Me long time rocket fan. Me have street cred and exp. as championship level fan. Morey no have no street cred and no have no ring!!!
You claimed that the Rockets won't win by employing "bad people" such as Artest. I pointed out that is not true, as we've won with Maxwell playing a significant role, and he was 10 times the crazy mofo that Ron is. Whether you like it or not, a lot of the NBA is frankly dealing with the personalities and egos of various NBA players and making sure they work together - such as getting Kobe and MJ from destroying their entire team through their competitive zeal. That is why anyone who claims Phil's not a great coach as he won those titles only working with great players is a complete BS argument. We got Artest because he could fill a role, and performed it admirably against Portland, which we would have lost if he hadn't been there. Whining about how we need to have an organization of saints is stupid - we have a lot of good people on the Rockets, and their character is one reason why we've overachieved, but character is hardly everything.
i respect a lot about what you said. as another long time rockets fan (though not as long as you) there has been a lot to regret in hindsight. however, you cannot hold the current management responsible for the mistakes of the past. whatever his faults, Les did have the foresight to hire Morey at a time when the analytical approach to basketball was much less in the spotlight than it is today. it was a risk and has proven to be a good decision. likewise, Les's tolerance for risk and desire to have a long-term winner in Houston have been proven out over time. Combine that desire with a new facility, passionate fans, a relatively large fanbase, and a team with good but not great history, and I think there is more positive than negative overall. if i can draw an analogy, if you carry baggage from previous relationships that didn't work into relationships that have potential to work, you will only end up sabotaging things and ensuring your own dissatisfaction over the long haul. when the rockets stood up to tracy mcgrady, i knew that the management team had turned a corner for the better. i trust them a lot more after seeing how well they dealt with that situation. the inmates are not running the asylum anymore. it is back in good hands. it feels like it has been a long time since I've had this much confidence in the rockets' front office, but legitimately, i do. maybe, in time, you will too. here's hoping.
First of all, your tagline is great. I would be the first to admit that I have fallen far from the level of pure faith I once had in this organization. And I haven't totally turned against Morey because I understand completely what he's up against and what he inherited. But, for the reasons I outlined above, he does not enjoy my trust anymore. I will remain skeptical of him until he proves otherwise. You make a very good argument about how the McGrady fiasco was handled. Your sincere expression of faith has touched me. I think I will wait and see how events unfold over the next few months.
Not to mention it would be nice to have a 6'11" small forward that is only 21 years old, on a rookie scale contract. I want Donte Greene back ! DD
You are correct that in the end winning is all that matters but I would also argue that it's HOW you go about winning that counts for more. Perhaps this will explain why I feel this way: Many folks here don't know it but back during the 1970s, Rockets players, whenever they were in town, would play pickup games at the Wheeler Ave YMCA (the one next to TSU) on Saturdays. I mean, you could walk into the gym there would be Rudy T, Calvin Murphy, Robert Reid or Mike Newlin shooting hoops! Mose Malone would be doing the same over at the Fonde Rec Center. And they would actually talk to you and joke around with you. They were genuine and it was that geniuness that blew me away. And that's why I stood by this team for so many years during the 1970s and 80s. Because of them. These were our guys - they were a part of Houston just like me - just like the rest of us. I was at UH when Hakeem, Clyde and Phi Slamma Jamma threw down. And I remember that moment just after they won that first title. I remember the look on Hakeem's face as if to say "It is done". And then, the very next season, I remember him and Clyde embracing after winning it all again while Rudy T was at the mike declaring "you never underestimate the heart of a champion". And we Houstonians felt pride - real pride because these were our guys. And for a city that hadn't tasted much of anything in the way of sports success, this was something magical. So you see, after living through all that great Rockets history, there is simply no way I could ever EVER accept Artest or anyone else of his ilk no matter what the MoreyBall numbers may have said. Because I was fortunate to have known them.
Maybe I'm a cynic, or it's maybe the times under which I grew up with the age of globalization, but that rant just simply felt like "In the good old days, you knew the store manager and the carpenter, so those evil mega stores are bad with their efficiency" or stuff. Maybe it was like that back then, when you knew the players. But do you really think we'll pull off a championship like that today? From what I can tell from your posting, you've criticized most of the star players we've acquired for the last 10 years, whether McGrady, Yao, Artest, or our attempt to get Griffin in the hope he would be a star. But with that rant, I can't help but wonder how much of that criticism is due to their inherent lack of basketball value and more the fact that they aren't "our guys", whatever that means. Because if you're trying to get "our guys" and people who've actually lived in Houston to win championships, you won't get anything.
This may be a bit hard for you to grasp because we appear to have grown up in different eras. But having grown up in Houston and being a fan of all Houston teams, I have seen more than my share of bad to horribly bad to laughibly bad football (Oilers), excruciatingly bad baseball (Astros then and now) and decades of uninspired basketball (Rockets then and over the last 15 years). During the time I've been around, it has been tremendously hard to be a fan of Houston sports teams because you often went many many years before they did something to justify your trust and faith. In the early days after their move from San Diego, the Rockets struggled mightily to draw a crowd to Hofheinz Pavilion - in fact there was one game where only 200 people showed up. Now if you were base your allegiance to this team on the basis of on the court success, you would have long since switched to the Lakers or Celtics or some other team because the Rockets through the years were more often bad than good. So, there had to have been something more to bind you to this team and for me, it was players like Rudy T, Calvin Murphy, Robert Reid, Mike Newlin, Kenny Smith, Hakeem, Otis Taylor and Clyde. Now are you trying to tell me that an SOB like Artest belongs in that group? The one thing that cemented my allegiance to this team were those guys I saw playing pickup games with ordinary folks and that's been the only reason I was able to stick with this team for such a long time...up until now. Now, I can't tell if the Artest move was an aberration by Morey or the shape of things to come. If it is the latter, I have no interest in spending another 15 years watching them parade a seemingly endless parade of NBA bodies through the TC while getting nowhere. Been there, done that. No, I did not like those moves because of their questionable basketball value. Consider the Eddie Griffin debacle. Even at the time, there was nothing about what he'd done in his short stint at Seton Hall to even remotely justify that he was worthy of 3 first round picks. Next, nobody on the Rockets bothered to look into his history of emotional problems which of course the Nets knew all about. Instead, they bring him here and from the start he's outplayed by Kenny Thomas, a guy who didn't cost them three no. 1 picks. Every excuse under the sun is made for him here on the GARM and elsewhere for his "troubles" but the one truth that nobody wanted to face was that if you had to continuously make excuses for the guy that cost you 3 No. 1 picks, something was very very wrong. And tragically, it turned out to be so. When they made the deal for McGrady, they in essence blew up the team - giving up their starting 1,2 & 4 while taking back vastly inferior players in return. Again, the thinking went somewhat like this: Yao + Tmac were the foundation of a championship team and all that was needed was for the Rockets' braintrust to put the right "pieces" around them (this has since been updated to "In Morey We Trust"). Now this would be the same Rockets' braintrust that lead this team to repeated trips into the NBA lotto only to come away with one player to show for the effort. And that would also be the same Rockets' braintrust that had given us the likes of Moochie Norris, Mo Taylor, Scottie Pippen, Juwann Howard, Tyron Lue. And that would be the same Rockets' braintrust that had given out bad contracts to marginal players which in the end left this team with no salary cap flexibility to perform a much needed roster overhaul. In spite of all this, virtually everyone here blindly went along with this line of thought. Quite amazingly, that plan failed to work out as well. Are you beginning to sense a pattern here? In the end, for me, that Artest deal was a back breaker. All I saw was them flush away a promising young player in Donte Green AND a No. 1 pick and for what? The Ron Artest traveling minstrel show? That was just too much for me to take. I had simply reached my limit and could go no farther with what had become for me an endless exercise in futility.
