epic musings of a lurker

musings of a lurker

Note: I’m not going to repeatedly put “in my opinion,” “I think,” et al because it is inherently redundant, repetitious, and unnecessary; e.g. So here is the blanket admission of opinion for those of you who like to harp on such issues.


The rockets have an undeniably bright future, however, they must continue looking farther into the future, especially with the new economics of the NBA. The thought of trading Kenny Thomas is def. a valid one. He reminds me of how people on the board used to call Othella the black hole because the ball would go in, but never come out. There was even a recent thread about KT's same gravitational effects. Moochie could also be dispensable if Tito is panning out,* and collier is expendable as well. However, we don’t necessarily need players back if we trade any of these guys (with the above caveat for mooch). A starting five of franchise hawkins/mobley, rice/griff, taylor/griff, and ming with the off player as backups along with cato, maddox*, T-mo, and nachbar is still very, very competitive. (And yes I’m talking championship level competitive once the team gels and a few players get a year or two under their belts.)

Salaries are going to become a very real issue in the near future for the rockets, however. Rice is valuable to us as potential cap space as much as he is on the court right now. His contract will be conveniently expiring as Griffin’s extension will need to be worked out. Looking further down, Cato’s contract also expires around the time Ming would be looking for his. We don’t need more players and therefore more salary. Doing so could potentially handcuff us and prevent us from keeping the team’s best players together.

Because of these extensions on the horizon I would suggest instead of getting players back, we try and secure draft picks for them. As a long term outlook I think the rockets need to draft projects. Yes it’s more of a gamble, but the rockets are in a position to do this now and if we want to trully begin talk of a dynasty, we need to continually plan for it. I would especially advocate international players (nbadraft.net names a few such as Carlos Delfino , Roko-Leni Ukic , Valentin Pastal, & Ivan Koljevic who seem intriguing).

We are already positioned somewhat nicely with having one of vancovers/memphis’ second round picks and two of chicago’s (source: nbadraft.net). Both picks should be in that ideal spot of upper second round where contracts are not guaranteed, but skilled players still can still be had sometimes, esp. young international players. So even if we don’t get top draft picks some should turn into nice roll players given time to develop and if we roll the dice often enough, a 7 is bound to pop up now and then. Perhaps most important, if these picks are international players, they do their developing overseas and have no impact on the rockets salary cap until the organization feels they would like to bring them over and they can contribute.

Es todo, I go back to lurk now…


PS: On trading Cat: The transition to a more motion oriented offense would be most difficult on an iso player. Cat, however, has improved every year and has shown his versatility in adapting to diff. situations before (i.e. when francis was out). I'm not necessarily the biggest cat fan at times, but a full year with a healthy cat should be given to see if he can adjust before any hasty moves are made. After that well... [granted some of these arguments could be applied to Kenny, but he has not shown as much adaptation and perhaps more damning, his position(s) is(are) loaded]

PPS: an earlier thread discussed the drummers at the rockets game. Did any of you notice (on the broadcast i.e.) before the game Rudy was playing some air drums and laughing, then you can see the top of mooch’s head and he is laughing as well. Looked like laughing at, not with.

PPPS: just for clarification: by epic, i meant long winded, not necessarily profound. i tried to edit it with no success, hence this addendum. ciao