The point is for morey to collect as many offers as possible. Some offers may not be there in the end, but not every offer will be beat out and in the end morey hopes that one team that's desperate will realize a better chance isn't coming and will pull the trigger on a lopsided deal in our favor. I'm sure morey has a lot more offers now than he did last month...and he'll have more next month that he did this month. Even the other teams who are now getting into the mix and trying to beat our proposals probably won't make a trade until next month. Its the way the nba works, they wait and wait trying to make their deals sweeter, very few deals happens this early.
Pretty much. Before the season people were talking about how the offense would be better to go along with lockdown defense. Wrong! They played over their heads earlier and have to play at such a frantic level every night, its basically impossible to play a game 7 82 nights in the nba. Thats what they have to do to compete on a nightly basis. They have 1 guys that can create a good shot starting, another guy that can hit open shots consistently in the starting 5. Landry has been beasting, but teams are starting to front him, lowry changes tempo but then you have to take your best offensive player off the ball, and chase still has rookie consistent issues.2 zeroes staring and another streaky guy doesn't help either.
They're starting to play like I hoped they would. Come on lottery! To stay on topic, I've always thought point differential over the course of a season was a goofy stat. Whenever you look at a season and the point differential among teams, I see it as kind of being redundant to their win-loss record. Winning teams will be at the top, losing teams at the bottom, and .500 teams in the middle. This kind of makes sense, I guess. Has there been any study done (publically) that tells you point differential determines anything of great value that win-loss records don't show you? The only thing I can think of is it may tell you something such as whether or not a team is involved in blowouts. For example, if they play a game and lose by 20, then win the next 4 by 5, 6, 3, and 6, their point differential is 0, but they're 4-1 during the 5 game stretch. If you look at most offensive or defensive team categories, Houston is middle-of-the-pack or lower. This pretty much is in line with their record or, if anything, shows their record may be better than what they produce. They're still playing over their heads, however, and if Landry gets locked down, the team will really suffer because then they're down to praying Aaron has a great shooting and scoring night in order to stay in the game.
I think point differential has more predictive value, but may be not to a significant degree. Suppose you have team A which has a 10-5 record, but all 10 wins are by 5 points or less, and the 5 losses are double digits. Now you have team B which has an 8-7 record, but all 8 wins are blowouts, and the 7 losses are by 5 points or less. Just based on that information, if you had to predict which team plays better of their next 15 games, who do you pick?
I don't know how to answer your question, but i think teams should win and lose the same way. If you're really good, you will beat down inferior teams and when you lose to a good team, its not by much. The 99 rockets were a fraud and i knew as much because they got blewout alot. Good teams, upper echelon teams don't get blown out alot. This rockets team is just another mediocre team. They're similar to other rocket teams in the past and thats why they had trouble advancin. They had to play at 8 just to win games on a nighly basis, but in the playoffs when a talented team plays to a 9 or 10, they couldn't get there.
I honestly couldn't tell anything off of those numbers. I'd be more curious to see who these blowouts and close games were against (the level of competition). If a team is getting blown out by good teams, but winning against bad teams, that may be expected. If the reverse is happening, I have no idea what's going on other than the team is not very consistent.
Right on, but - - if DM the GM pulls a McGrady deal and/or a Bosh-esque deal out of his hat then maybe next year is this year, too?
It's very dangerous to look at a short stretch of games and make a judgment based on that. The Rockets have lost a few games to teams we would expect them to beat easily....the last 4 or 5 games have not been impressive (aside from Brooks' performance). But 4 or 5 games is a very small sample - far too little to make any kind of conclusion. It could be multiple of factors 1. Scouting as Dada has said - but you'd expect that to be a more gradual trend and with teams that have played us multiple times. Not the Bobcats and Heat. 2. Fatigue from a short rotation 3. Team is in a slump and might shake it off. We're just collectively playing without the same urgency or fire - it happens. No one can be consistently at the same level of intensity across 82 games 4. Other teams are feeling the pressure to make a run or their season is a goner. It's that time of year where players actually try really hard, so our advantage of hard work gets nullified a bit 5. Other teams are inspired by our play and try to match our intensity I can't say which of these is the most critical factor, but I have seen a bit of all of these in the few games I've been able to watch. Still, hard to say - and that's why we have to wait another 10-15 games before we can really see any kind of trend here.
FWIW, the Rockets are 8-6 in games decided by 10 or more points, and 3-3 in games decided by 3 points or under. The blowout wins are against: Utah, OKC, Memphis, Lakers, Minny, Clippers, Cleveland, and Detroit. Half of these have winning records. The blowout losses are against: Dallas (x2), Toronto, Denver, Orlando, and Cleveland. All but one of these have winning records.
waiting we could possibly get more.. doing something now is how some teams get in trouble.. Its only a few games. We get a few says rest, and that should help us out against the bucks...There is still no need to panic, because we all thought this would happen beginning of season
Morey is not going to make any moves soon. Even if he does, I highly doubt he will be able to get back a good offensive talent. But right now, its all on Rick's back to fix this problem. I know Adelmen is a great coach and its up to him whether he want to change up the game plans.
This is a little off topic but I thought it related to the point differential issue. According to 82games.com, right now our starting lineup of Brooks-Battier-Ariza-Scola-Hayes has a +/- of -37, by far the worst out of our 5-man units. http://www.82games.com/0910/0910HOU2.HTM The only team that whose starting lineup has a comparative +/- number as ours is Toronto with -38. By comparison, unlike Houston, most competitive teams' starting lineups are usually the ones that put up the best +/- numbers.
Point differential is about the whole team. What you point out here is a certain lineup within the team. It is no secret that we don't have a good starting 5-man squad because we are a team full of good role players but no elite players. But we do have a very good bench. Some guys on our bench could start for many teams. That does not mean that our starting lineup is worse than our bench players. It just means that our starting lineup is not as good as most other teams' and our bench is better than most other teams. Most teams have a big drop off of talent between the starters and the bench players. The Rockets is unique that we have 8 to 9 guys who are not very far from each other talent-wise.
Man, that's an eye opener of a post. After their strong start in the early part of the season, I put them higher than middling to bottom third in the NBA. I still have high hopes, but I think it's becoming increasingly obvious that several trades need to happen to change the status quo for the better.
I actually made a mistake with that post. That site defines Eff according to the NBA.com EFF metric. I thought they were referring to points scored per possession. The Rockets rank 18th in point differential against playoff-bound teams.
I would like to add one more possibility. I think there's an added psychological stress present that wasn't there at the beginning of the season. I don't know the exact date of the quote but it was roughly around the time of this last "slump" (if you call it that) that DM made the comment that essentially no one on the team was "untouchable". Imagine, you start the year as the underdog but you believe in your team and you start showing the basketball loving world that a good team of second rounders and smart veterans, working as a team, can compete with anyone. You begin to believe that you can do it as a team. That you don't need a superstar to get to the playoffs. Then the GM comes out and says that in the pursuit of a championship no one on the team (yourself included) is safe. In other words you are told (at least it is implied) that a team of hard working, smart, team basketball playing role players isn't good enough and indeed even your boss is ready to trade in pieces of this verifiably exciting brand of underdog basketball for a superstar (or superstar in waiting). It was already hard enough to win but then you are told (in a sense) that there is no Santa Clause. That your TEAM (with no "I") isn't good enough. I hope I'm making sense. I'm a therapist by trade (though I've only been at it for about 3 years) so this is how I tend to think about things when I see a change in the behavior. Also, I love this team and I think DM and RA are generally awesome. My prediction is that once the trade has actually been made, or not made, then the Rockets will get back on track. They'll relax a bit and do what has come so naturally up to a few weeks ago - play increasingly smart high energy basketball. I don't have any doubt we'll make the playoffs and scare the hell out of (or beat) whoever we face.
I think 2 main contributors to our offensive woes are: Teams now make us play half court where we struggle and Trevor hasnt shot 50 % in weeks...I do expect Ariza to play better, but if we keep playing half court ball, we're not making the playoff w/o trades...
