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To the OP- From everything you hear and the speculation that is on Clutchfans, it doesn't seem like it was a personal knock on the city of Houston. It sounds like it had more to do with Dwights longterm goals of winning a championship as soon as possible and building his brand. He probably felt like giving it one more year in Orlando would free up more options to find a better situation in Brooklyn, Orlando(with new GM's moves to be made), and possibly LA. The reason I think this is in the past marquee free agents and their representatives have been very good at coming out to say as public as they can that they have no intention of signing long term in that city. Usually Chris Broussard is used to convey this message loud and clear. This completely destroys that teams leverage in negotiations and forces the current team of the Marquee free agent to the team of their choice to negotiate. You saw this with Melo, you saw it with CP3 to a certain extent, etc. Dwight never did this to Houston which says to me that with as much as you heard about the Rockets being in talks, Houston had to be in consideration at some point from Dwight's camp. Maybe at the very end he had a change of heart, but its no reason for folks in Houston to start getting sensative out how crappy they think their city is. In the end its all about championships, and if the Rockets are going to make a run at a superstar then there just needs to be multiple domino moves in place afterwards(which I believe they would) to make sure that star player knows that they are serious about winning a title ASAP. Modern day stars dont want the burden of having to carry a city on their shoulders anymore. They need some help at the end of the day.
I don't really see much of a downside to swinging for the fences with Howard. best case scenario we land Howard, he resigns with us and we become a more attractive destination for FAs. I think if any team can build on the cheap around a couple of key players, it would be Houston. I would love for Houston to pair Eric Gordon with DHo. Worst case, we lose Howard and a number of assets, suck immediately and are a faced with getting a top lotto pick while sitting on a lot of cap space. I would much prefer to get worse immediately then suffer through more mediocre teams. To me this is a relatively low risk/high return award. Over a 5 year window you could have Dwight and be markedly better or you could have a top flight young player out of the draft to roll the dice on if Dwight leaves. To me, that's worth gutting most the pieces on this Rocket team for. My 2 cents...
