If your role players can't make wide open jump shots, your superstars will be suffocated. Leonardo Barbosa vs Rafer Alston Boris Diaw vs Juwon Howard Raja Bell vs Luther Head. I guarantee you 3 people aren't surrounding Steve Nash, Amare or Shawn marion.
^ It goes both ways though. A dominating superstar improves the play of everyone around them. Consider how the presence of Dream in the middle made it easier for the mid-90's Rox perimeter players. You're right though its a team game but I can almost guarentee you that two dominating superstars can still win in this league. They key is they have to dominate.
Dream passed to Sam Cassell and Robert Horry. Yao passes to Rafer Alston and Juwan Howard. The idea the Rockets won their championships with average "roleplayers" is a myth. You make players around you better by giving them wide open looks and easy opportunities. Yao passes to Luther Head and he misses a layup underneath the basket. T-Mac passes to a wide open Rafer Alston and he bricks it. Head and Alston can't complete a 2 on 1 fast break against Derek Fisher. Juwan Howard can't make a wide open 10 foot jumper. If Micheal Jordan passed to John Paxson or Steve Kerr, and they missed, guess what, the Bulls lose. We are 2 good role players away from being a true contender and that has nothing to do with our superstars.
The problem is that our role players are missing wide open jumpers in the series. Just look at the 3s Luther take. The majority of them are wide open and they are not even close. And I won't even touch JH. Can you imagine that the likes of Sam, Horry and Kenny would miss these kind of shots in 94-95? Sure they can, but we would not have won two rings then. In enough of those games, it were the role players who knocked down key shots down the stretch if you remember.
Role players that fit the bill of having actual talent to do more than just one thing: Derek Anderson Bonzi Wells Boki Nachbar Mike James Vassilis Spanoulis (say what you will about his TOs, but you'd have to be dumb as hell not to see that he has more talent than our other bench guards) Kirk Snyder I'd add Rudy Gay, but everyone here loves Battier's intangibles None suited JVG's ideal of limiting their game to only what he wanted to fit his system so we could "win now," so they were labeled as headcases, benched, or shipped the f*ck out. Now we have Tracy, Yao, and a bunch of trash trying to win a playoff series.
Sam, Horry, and Kenny did have games where they shot poorly. When that happened, Sam would drive more, Horry would concentrate on D and rebounding and get out on the break, and Kenny would try to distribute the ball better to the guys that were scoring. Rafer, Lu, and J-Ho don't have the talent to even consider those as options.
No, it is not over IF you have two "REAL" super stars. The Heats are in trouble because they got one super star who is playing with an injury, and another FORMER super star who is only a shadow of his former self. The Rockets only have two star players, not super stars. You cannot labor them super stars when they haven't done anything in the playoff to warrant that label. Super stars are made in playoff, not regular season.
If the 2 stars were Clyde and Hakeem, you can bet they would be competing even with misfiring roleplayers. Hakeem wouldn't let Okur punk him one-on-one. He would Dream Shake, Up-and-Under, and dribble around Okur. Hakeem was the fastest 7 ft center when he was playing. With Yao and McGrady, They will still take it to the Jazz. This series winner still be Houston. It just takes 6-7 games instead of 5.
Let's make something clear: the two superstar thing isn't outmoded, the problem is that we have scrubs around these two. If Yao gets trippled and nobody can make an outside shot, how does that fall on Yao? Just one example.
