Some roster turnover is good even inevitable but if your entire team building process is predicated on this approach you sacrifice continuity and risk falling into the trap of flipping through players for the sake of flipping through players. And this is what I believe has happened with the Rockets. They are like gamblers who keep laying down bets because they believe they are due to hit the big score. Meanwhile, years go by and they find themselves caught in a cycle of meh with not much to show by way of success. Yes, DM did land Harden because of OKC's stupidity (we take all luck that comes our way). But having watched him play and his impact on this team, can we truly put him in the class of a Dirk or a LeBron or a Kobe as the foundation of a championship team? Or is he merely a gifted player who can contribute but not carry a team to a title? After watching him these past two years I'm still not sure which but I really like his skill set. But with everything else with this team in flux we are back repeating the player cycle once again. It's like watching a slot machine spin and spin and spin while hoping to hit Jackpot.
i guess i just personally don't value continuity unless you have a core in place. a championship core is what all the moves are about and until you have it i personally favor however many moves are necessary. the only thing that would change my view is if i somehow thought an excess of moves could somehow cost me part of the core i am building. in other words, if a move that would help the future might cost us 5 wins next year by lowering the talent or hurting the continuity and those 5 wins might cause my 2nd best player to leave in free agency, maybe i change things. but right now, our core is just james harden. everybody else is expendable and moveable in as much as these moves a) add to the core and b) don't cost me james harden. and even then, a team like san antonio seems to show they have no particular loyalty to anybody but the core. duncan/parker/ginobili have been there forever. but role players who get too old or too expensive get kicked to the curb. pop apparently loved george hill but had no problem trading him for a draft pick when he was up for a new contract. the pick ended up being kawhi leonard so it worked out, but continuity really only seems to apply to the coach and the core. if you can keep a whole set of championship role players around for 2 or 3 years, you do it, but that's about as far as it goes for most teams before the churn starts. i think the "cycle of meh" is a necessary evil to prevent the team from locking itself into mediocrity. almost the only way to have continuity is to pay role players their market value. that pretty much prevents you from having cap space or valuable contracts for trade. without a championship core already in place, that pretty much means you can't build a champion. there's no guarantee the churn will build a champion, but there's a bigger certainty that locking yourself into a non-championship team won't provide a championship (and then you'll probably have to tear it down and start over). i think he's certainly a kobe or dirk. he can carry an entire offense on high volume and high efficiency scoring. i think anybody who was a legit runner-up mvp (and could have easily won) is good enough by historical standards. can you win with as little as you could with a lebron (or hakeem or duncan)? no. but he can certainly be the best player on a title team. and i agree, it is like watching a slot machine spin and isn't fun. i'm just not sure any other paths are more likely to get us the jackpot.
