If we got to game 7 of the second round last year with essentially the same team. What's to be expected this year? Atleast the WCF. :grin:
If a team wins a title, whoever is on it and playing lot of minutes will become stars. Rip Hamilton was just some guy who scored points on mediocre teams before the Pistons won it. Tayshaun Prince and Ben Wallace on a bad team would have been relative nobodies. Rasheed Wallace on a bad team is just some headcase who never fulfilled his potential.
If you need to play with max efficiency and min errors to win, then most probably you wont' win. It is extremely hard to sustain that kind of play. Great teams have a large margin of errors because they have great players who can carry the teams when they are not playing well. BTW, it's funny that a couple of years ago, 99% of this board would say you had to have at least one, preferably two superstars to win a title, and that the 04 Pistons were just an anomaly. Now that TMac has fallen from grace, there is actually a "win without a star" bandwagon now.
Shrugs... you dont NEED a superstar to win, but having someone who can pick up a team during the inevietable stretches of offensive drought really makes things much easier. Like I said though, it is possible even if highly unlikely. I would rather we tank the season and try to get John Wall, but with our group of competitive hard workers, that would be equivalent of asking them to cut their balls off.
The stats often mislead people. DM is so successful because he values things that are not measured by these stats.
No, they don't, Chase Budinger is not a superstar, never will be... Same goes for Brooks and Landry... DM is in a tough position. We need to turn our situation into a franchise player and quick...
I am willing to bet that given the opportunity, CBud has the talent and skill to become an allstar, and possibly a supertar, whatever that means. He will, of course, never get the hype that James is enjoying.
Agreed. That is why, in my Xmas wish list post I listed an elite PG and Yao getting back fully healthy. For all the excitement this year about this Rockets' team, the PG position is really the most critical weakness. With Yao back, Brooks will again be challenged to feed the post. He is one of the worst in the team in feeding the post. Budinger, to me, seems to be the best at making the entry pass to the post at this time.
We won't, and if you think the current group can, just don't flame the team when they crash out of the playoffs.
Sure they all have a chance to be an all-star, maybe for a year or two but none of these guys are gonna do anything huge with their careers, in 5 years people aren't gonna be foaming at the mouth about how good chase budinger is and how he's a 25, 5, 5 guy, or even a 20, 5, 5 guy. I believe all-stars can be made through hard work but superstar players are just born. They enter the league and immediately change the whole environment. There isn't a fine line between superstar and allstar, it's a universal gap. Watch a guy like Danny Granger who's a great player match up with other Superstar SF's (melo, Bron, Durant) he will get torn up. Superstars obviously can take several years to emerge of course but thats because they need to be given a chance in their own system (t-mac in orlando). These league has maybe 5-6 superstars, maybe. Something like Kobe, Bron, Wade, Melo, Durant, Garnett and you can argue Roy but I don't believe he's there, he's just playing in the perfect system to benefit his style of play and lack of athleticism, I look for him to decline a little younger than the other guys and take a back seat role to some other star. I think people use the term superstar too loosely. There's always those players who make 2-3 allstar appearances that play good ball when they're in their prime, then there's those guys like Kobe and Garnett who despite their age (14th and 15th years respectively in the league) find ways to dominate no matter what. In my opinion thats a superstar. All-stars just have more good games than bad, Superstars will more often than not dominate every game at some point in some way. T-mac was a superstar once upon a time but he just rode out his young legs and didn't bother to evolve his game to suit his veteran status. I think we're seeing more of that today than in previous decades. I believe Wade will follow a similar but not as steep decline as t-mac.
The winner-loser labels are always circular reasoning. Why are some players winners? Because they won. Why did they win? Because they are winners. Why are some players losers? Because they never won. Why did they never win? Because they are losers. KG was labeled a loser before he got to Boston and played with two other elite players. Pierce was labeled a choker until his team acquired two other elite players. Funny how a loser and a choker could come together and became winners.
