I agree, The Lakers might have a better record and all of these things said above. But, the Lakers defense is nowhere near as good as our team defense. We have better defenders at every single position, even going into the bench. Except for maybe point guard position. Also, the Lakers probably only have two shutdown defenders at best. We have about 4 to 5, Hayes, Artest, Battier, and Mutombo. Also, you have Yao who is very good against one-on-one vs. other big men, like Bynum. And also, decent defenders in Scola, Lowry, and Brooks. We also have more dynamic players on our bench, like Von, Lowry, and Landry. I think Odom is better than anyone on our bench, offensively. But, everyone else on that team is behind the three Rockets I just mentioned. I don't see anyone that bench who I would want the Rockets. The squad has been wildly inconsistent for good part of the season. Again, I will say that Bobcats also swept the Lakers, does that mean they would stand chance against, if given the opportunity in the playoffs?
lol, even a casual jvg comment can bring quite some yao-bashing reactions, on a supposedly die-hard rockets fan site. interesting... and fyi, okur didn't stop yao that year, let alone "one-on-one". it's not a tight double but okur had plenty of help from ak47 etc. and yao coming back from a broken leg still got 25+/10+.
JVG always a good coach and a good person he still love Houston ,especially Yao.He is the frist Yao Fan i still believe in Houston he can do too much with good players like Scola,Ron,he is lack of luck
Good scorers can't be stopped in the NBA so it's not really that great of a compliment. You can only contain them. Pau Pierce, Wade, Bron, Kobe, DWill, Chris Pau, etc
Shane has been able to contain Kobe and frustrate him in the past, but not this year. Maybe because Shane is half a step slower now, or Kobe has figured how to get around it. Ron needs a better chance to get physical on KB. Getting out of the first round would give the Rockets rocket-high confidence in getting over the hurdle after all these years, and could propel the Rockets into the WCF. If the Lakers are in that path, and they are banged up and fatigued, or off their game, they can be had. All it takes is for Gasol or Kobe to have a bad series. We've seen Gasol go south vs. Boston last year, and even Kobe wasn't that great. We have stayed with them for 3 quarters and even led in the games that ended up 0-4. So it's just a matter of playing perfect in 4th quarters that the Rockets have to learn. The pressure is on the Lakers to make it to the Finals. Everyone else in the WC has nothing to lose.
The Lakers don't shut down Yao one on one. No team does. Yes, sometimes players are effective for a game against Yao, but not for an entire series. That includes Okur. However, if your post player can match Yao's point output and control him on the boards you've neutralized him without shutting him down. Bynum and Gasol can do that and that is why Okur is effective against Yao. We match up well against the Lakers defensivly and we would be fine against them if our offense was more effective against their defense. But, its not. They can go to their strength in the fourth, Kobe. No defense is going to consistently over a seven game series shut him down. We have to have someone who can score with Kobe in the fourth to negate his effect. We don't have that. Love him or hate him, T-Mac at 100% would have been that guy. Our most consistent scorer is Yao in the post. With the way the defensive rules are now, if a defensive team wants to shut down a post player they are going to do it no matter who the post player is. We can adjust to it of course, but the result is the Laker's depend on Kobe for their fourth quarter points, while we depend on someone other than Yao. In seven, Kobe is going to be more consistent then whatever we go to. The encouraging part of this years play-offs is that other than the Lakers the Rockes have a good chance of beating all the other contenders. The way the Jazz have been playing lately, Im not even sure we would need to worry about them. But, I would feel much better if we just avoided them all together.
The rox might win 1 game vs la maybe 2. The lakers get enough production to offset yao and the rox have no one to contain pau,odom,or kobe. Its not hate, its just the truth.
agreed if the team had a 100% healthy mcgrady we would stand a real shot at beating the lakers in a 7 game series with or without homecourt IMO. without him the talent gap is too wide if the two teams were to meet in the WCF or in the second round I would be surprised if the series went past 5 games.
if the team were to have tlady, we might make a first round exit again....its time to let him go...i mean if the team do get out of the first round this year. This will finally prove that tlady sucks....reason for our exit of the first round for the previous i think cause of tmac poor 4th quarter performance...4 points quarter and ****...not to say his free throws sucks and his shooting sucks....i rather have high percentage shooter.
Is Shane really a Kobe stopper? All I remember is Kobe sinking those jumper after jumper even though Shane tried so hard to poke Kobe's eyes.
Just check out the head to head matchups. http://www.basketball-reference.com/fc/h2h_finder.cgi?request=1&p1=bryanko01&p2=battish01 I wouldn't call Shane a Kobe stopper but he's effective once in awhile.
We all wanted Jeff out because we lacked the offensive capabilities. The only reason we want him back now is because we now have another DPOY player on our team, so we have 2 defensive player of the year candidates for Jeff, as well as the ageless wonder who is a 4x winner of that honor. Jeff knows how to light a fire in everyone's ass on defense, he even got McGrady to play good defense. Bottomline is, with Jeff here, we are sure to be using Hayes and Mutombo very effciently, and we'll probably be playing one of the best defenses in this league. The downside? There would've been no Brooks, nor Landry, nor Wafer. The question is, lacking 3 potential young players, would our defense be enough? That we can never answer.
It was everybody's fault. But it was a winnable series. We just failed. It hurts me (as a fon) even nowadays. What I liked about JVG is that we knew who we were. We were a defensive team who stopped opponents. We could relay on our defense. Also, we used to blow out garbage teams from the beggining of the game, we can't do it under Adelman. But we also used to lose most of game to great teams, especially Suns, Dallas. Under Rick we don't seem to ba as motivated as we were under JVG and maybe that's why we have lost a lot of easy games. But at least we are able to compete with the best, we beat Celtics without T-Mac, etc. And one more thing, JVG never belived yound players. He would have never allowed Brooks to be our starter. Landry would have never seen as many minutes. And that is a big minus. I'd like to hire him as an assistant coach, though.
Maybe Rockets can beat Lakers 4-3 with T-mac. and there is no chance against the Lakers without Tmac imo
How sweet it would be if Van Gundy stayed as an assistant defensive coach. His eye bags would probably worsen and hair turn to grey of what is left on his head but we would be beast.
Maybe Kobe will also get broken by AK47 in the first round and miss the WCF against rockets as a result.
