Where was all this when Eddie Griffin was hoisting up corner 3's with no refined dribbling or post skills? And talks about what his real open market value compared to what was given up for him?
i'm skipping about 30 replies to make this one so maybe this has already been addressed, but why do you (and leebigez also) keep saying this? are y'all incapable of looking at the numbers? he's averaged 10 ppg both playoffs for us. considering that is right at his regular season average while playing in much lower scoring games, i'm going to need your respective definitions of disappearing. apparently it's not turning into a 1-on-1 20 ppg scorer, something he has never been. apparently if he could have averaged 7 ppg like posey and bowen, we would've won the title. but since he disappeared and averaged 10 ppg, we got knocked out in the 1st round again. i'm gonna need the list of all the role players who carried their teams to a title in the absence of one of the teams star players. outside of the pistons, every recent title team has had a HOFer or HOFer's playing at peak level carrying them to a title with the role players filling in with their 10 ppg or some defense or occasional 3 or whatever that particular role player does. shane battier has filled his role quite well. if he played next to kobe and shaq, or with boston's big 3, or with wade, i'm guessing he wouldn't have gotten those teams knocked out in the first round. the great james posey scored 10 points combined in the final 4 games of the cleveland series last year, boston's most important series. that's disappearing. but his team still won and he lived to hit another shotclock beating 3 many games later and look like he really won that title for them with his epic contributions. edit: as for paying too much for battier, that's irrelevant at this point. and you're forgetting (or choosing to forget), that we were also getting rid of stromile swift's contract in that trade. that was a negative in that trade. so giving up a #8 pick for battier may have been overpaying, but we were working from a deficit. and the artest trade was the opposite. we were giving an expiring contract, a positive, and getting a negative, artest being crazy, so the actual value we had to give for artest in addition was much lower. but i think y'all already knew that. y'all's argument seems to be that battier is your typical good role player, the kind who has weaknesses and who doesn't score 20 ppg on demand, like most every other role player on championship teams. but since he's not way better than your typical championship role player, he's not that good. and the contention that nobody would consider him a good defender the season after he finished 3rd in DPOY voting (basically tied for 2nd with camby) was also kind of funny.
Sure would have been nice for Battier to show up against Utah in that seven game series. It was McGrady + limited Yao + not-much-doing (you can insert any of the rest of the Rockets here) against the Jazz. Now that I look back at that series, it was pretty impressive that we went to seven games with a horrible game plan and 3/5 of the starters + bench contributing next to nothing. Someone that we got in exchange for a lottery pick SHOULD be expected to make an impact in a seven game series especially if the driving force behind the trade was "Win Now." We set some god awful records in that series.
You seem like a smart guy but have a blind spot in your thinking when looking at the big picture... I would rather have Battier stop the best player from the opposing team go off with 40 points on us than having Rudy Gay score 20 points for us. I am going to say it again--We love Battier here in China. He's the best thing happened to the Rockets besides Yao Ming.
Easy tiger. We are talking about a team that has been a disappointment in playoffs for a whiiiile now. PS. Rockets have been around before Yao Ming era, and better things have happened to them.
