[Charlie Pallilo] Thabo Sefalosha would have been a Rocket...

There were quotes from him in the Chron too. He was trying to say that we should compare Battier with Sefalosha, not Gay, in evaluating the trade. As if a second boneheaded decision could help deflect blame from the first one. Really, now we can compare Battier's season with Gay's and Sefalosha's. If either rookie blows up, we can reproach the Rockets for blowing the draft forever.

 

Speak for yourself.

Charlie is one of the best in the entire USA.

I do not even know where you are coming from with this or going to. Did Charlie something to you personally? Really, your stance is ridiculous to say the least. And you say Texans voice is good? Ludicrous.

That said, the talk about Thabo (Ta-bow not Tha-bow) is that the Rox would have traded down to get him or arranged with lets say Chicago to get him for a swap of players later (a pre-arranged deal ala Houston-Memphis).

 

Blowing up the draft and blowing up the trade are two different things. People keep confusing them when they criticize the trade. I disliked the trade because of the Swift throw-in, not because of Gay or Sefalosha. If Swift turns out to be close to worthless, then I am okay with the trade.

About the draft, let's wait a little while to judge how Gay or Sefalosha turns out. Did they blow it for preferring Sefalosha over Gay? Did they blow it for preferring a "sure thing" veteran role player over Sefalosha? We'll see. But please don't confuse the trade with the evaluation of unproven talents.

 

I would take Thabo over Gay. He's looked pretty good so far. Very similar although Thabo has better ball handling.

 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but your logic makes absolutely no sense to me.

First, you are trying to isolate the draft and the trade into two seperate components. That is impossible...they are intrinsically linked together. Why? Because the whole goal of either was to improve the team. That is the core basis of why there is a draft in the first place. That is at the root of the "Win Now" expression.

These are among the actual options:

Swift + Rudy Gay
Battier
Sefolosha @ 8

I do agree that the timeframe for evaluation can't be as short as 3 or 4 games. But there is no way possible to say that trading Swift and the rights to #8 did not have an associated opportunity cost. That cost may vary over time...even nightly...but last night the value was 11 for 23 FGA's and 27 points.

As far as Sefolosha, I doubt Van Gundy had ever seen 1 minute of his play prior to the draft. VG is on record as saying he never saw V-Span with Panthanaikos. The pick of Sefolosha would been entirely a Morey pick (as was Battier IMHO). And if we'd have pick TS @ 8 and sat him on bench ala Novak, I'd be hearing the screaming here in Austin.

 

Who is this Thabo guy?

 

Really?

What's your favorite trait of Pallilo? The extreme condescension he has towards callers? The fact that he interrupts everyone, callers and guests, is rude, arrogant is utterly ill-informed on almost every topic about which he deigns to converse? Or the fact that he finds himself endlessly amusing, thinks he is hilariously funny, and yet does not have one funny bone in his entire body? Or maybe it's the fact that he is a homer.. for any team NOT from Houston, but especially for any team in the northeast?

Some social facts: The only thing less funny than a truly un-funny person is a truly un-funny person who thinks he is a laugh riot.

There is also only one thing less intelligent than a truly un-intelligent person, and that is a truly un-intelligent person who thinks he is a genius.

With charlie paillilo, you have both of those people all rolled into one.

But whatever. Everyone's entitled to their opinion. No accounting for taste, I guess.

 

We did not trade Gay for Battier (forget about Swift at the moment). We traded the #8 pick for Battier. The pick is an opportunity, not a player. The cost of the trade was the opportunity to pick a player we wanted.

You guys keep saying that whether the management wanted Gay at #8 or not is irrelevant. I say it is relevant because the pick was not Gay for us. It was Gay for Memphis, but not for us. If they traded it to another team, that team might have used the pick for someone else. Should we then compare Battier with that "someone else" in order to evaluate the trade?

The management did not think Sefolosha or any other draftee left at that point was worth the #8 pick. So they traded it for Battier. Now, you can say Gay or Sefolosha or anyone is worth that pick. The Rockets should not have traded it away. That's about talent evaluation.

What I'm saying is, swapping the #8 pick in a weak draft like this year's for Battier is a reasonable trade. Throwing in Swift is a questionable move. How any of the rookies will turn out remains to be seen. That's the gamble part. Trading lottery pick is always a gamble. The pick can be a stud or it can be a bust. Think Eddie Griffin. We salivated for his potential for a couple of years. We even sneered at Seattle's offer of Rashard Lewis for Griffin. Now we know we were wrong.

 

The trade is not about trading #8 pick + Swift for Battier, it is Rudy Gay + Swift for Battier. If it was #8 pick + Swift for Battier, the trade could be done prior to the draft. No, Gay at #8 pick was the condition for the trade to happen.

 

Regardless of who they planned on picking, if it wasn't Gay then they have a talent evaluation problem and that's not good.

 

The condition was set by Memphis. They wanted Gay. Rockets' condition was Roy being unavailable. If both Gay and Roy had been taken at that point, the Rockets would either make a deal with another team or pick Sefolosha.

BTW, it also bursts the so-called "win now" philosopohy myth. They have come out to say that if Roy was there at #8, they'd pick him and not make the trade. It's not about win now or win later. It's not about Gay or Battier. It's about talent evaluation.

 

what? roy wasn't necessarily themost talented, he was the most mature player, where were you in the draft?

 

Speaking of Palillo, was he separated from Ben Folds at birth?




Have you ever seen them together? Hmmm....

 

You said the Rockets traded the #8 pick + Stro for Battier, I pointed it out it wasn't the case. It was Gay + Stro for Battier. I bet there is no any words like No.8 pick in the trade clause.

 

You keep putting it in these terms and I absolutely disagree. You are using the semantics of "the rights to #8" as if there were multiple other options for Memphis. There weren't. It's not like MEM could stop the draft indefinitely and get "the rights" to any player they pleased.

MEM made the trade because "the rights" were the rights to Rudy Gay. That's the only reason they made the trade. You can obscure it all you want with semantics or legalese but the bottomlime is that is Gay had been taken earlier MEM would not have made the offer. Ignoring the verbiage of "the rights to #8" the trade was Battier for Swift and Rudy Gay.

You can word it any way you want to, but the Rockets gave up Stromile Swift and Rudy Gay for Shane Battier. That's a fact. Shoving the words "the rights to #8" or "the rights to" Rudy Gay into the sentence doesn't change the end result one iota.

The fact that the Rockets passed on every other player available at #8 means they (via $Ball) valued Battier above every other option they had. And history will be the judge of the soundness of the logic.

 

I don't know why some people automatically assume Sefolosha is not as good as Rudy Gay (or Shane Battier). How many of you have seen him play? He actually seems to be a nice young player when I caught the season opener vs. Miami and parts of subsequent games on the League Pass-- nice atheleticsm, handles, and overall skill set. His tradition stats are very good, too: playing 17.5 mpg, he averages 8.3 points on 52% FG and 33% 3 pt shooting and 83% FT, 2.8 rebounds, 2.0 assists, 1.5 steals, and ONLY 0.5 TO. His "PER" comes out to be a star-like 25.1.

Just because he played overseas rather than in UConn on American TV all the time last year doesn't mean he's not good.


In addition, for what it's worth since the season is very young and the sample size is small, here are the analytic stats for Gay, Battier, and Sefolosha:
+/-:
Thabo: +30.1
Shane: +23.5
Rudy: -11.8

PER:
Rudy: 15.1
Shane: 14.3
Sefolosha: 25.1

http://www.82games.com/0607/0607MEM.HTM
http://www.82games.com/0607/0607HOU.HTM
http://www.82games.com/0607/06CHI5C.HTM

Yeah, the returns are from an VERY early collection of minutes and a lot can change, but since people like to "review" the Battier trade every game, I figure we might as well throw in some data other than the random impression based on SportsCenter highlights.

So far, it seems like that Battier is doing what he always does-- his team does better when he 's on the court while his own fantasy numbers are not neccesarily high. Rudy has not made his team better overall, despite having a good set of abilities and his own fantasy stats, on a per minute basis, is about the same as Shane's (at the league average). Sefolosha, on the other hand, has played like a star in his 17.5 minutes per game in the first four games. Scoring well, gambling successfully for steals, making VERY FEW turnovers, and the Bulls so far have fared significanlly better with him on the court than with him sitting.

Based on these EARLY numbers, one could make a better case arguing that trading for Shane instead of keeping Sefolosha was a mistake than the case that trading for Shaen instead of keeping Gay was a mistake.

 

I am not going to argue with you about semantic anymore. What you said here is exactly what I meant. The Rockets valued Battier more than the POTENTIAL of every draftee, including Gay and Sefolosha, available at #8. You and many people here might think that Gay was the best player left at that point AND would turn out much better than Battier sooner not later. The Rockets management and some other teams might not think so. We'll see who is right a few years down the road.

As I said, it's a gamble either way. It's a gamble if we used the pick for Gay or Sefolosha, and passed up Battier (our best player behind Yao and TMac). It's a gamble trading away the opportunity of getting a future star player.