Who's better? Rudy Gay + S. Swift or Mo Evans + Brian Cook . . . Anyway you look at it, that was a bad trade for the Rockets.
I am not surprised. Houston has been horrible in drafting and FA signings for the past decades. It's no joke. Teams that have been there are recovering much faster than the Rox. Portland, Lakers, Utah, all those used to be western power houses. Now they are recovering fast after missing some years of playoffs. Look at the Rox. It is a second tier organization behind the Spurs, Suns, Jazz, Portland, Lakers and the Mavericks. Les is a weird owner. He doesn't really know the importance of a good GM and drafting. First, he got CD who is not supposed to be a GM, and now, he got a freshman GM who has never been a GM. Just weird stuff.
One thing you're not mentioning is we are supposed to be better than all of those teams with maybe Utah being on our level, it is up to management to dignose the problem and fix it, we should not finish the year with a worse record than any of these teams.
I think he does this so he can make many of the decisions himself. He gets a pushover like CD and a rookie like Morey so he can dictate what changes are made. If the move works then great and if it doesn't then the GM is left looking like an idiot to the fans and media. You'll never see Les hire a guy like Jerry West who makes the personell decisions...like a GM is hired to do. Les Alexander gives me the impression that he thinks he knows more about basketball than the coaches and GMs he has hired (and fired). In reality, he doesn't seem to know as much as a lot of the real, diehard basketball fans. And yes, I think he really thought he could turn this team into the Phoenix Suns.
To everybody (not just the "O.C."): Please resist the urge to turn random threads into Gay/Swift for Battier threads. I mean, it's like we're playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon as modified to find some way to turn an unrelated thread into a discussion of something we cannot fix. We've all pretty much said our piece on the matter, and we're not even to the All-Star break yet. Let's hope the rest of the season is fruitful so we can make a push in the playoffs, and pray that Gay turns into Sam Bowie.
