The sad part of the matter is, the arena has been half-empty for most of the a season despite the fact that the team was in contention to make the playoffs which sort of leads into the idea that if people this team can contend, then they aren't going to shell out the money to see them play. In all honesty, if your goal as a franchise shouldn't be just to make the playoffs, just to keep people content. Your goal as a franchise should be to championships and if you aren't winning any championships, you've got to at least get the business side right. The Rockets are still many years away from contention and people aren't paying to see them play. The only way the Rockets are going to get better is by improving though the draft (by means of the lottery) and hopefully that will put us on a faster track to success instead of swimming around in mediocrity for who knows how many more years, while putting more than just a pretty penny in Les Alexander's pocket.
The sad part of the matter is, the arena has been half-empty for most of the a season despite the fact that the team was in contention to make the playoffs which sort of leads into the idea that if people this team can contend, then they aren't going to shell out the money to see them play. In all honesty, if your goal as a franchise shouldn't be just to make the playoffs, just to keep people content. Your goal as a franchise should be to championships and if you aren't winning any championships, you've got to at least get the business side right. The Rockets are still many years away from contention and people aren't paying to see them play. The only way the Rockets are going to get better is by improving though the draft (by means of the lottery) and hopefully that will put us on a faster track to success instead of swimming around in mediocrity for who knows how many more years, while putting more than just a pretty penny in Les Alexander's pocket. Edit: CAN'T contend (second line)
If the Rockets had sucked the whole year, I wouldn't really care. But when they are actually winning and getting me all hyped up then go on a slump, thats an ultimate heart breaker.
Whats painful is knowing lower teams like t'wolves, kings will eventually surpass us when there young guys develop ala grizz thunder and clippers.
First of all, where do you think the OKC franchise came from? H-E-L-L-O? Seattle. Right? How many NBA championships did the old Sonics win? They won it once in 78-79 so they have fewer titles and have won less recent than the Rockets. The last time they reached the finals was 1996 so approximately as long as the Rockets have waited to be relevant again. Nothing magical going on with that franchise. Their attempts to rebuild - tank - go in a different direction - blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah have led them to a near identical outcome as the Rockets. Except they've managed to put together a couple of successes in the draft which they have done before. It wasn't particularly premeditated as the history shows. BTW, the Rockets have had their share of draft successes over time and they will have them again at some point, no doubt. The argument isn't whether or not the draft is the way to go. The question is, does any team substantially benefit by deliberately becoming less competitive in the short term and in so doing, coax a better draft outcome sooner? And the results are mixed because for every top 5 lottery pick that turns into a great player there are invariably 1 or 2 others from that same draft in the same top 5 who don't. One of the ideas that I thought was interesting that supposedly the players were proposing to the owners during the recent CBA negotiations was this idea of giving the worst teams two picks in the first round instead of one thus allowing for a draft mulligan and stepping up the parity food chain cycle in the NBA. The distribution of the additional picks would be an interesting exercise. But the problem that demands to be solved is not that teams want to be deliberately uncompetitive. It's that when it's their turn to turnover their talent and start anew, which happens to every franchise, how can the sport reduce the timetable as much as possible so they can become competitive again as soon as possible. Our present model leaves a lot to be desired no doubt.
la lakers 2004-2005 34 wins. pathetic 2005-2006-45 wins mediocre 2006-2007-42 wins jajajajja! that's with the best player in the nba. The rockets biggest offseason is now. I'll judge at this time next year.
i think anyone that is satisfied with the way the team is playing and doesnt want to build through the draft should frequent the college basketball and international prospects thread. sometimes its frustrating watching our team and seeing current high schoolers with more talent. with that said i like the top prospects for these next two years. muhammed and parker should be top priorities for our team.
I basically agree if everything you say here, but I wish everyone here would understand that if we blow up the team and start from scratch it will probably mean we will be sacrificing a lot more than one season. Many teams get lottery picks year after year and don't improve. I keep hearing people say if we just tank for one year then our problems are solved, but that may not be the case. If the Rockets want to tank, I'm OK with it. But there are no guarantees the Rockets will be a playoff team anytime in the near future. Even if the Rockets get lucky and the ping pong balls bounce their way, it is not a certainty the player the Rockets select will be that "superstar" everyone wants. Even if the Rockets get a true "superstar", they then have to build a supporting cast of players around that player in order to be a true contender. The list of "superstars" that have never won a ring is long. Tanking and rebuilding may very well be exactly what the Rockets need to do, but lets not fool ourselves into believing it will be a quick and easy makeover. I think tanking can be very a tricky thing to actually do. We will still have players and coaches who will be trying to win. The Rockets will probably want to try and keep some of their best young players like Parsons, Morris, and Patterson. What if those guys start improving rapidly and we win too many games to get a top 3 pick? What if the ping pong balls go against us? Clutchfans need to be prepared to sacrifice a lot more than one season, they need to understand that we may become one of those teams that is horrible for many years. Of course we also may get lucky and suck for one year and then draft our next Hakeem. But remember, Hakeem played for the Rockets for ten years before ever winning a championship, and many of those years the Rockets were barely a .500 team. Will Clutchfans have the patients to support what it takes to rebuild a team from scratch. I'm not even sure what people here at Clutchfans really want the Rockets to do in order to tank. Trade Scola, Martin, Lowry? Don't bring back Camby, Dalembert, Lee and Dragic? So we would be left with Morris, Parsons, Motiejūnas, two 2012 first round picks, and a few D-league players. Is this what we are talking about when say "tanking". What if those players play too well to get high pick? What if they are so bad that we put ourselves in a hole so deep that it takes us ten years to recover? Anyone remember the Dallas Mavericks of the 1990's, that could be the Rockets. Tanking may be the best soulution, but tanking is tricky business.
This is just the saddest and most hopeless I've felt as a Rox fan in a really long time... I had hope that the Moreyball thing was going to take us somewhere -- even when the Gasol trade seemed to be happening it wasn't very exciting but I thought "maybe?"... I thought that the Morey experiment was exciting just because it seemed new and interesting... now, though? Hard to have too much hope, seems to me. Still love my Rox, though. No hate for Morey or Les at all, just want to see some hope. I mean, though, maybe Utah loses its last two games, Phoenix loses to the Spurs, and we win out.......................................................
You realize that you need than more than half of those teams typically have winning records and if they are in the Western Conference, more than half of them are 50+ win teams. So are you advocating some awfully competitive teams should be left out of the playoffs, because in recent years there have been some really good teams in the West who did not make the playoffs, even winning almost 60% of their games.
Staying Competitive but Missing the Playoffs By a Game or 2 (finishing 9th or 10th) That means you miss the playoffs by a hair and receive what is typically a near sucky draft pick. If this draft were in another year, then I would've never consider not making the playoffs as a realistic option. Though, this year's draft is fairly loaded with great potential. Moreover, my expectations weren't really high for this team and they are finishing in the area that I had them in 32-34 wins. Borderline playoff team. Anything above a 6th or 7th spot was wishful thinking or blind homerism.
I do wonder if Morey is deliberately aiming for middle picks, espeically in this draft. If we had properly tanked and got like an 8th or 7th pick, then packaged that with a Lowry or Martin or Scola, then the overall 'value' is much higher than if we traded them with a 14th pick. But yeah, it is frustrating to keep running on the mediocrity treadmill.
Daryl Morey had asked Les Alexander if he would favor a strategy that would clear out contracts and suffer through a lousy season in hopes of draft lottery magic. Alexander refused. It’s his team and he hates to lose. He did not order Morey to throw around a bunch of lousy contracts in the chase of an extra win or two with each, but he still wanted the best team that common sense would allow. Technically speaking would that be deliberate tanking or simply clearing out contracts of players who you know are not in the team's future.
This. Although I think the reason most of us don't want to tank (me included) is because we really haven't experienced a season in which the Rockets HAVE tanked to get a high draft pick under Alexander's ownership (the only year I can think of being 2001-02). Therefore, most of us are pretty averse to the idea of tanking. Those that have supported the whole tanking idea and haven't been following the team for 25+ years haven't experienced the possible suffering a tank season can put you through. Could you STILL BE a Rockets fan after they've decided to tank for a couple of seasons? Both avenues are pretty tricky plans to follow because, apart from all the good planning a team's GM has to do (we know that there are more Morey-lovers than Morey-haters on this board), a team has to be lucky and have all the right chips fall into place.
This season would already be over by now for the tanking so. It would have already been done with and the Rockets would be talking about one of the top guys in the draft/ So right now I would already be pretty excited.
Well, here's the thing. I think the Rockets had some nice pieces going into the season. We had solid PGs in Lowery and Dragic, we had a formidable PF and you can argue that we had pretty decent shooting guards. With that being said, our most glaring weakness is our lack of size and strength in the middle from both an offensive and defensive standpoint. If we had began the tanking process a little earlier in the year, we would be in prime position to grab one of the elite big men in this years NBA draft (i.e. Anthony Davis). I believe that given the fact that our team is relatively young, this sort of lineup would have better positioned us going into the future. Instead, we are stuck with another middle of the round 1st round pick, which will most likely (hopefully not) result in an undersized, underutilized PF. Right now, the Rockets simply having anything to show for as the team is always siting "age" and "accumulating assets" to hide the fact that the team really hasn't made any sort of progress in the last 3 years. The way I see it, the team needs to do whatever possible to put this team in a position to not just MAKE the playoffs, but be able to CONTEND for a title years to come. What would have Gasol done for the Rockets exactly? The Rockets would probably be a 7th or 8th seed at best and a quick 1st round asset. Not only that, Gasol at the age of 32 isn't getting any better or younger. Essentially, Gasol becomes a depreciating asset and the Rockets will only digress from there. The Rockets need to start building for the future and nobody said it was going to be an easy or short process. As far as I see it, the Thunder and Clippers clearly have a head start when it comes to Western Conference foes. As far as the East is concerned, the Heat and Bulls have positioned themselves head and shoulders above their peers are in prime position to compete for the next 3-5 years. While having a higher draft pick doesn't necessarily guarantee the Rockets success, it puts them in a better position to succeed going into the future
Well, here's the thing. I think the Rockets had some nice pieces going into the season. We had solid PGs in Lowery and Dragic, we had a formidable PF and you can argue that we had pretty decent shooting guards. With that being said, our most glaring weakness is our lack of size and strength in the middle from both an offensive and defensive standpoint. If we had began the tanking process a little earlier in the year, we would be in prime position to grab one of the elite big men in this years NBA draft (i.e. Anthony Davis). I believe that given the fact that our team is relatively young, this sort of lineup would have better positioned us going into the future. Instead, we are stuck with another middle of the round 1st round pick, which will most likely (hopefully not) result in an undersized, underutilized PF. Right now, the Rockets simply having anything to show for as the team is always siting "age" and "accumulating assets" to hide the fact that the team really hasn't made any sort of progress in the last 3 years. The way I see it, the team needs to do whatever possible to put this team in a position to not just MAKE the playoffs, but be able to CONTEND for a title years to come. What would have Gasol done for the Rockets exactly? The Rockets would probably be a 7th or 8th seed at best and a quick 1st round asset. Not only that, Gasol at the age of 32 isn't getting any better or younger. Essentially, Gasol becomes a depreciating asset and the Rockets will only digress from there. The Rockets need to start building for the future and nobody said it was going to be an easy or short process. As far as I see it, the Thunder and Clippers clearly have a head start when it comes to Western Conference foes. As far as the East is concerned, the Heat and Bulls have positioned themselves head and shoulders above their peers are in prime position to compete for the next 3-5 years. While having a higher draft pick doesn't necessarily guarantee the Rockets success, it puts them in a better position to succeed going into the future. Edit: first round exit (line 5, paragraph 2)
