When the ROckets were fully healthy, which was rare in JVG's tenure, they had the Mavs number. Going back to Francis-Mobley era; the ROckets struggled under Rudy T/Larry Smith to beat the mavs. We got swept by them in Yao's first season. THen in JVG's first year, we beat them for the first time despite committing 31 turnovers. Okay, that was Don Nelson. Moving on. THe first time we played Avery was in the playoffs in 05. We had Bob Sura playing on 1 knee, Ryan Bowen, Scott padgett, and Weatherspoon at powerforward to guard Dirk, an old, undersized David Wesley at the 2, a developing Yao Ming who got no love from officials, and a coming out of retirement Jon Barry. That's ****ty talent if you ask me. THe next year, we had injuries, so obviously we get swept by Dallas. We didn't play a single game with both Yao and TMac healthy. Last year, the one game we were healthy, we blew em out by 30 something points. I was hoping we'd play them in Round 2, but that didn't work out.
Oh you mean the 2nd game of the season when the Mavs started 0-4. I'm not giving Rockets credit for anything in that game. Tell me what happened in the other 3 games.
Two were very tight, one was a blowout. All Dallas wins. Not that they really mean much in the long term.
We didn't have Yao in any of those. And TMac took the 4th quarters off of every single one. I'll give you this. The Mavs were the better team. But if we had Kobe instead of TMac, then we would have easily rolled into the championship last year.
Define "easily" Define "rolled" Define "championship" State the year in MM, YYYY format. That's high grade stuff you are smoking. And this is coming from someone who knows Kobe is better than Tmac.
1. congrats on mark losing weight 2. his dance partner had a smoking hot body 3. don't really care what mark says about the rockets
Coaching matters no doubt, but I generally only consider someone to be "out coached" if they had the superior team and lost. No one outside of Houston thinks we have ever had a superior team to Dallas in the last 3 or 4 years. I'd be disappointed if we don't do better than last year too, but it has more to do with picking up a ton of depth at our weakest positions than who is coaching. Considering how incredibly weak our back ups were last year it is amazing we won as many games as we did. I mean we did have a winning record with a line up of Tmac, Rafer, Hayes, Battier and Deke while Yao was out... Of course those wins were because of the players and any losses were because of the coach
Interesting hypothesis, but would Dirk be able to perform in the clutch (i.e. make critical freethrows) or would he be a no-show when you really need him?
