. Then use a mediocre or a good pick. If those are too important, use some role players or bench players and second rounders. If those assets are too important, then trade the least important young core player(s). If all of that is hard, maybe a swap like you waited 2 years to get for Gordon. Not every single thing we own is made of gold and if Stone is thinking that, it will hurt us. He has to be able to negotiate deals and see nuance in his assets and have to make choices. Whatever you believe in more, we are filthy rich in trade talks. You can't tell me there's nothing we should possibly trade when this team is visibly designed to suck at something that is suffocating its offense. There is nothing that stopped them from getting a bench shooter is there? A great bench player is available for multiple 2nd rounders or if it's a starter calibre player you might give up a late 20's FRP that rarely turns into anything. - In the NBA, you will never have definitive proof of these things so let's immediately release that notion. Nico Harrison just traded Doncic for a good-ish FRP and a late career injury prone star. Even in that extreme situation, someone can come out and say "but do you have proof of X, Y and Z" and "you don't know what's going on behind the scenes". Come on, at some point when Cuban and Nowitzki are disgusted, when the entire city of LA erupts in joy at the acquisition, when the player coming back (Davis) misses more games than the player they traded - you have to deduce something, you're not going to get an immediate massive collapse of the idea and a leaked letter from Nico's office saying what his real reasoning was. No we will never have proof of such things. When such things leak, it's just the 1% of stupid professionals. The other 99% you will never ever know as a fact what's behind the walls. What we can do is judge them by actions and results. - Ime's ego man. Not playing shooters because they can't defend, except his boy Holiday. Why? Every champion has these. What is this other than extreme OCD? The cost of an excellent shooter who's a good defender is exorbitant and we probably would not want to fork over that much at the deadline. So can Ime even let us help him? Or would he prefer Jasean Tate over say Duncan Robinson even if we're #2 defensively and #30 in 3pt shooting? If we're being honest, there's a good chance he doesn't play Robinson because he's not a good defender. That's not benefitting the team in any way. We're not living in Ime's dream of winning the defensive championships. We live in a net point differential league. Sometimes you can move up 3 ranking spots offensively and drop down 1 spot defensively. I don't think Ime is willing to do that. He is overly obsessed with defense, very much like a JVG or JBB. That's just his OCD. Nothing to do with good culture. He learned good culture from the Spurs and this is not a part of it. Balance is critical in the Spurs system. Championship winning coaches are mostly balanced, extremist coaches are barely represented in championship coaching. - Back to my original point, I believe it's Udoka moreso than Stone who doesn't believe in these guys offensive potential. We know this from an insider that Udoka believes that, which is scary because offense is his weak point and he is contributing to their offensive suffocation. We know we negotiated to trade Jalen at last season's deadline. All the while his offense is making them less efficient than they need to be, which is either supremely stupid or nefarious - you choose. After this season's deadline, he literally comes out fawning over the other team's superstar openly "it's nice to have a superstar close games for you" - after a game most argued that he made the tactical mistakes that led to us even needing to close a tight game. You can disagree of course because we'll never have proof, but to me this is crystal clear. Udoka pushed at the first deadline probably Stone pushed back. He pushed again at this deadline, seems like Stone pushed him back and the players had made a better case. I think the fact that they didn't acquire a good shooter on a manageable contract at the last 2 deadlines is a sign they're hoarding those picks and at some point Udoka will push Stone over the edge. They have not fulfilled their responsibility to this team in terms of shooting and it's resulted in exhaustion, deflated record and even predictable injury problems. I think it's unwise to not differentiate between "let's see what we have, not give up major assets" and "let's what we have and not invest another dime in it even if what we built makes them look worse". Now it's late. Now we have to make a decision and we've never seen any of our young players outside of the worst spacing in the NBA. We have no idea their true ceiling. This summer I'm ok with including our 1 or 2 of our worst prospects in a big trade and whatever picks necessary. I'm not unrealistic, we can't sit and wait forever. They just missed the boat and now we are going to have to swallow the fact that anyone we trade will look better inside the arc on like 20 other teams. We can't NOT make a trade now, it's impossible to sufficiently improve this bad a spacing with internal improvement.
Only if he is still Cheap Not unlike when I wanted Caruso These guys are GOOD to GREAT Peices but they are not the Star we need Rocket River
Phew, that was a long post dude . I don't have nearly as much to say in reply. I largely agree with you about the direction Stone should be taking, I'm just not convinced yet that he's unwilling to make smart plays and trade assets to get better. I have disagreed with some of his individual moves and mostly been proven wrong (signing Dillon Brooks, trading for the Phoenix picks). So I'm at the point where I have to give him a little credit and show some faith. I was frustrated he didn't do anything substantial at the deadline. But I get it and can give him a pass for now. We've been really good this season and he doesn't want to mess with success in the middle of the best year the Rockets have had since probably 2018-2019. It does make more sense to re-engineer the rotation during the offseason when everyone has time to take a breath and reset, and we have a clearer picture of the best ways to upgrade. I do agree with you that he has held onto some players for too long. I just think his moves largely make sense give where we were at for each moment in time. If he doesn't make some kind of real move to upgrade the shooting in the offseason I may start agreeing with you. That, to me, is the play. Add a high-volume, 39+ percent shooter who can find real minutes in the rotation, either 6th man type of minutes off the bench or as an upgrade to the starting lineup. If he doesn't do that, he should be in the hot seat, and one disappointing season should be it for him. If he does, then I think your premise that he's too much of a hoarder will be proven wrong. We'll see I guess!
I feel like the past couple of weeks the offense is flowing so much better. The three most significant changes I see now is - getting into the offense much quicker. - guys passing out as soon as they draw and advantage rather than holding on to the ball a second longer than necessary - guys shooting without hesitation as soon as that advantage is created and they get that sliver of day light to shoot. Ball is sticking way less.
I'd say the period in January from JSJ's injury to FVV's injury was the best ball movement the Rockets have had in a while. Last few games have mostly been weak opponents while the Rockets offense was beating up good teams in January.
You're going to think I'm making this up but it was about twice that size and when I cut it down I was like "that's nice and succinct" We'll see on Stone, I actually hope I'm wrong. My hope is that they just recognize these guys need shooters before they need stars and any star would require shooters anyway.
Houston can go 5-2 or even 6-1 in the upcoming stretch, if they continue to play the same way as they are doing. Denver is the hardest opponent, Miami is also tough for the Rockets. 4 of the games are on the road though, and Amen is still out unfortunately. I do like the fight in the team though. Let's Go Houston Rockets!
I’m optimistic about the offense we are going to see in the playoffs. I agree with @fchowd0311 on his observations and I do think that for the most part when everybody is healthy, we have turned the corner offensively. if we can just hit shots a little bit more efficiently and continue to be very impactful with the offensive rebounding. I definitely can see us winning a playoff series.
That's kinda crazy. Not only are they by far the most reliant on 23 or under guys, they also have by far the best record out of the top 10.
Most of those other teams play the kids because they want to lose. We play our kids because they are our best players. Only FVV and Brooks (and Adams when he's healthy) are worthy of rotation minutes on a winning team.
https://www.espn.com/nba/insider/st...west-tiers-lakers-nuggets-warriors-battle-okc Houston Rockets Current record: 43-25 Record since Feb. 17 check-in: 9-4 Tier change: ⟷ Fred VanVleet's return from two ankle injuries came at a perfect time for the Rockets, who went 10-9 without him despite facing relatively easy opponents. Houston will be hard-pressed to reach second in the West but is well-positioned for home-court advantage in the first round because the Rockets' remaining schedule is much easier than Memphis' slate, which, according to BPI, is the league's hardest. As we look toward the playoffs, there are reasons for skepticism about Houston's chances. Of the team's typical starters, only VanVleet has playoff experience. The Rockets are also unusually weak for a playoff team in half-court offense. On the first play of a half-court possession, Houston averages just .92 points per play, which is 26th in the league, according to Cleaning the Glass. No other above-.500 team is in the bottom 10 in this category and no bottom-five half-court offense has made the playoffs since 2021-22, when the Toronto Raptors (26th) and New Orleans Pelicans (27th) lost in the first round.
