the only rookie i see as a future star is hill... He has all the tools for success. Budinger, really struggles against those who put the ball on the floor. Good thing he can jump and shoot. The future looks bright..Smile, relax...besides budinger is gonna be gone when we make are big move this summer anyways
yeah but battier plays thru a lot of injuries and always puts his body on the line and that adds up to a shorter career. and yes having surgery to remove bone spurs is due to age and years of playing basketball. bone spurs are caused by cartilage degeneration and are formed when the joint is arthritic. removing bone spurs is not a permanent fix. they come back like a callus.
I still think we should play to win. Playoff experience is always a good thing (and much needed). Plus our team is basically set for next year, save for a certain superstar power foward Let them learn how to win.
i agree we should let them play but come on theres 15 games left and the spurs seem to be on the decline considering their schedule so yes i still belive we can make it and pull the upset against the lakers
Playoffs is out of the picture, but still, there is not enough difference between the 11th and 14th pick to start playing Jermaine Taylor and Hilton Armstrong. We have to put all the pieces together so they know how to play off each other and get ready for next year.
Bone spurs are not always due to old age. Sometimes they are due to other stresses or some kind of injury/damage to the bone. Yes, Battier's could be due to playing a lot of minutes consistently since college, maybe even high school, so I guess you could relate that to age since he was literally aging through those years, but the direct cause isn't necessarily aging. Usually for it to be simply aging you'd be talking about someone pretty old in general, not in basketball life. I get while you mean about bone spurs, but my point was this injury was not caused by his age or any wear and tear on his body. It was caused by how he was undercut, a simple accident that would have likely had the same result whether it happened to battier or Hill.
had to work through the game what the hell happened with Jordan Hill getting 12 minutes? that's nonsense
i think we are talking about the same thing just in a different way. joints can be a lot "older" than the age of the person who uses them. his ankle joint has spots in it where the cartilage that cushions the joint is gone. so then those crappy little bone spurs start popping up in the spots where the cartilage is gone. and i love bone spurs! i have them all over! my knee and elbow are very old for my 30 years. and i agree about the knee injury. my response was just a knee jerk reaction
Okay..... Now that the season has officially been called here on ClutchFans.... Doesn't anybody here NOT get that there are usually two mindsets functioning between coaches and general managers at the professional level? The goal for everybody is to win games. "Development" of players at this level has more to do with gaining confidence and experience than improving skills. A GM's priority is to keep the team stocked with enough viable talent to be competitive (with salary caps and injuries and competition figuring into that), and to work with the coach to get the type of talent the coach feels works best with what he intends to implement. The coach's job is to WIN with that talent. Always has been. Part of the reason why the league will re-do its collective bargaining agreement here soon is to put more of a premium on winning games, than overpaying a league of watered-down talent through league expansion and player marketing. No coach worth his salt is inclined to do anything other than win. His job is on the line much more often that any GM or player. He has to get the job done , or he's gone. Not every coach is a Jerry Sloan, and Sloan has won in Utah virtually every season, whether it was John Stockton and Karl Malone or Deron Williams or Carlos Boozer. There won't ever be a "time" where you shelf wins for "development", not when the coach establishes the expectations and the players execute them. That's why all of that gibberish earlier in the season by everybody in management and coaching about needing to develop players and finding minutes for everyone made very little sense, for just some of the same reasons people are trying to latch onto now (making the playoffs, most notably). Players develop as much (if not more) from WINNING than they do from anything else. Coaches know that better than anybody else does. That's why the best coaches don't ever use an explanation like "developing" players to define a season. How much "developing" has Brandon Jennings had in Milwaukee this season under Scott Skiles? Why have the Milwaukee Bucks dared to put themselves smack-dab in the middle of the Eastern Conference playoff field, if they were needing to "develop" players? Jennings hasn't been given the "he's-only-been-a-starting-point-guard-in-the-NBA-for-X-amount-of-games-so-he'll-get-better" line that some of us use with Aaron Brooks. You learn how to win. And the sooner, the better. And you don't learn how to win by giving time to players who don't earn it. The Rockets didn't do that early on the in the season. Rick Adelman wanted no part of "development" in the season (or so he said). Winning was what was important to the Rockets. And nothing's changed. Except that the reality of the situation is that the Rockets are not yet near where it is they wish to be competitively. That was the truth nobody wanted to hear around hear. And nothing was wrong with that truth. Not trying to win (or "player development" or "tanking") will only get you stuck in something that's extremely hard to get out of. The Rockets have a good group of young players. But nobody can say yet if any of those players will be mainstays on this team. Part of the reason why is because of how the season has gone. Had the Rockets kept the torrid pace they'd set in November and December, more than a few of those questions would have been answered. What remains to be seen now is how the team finishes. I hope its in the positive. Meaning, if you have a chance to win, take it. It's too far into this season to think about how high a draft choice you can get..... ....and if you were leaning that way anyway, than you start it in November, not now....
Nice post but not without some falsehoods. With very little exception teams including the Rockets will tank when the season is ending and they mathematically can not make the playoffs. Spurs did it to get Duncan We did it to get Sampson and Hakeem. The whole point of the lottery was to curtail these displays of ugliness and pointless games. And it helped some but in the end did not eliminate. The year we lost out on Brandon Roy we made the most blatant attempt to lose a game to Denver. But Denver wouldn't indulge us. So the pulled Carmelo and Andre Miller and let Camby jack up 3's. It was the most blatant attempt at two teams trying to lose I have ever witnessed and we still won. That cost us Roy. So when no hope of making the playoffs is available and we are near and of the season and a loss can move us up a couple of spots most coaches with a future will opt for the loss to help their team the next year. Of course they may disguise it as developing players and they won't deliberately tell a player to perform badly (accept maybe Karl) but if they are smart they will look to the future. And a couple developmental losses here and there won't effect the team next year and may mean the difference between a Roy and a Gay.
Hello, Old Man Rock. I hear you. I know "tanking" is just as much a part of this game as last-second play-designs, unfortunately. But I've never subscribed to the notion of tanking to get a draft pick. You just don't know what kind of player you're likely to get. You might not get the player you want, and what's left probably wasn't what you wanted in the first place. Most of that is enough of a gamble in the natural course of things. Do it on purpose, and you could just as likely wind up like Rick Pitino did in Boston, who was tanking all the same to get Tim Duncan that season, too. Not enough of a reason for me, unless what you get is a sure thing. And you can't know that until after the guy plays. Especially nowadays, where guys need a couple of seasons to mature because they don't play college ball for more than 9 months. The only saving grace is that you don't bankrupt the franchise by giving someone a ridiculous contract before they prove they're worth it. Your point about our attempt to get Brandon Roy a few seasons ago is just what I mean. Roy was still available, more or less, at the time the Rockets were going to pick, with or without that one game. Better front office decisions might have gotten Roy anyway. The one or two spots in the middle of the first round don't matter all that much to me. The player you're likely to get is essentially the same player, at least talent-wise. The only reason you "tank", to me, Old Man Rock, is to get a franchise-changing player. A player who you would gut the roster for, because the roster's already proven that it can't get the job done. Just because a team is middling or mediocre doesn't mean that they need to try to get worse. They need to get a player that makes things go for everybody else, on both ends of the floor. Brandon Roy is good. Possibly even elite. It's debatable if he's a franchise player, but he's pretty close. And that's rare, because 5 or 6 guys were selected before him. Hindsight is always 20/20, Old Man Rock. So it's a poor way to look at things as they are happening (or happened, as the case may be). That's where the Rockets are right now, in my opinion. Yao is supposed to elevate this team into contention on his own. If he's healthy, of course. It's still too soon for people to start discussion championship-contention, though. Contention isn't winning. The Rockets have to win before we can start talking about a championship. A first-round win is a step in the right direction. Haggling for a mid-first round lottery pick at this stage seems a lot like cutting of your nose to spite your face to me....
I was against it as long as there was a somewhat realistic chance, but that chance is gone, so just play with the rotations a bit and see what everyone else who is not usually in the regular rotation can do.
Hear that Battier might be out for at least 3-4 weeks, pretty much, that means Jermaine and Chase will indeed get minutes to develop. Although our only hope is that, Shane is able to still go to the practices and teach them the proper way to defend. Don't see why so many people are gun ho about playing the younger guys. Our top young talent (Hill) is injured and while Budinger and Taylor are good, without a more experience leader in the locker room, (which would now be Scola or Ariza from the looks of it) these guys are just as likely to develop crap habits as they are good ones.
