Someone just needs to tell Rudy that while he does control which 5 players on the floor playing, that he ALSO needs to attempt to control what the 5 players on the floor are actually doing while they are out there. The problem wasn't with the 5 guys on the floor. Mo hit 4 straight shots and had the assist to give the Rockets the lead, but then Mobley went down and wasted 3 possessions jacking up garbage from too far away. I have no problems with him leaving the 'b team' on the floor, but emphasize to those 5 guys that Mo is hot, give him the ball. Mobley just kills me when he does that...If Francis isn't in the game, Mobley cannot get it through his thick skull that he is not automatically the go-to guy. That is his mentality and it causes more harm for the Rockets than good.
That's the thing, I don't really think they do conflict with each other. The hot hands is usually the guys who are scoring, and those were morris and taylor. I do not call Cato the hot hand because he was to recipient to good passes, and Yao could have easily got the same. Yao was just as aggressive on the boards (24 min each, Yao 8 with 4 offensive and Cato 9 defensive). Moochie was 2-2 up till the 3 minute mark, taking 2 shots and making them hardly qualifies has "the hot hand", don't you think. I don't think it would have been a bad choice to have Francis and Yao in with Morris and Taylor. Then you would the "hot hands" and the "stars". That way, if we still lost, we can argue about what we usually argue when we lose, guard's poor play plus some ref bashing. Instead, Rudy decide to pull a wild one on us and here we are, debating over this crap.
Ok, like Easy said...it's all relative. We could have put the stars in and still lost or we could have put them in and won. None of us here knew which outcome would have been the better one, then and now. It's one of those split-second decisions, a gut-feeling that you have to make and that's exactly what Rudy did. It didn't pan out the way we wanted. So we might as well get over it and focus on Dallas tonight. There's no sense in dwelling on the past, contemplating the "what ifs." If any of you think it's a real easy decision to make, it's not, nothing ever is...do you go with the hot-hands or go with the struggling stars. He chose the hot-hands, it didn't pan out. So let's move on, because by all accounts, they lost that game well before the last 5 minutes.
