Entering 2023... the Rockets are again the worst team in the NBA

Also Silas is such a Greenhorn passive head coach that the moment a high level floor general with that much clout and experience like CP3 joins a team like this, he's immediate the defacto head coach. That's how passive and green Silas is that a player would probably upend his duties.

 

I'm confident that a lot of SGA's growth as a player can be attributed to CP3 as a teammate during his first years in the league.

 

how am I eliminating the context ? You literally said the OKC rebuild started the year of the WB trade .

well that year they made the playoffs ...

 

Lucas: "Okay, Jalen, take the chalk. It's your turn. You can do it. 'Defense.'"
Green: (standing at chalkboard, embarrassed, chalk in hand)
Lucas: "Sound it out, Jalen. 'Defense.' Now....spell it!"
(team laughing)
Green: "Shut up, y'all can't spell it either!"
Lucas: "OK, OK, sit down, don't hurt yourself. Who's next? We're gonna be here all day til someone gets this."

 

I didn't say anything. But yes you are eliminating context. Everyone thought that the OKC team was going to have one of the worst records in the league but CP3 joined and the entire league was shocked that Thunder made the postseason. Again this is CP3 magic.

His last three teams in the Rockets, Thunder and Suns, the moment he joins, that team DRAMATICALLY improves.

 

It's like you've completely forgotten that when CP3 performed that well for them, it was a shock. They didn't trade for him to improve, he was supposed to be the consolation prize for Westbrick, which is why we had to include so many picks. Paul was seemingly on the decline with us, which is a big reason we supposedly moved him for Russ in the first place. They were absolutely starting their rebuild at that point, regardless of whether CP3 turned vegan, had a resurgence and made Morey/Tilman/Harden/The Rockets look like mugs for giving him and loads of our draft capital away. But sure, try and change history if you like...

 

ok go read my first post again , I quoted you ...

anyways . I would like to bring in a vet too , to dramatically improve the team .

but , I don’t trust stone or Silas . I have a bad feeling about our progress or lack thereof .

we’ve been intentionally trying to be awful . Let’s hope we can crawl our way back up

 

I mean the reality is you ain't going to find a vet like 3 year younger CP3. That dude is magic for a young team. Wish he was available like he was for OKC.

 

Do you know what a rebuild is? Rebuild doesn't just mean they have to lose games. In OKC's case, they traded away their two franchise players in one off-season to eat contracts (Chris Paul) and for young players and picks. But it took them another season to unload the rest of their veterans (Danilo, Schroeder, Steven Adams). It's purely an unexpected anomaly that CP went all vegan and decided to revived his career. Pretty sure Presti was expecting that team to be much worse that season.

Utah is currently in a similar situation, they are still managing to win games despite blowing their entire team up. But once they get rid of the pesky vets, they will once again lose as many games as the rest of us.

 

Yup Utah is basically where the Rockets were two seasons ago when we had Wall, Dipo, Wood leading the team but the difference was that Utah's pesky vets are better than the Rockets at that stage which actually kinda sucks for the Jazz because our peaky vets sucking balls got us Jalen Green. Their pesky vets being mid is unfortunately going to eliminate them from getting a franchise altering centerpiece.

 

Man, some people are way too confident that tanking will definitely lead to success.

This will be the last losing season for a decade or 2?

 

lol . So somehow just because the media didn’t expect it to happen , it didn’t ?

ok they started their rebuild that year ?.. did CP3 help them get ahead of schedule ? Did the winning out them behind schedule (cause they didn’t get a top draft pick )?

@fchowd0311 says CP3 helped Shai develop .

If green had an MVP season this year unexpectedly it doesn’t mean that our rebuild didn’t with trading harden

 

Lol obviously the core we have now could blow up in our face and we have to start over from scratch again. That's always a possibility.

But for all intents and purposes we are rebuilding the right way minus not having better vet presence.

We acquired our young talent minus probably one more piece. Next season is probably the last season we add another high level young talent.

 

Man it's sad how people here are more pessimistic about this team than non-Rocket fans.

I think it's just an aspect of this franchise just never doing a full rebuild so fans don't know what proper expectations are especially in the one and done era where it's possible to have entire rosters full of 19-21 year olds. That just didn't happen before in earlier generations.

 

It's also worth keeping in mind that we're still winning more games than we have in a while... It's just that the NBA has more parity than it's had in a long time right now. At least we're not falling behind. Just give it time.

 

I have to guess most of these people are not Astros fans, because if you were, then you would know what it takes and also what the rewards might be.

 

Yes, that's a fair point -- they were trying to rebuild at that point. But they still played so well that I think it's silly to think of their rebuild really starting before the next year. Whether or not it's a shock, when a team wins a lot of games because of great veteran play, they're not really in the kind of rebuilding phase we're in. That's why they had to trade Chris Paul. He was too good to tank and rebuild with, but too old to get them to the promised land without another significant piece VERY quickly.

 

there's no guaranteed success in anything. But tanking gets you young players and assets. If you don't tank you can either sit on your ass and wait for FA to come to you, or you pray that you luck out in the upper part of the draft.

At the end of the day, you can't conjure players out of the air, it needs to either come from drafts or free agency. Drafts have a lot of luck involved, and getting high drift picks increases your odds. Or you can sit on your hand and wait to sign FA, but I am not sure who wants to come to Houston with no other superstars already on the roster.

 

What's this confidence based on?

Chris Paul played on the Thunder for... 1 pandemic season.

Not picking on you personally - I just find it wacky that of all the bazillions of influences on somebody's basketball career (genetics, motivation, family, emotional makeup etc) - we'd infer it's some kind of indirect osmosis of CP3 over a brief period that is the cause.

I'm sure there's some quotes on the record somewhere of SGA lauding Chris Paul just like there's ones of Steph Curry attribuing his success to Stephen Silas - but that's not really the right question.
.
The right question is the counterfactual - if he had nof played 70 games with CP3 would he still become a pretty good player eventually? Probably yes IMO, just playing the percentages..