I hate to say it, but his predicted record seems pretty acurate (assuming the current roster stands pat throughout the season) They play hard and overachieve, but it is hard to do that for 82 nights. I hope I'm wrong though.
Don't have an argument with what was written but I do have a feeling this group will vastly "overachieve" and win more than 37 games.
"A strong return from McGrady could propel the Rockets to a playoff spot and yet another first-round exit, but that's about the ceiling here." What? They don't know that. If Mcgrady comes back strong with all the supporting cast that the Rockets can give him, we are a strong solid unit but a tad bit undersized. I bet if Tmac can come back into his old former self, the Rockets are a really dangerous underdog team that will make good teams miserable. If this team really put it together by playoff time, I bet no one wants to play us in the first round.
Oh mate, I do not mind Hollinger he is by far the best of a bad group but even he gets a lot of things wrong, not even stats and all the maths in the world can predict what will happen, it can help but at the end of the day anything can happen. My point in my post was more to say why should anyone care that we get dogged in these 'preview/projections' and that its a lot more fun proving people wrong than proving them right or failing to live up to expectations. Also besides a couple of them they are a very very ordinary bunch of 'experts' and I know for a fact I am not alone in that view!................unless I was posting on a Lakers board.
So u imagined the whole scenario that with Yao we wudnt have taken lakers to game 7? Pttt, yeah right.
Please. On a Jeff Van Gundy team maybe. On a Rick Adelman team, no. Adelman has no clue how to fully utilize Yao. The stats prove that. The games in the playoffs that were lost were games he only scored 12-17 pts. The games where he dominated and scored 25+, The Rockets won. Adelman does not focus on getting the ball to Yao like Van Gundy did. His defense is always going to be a problem against the quicker big guys, so he has to score 25+ for The Rockets to have a chance. If he doesn't, the only way they win is when they buckle down on defense and share the ball. This is what they did when Yao went out against The Lakers, and it was very effective. Chuck Hayes played lockdown defense and wasn't a factor on offense. With Yao, The Lakers were locking down Yao and he was never a factor on defense, so it really was the proverbial "4-on-5" that lots of folks on this forum love to talk about when Chuck Hayes is on the floor. If Adelman was smart, he would go that route this season. But, history says otherwise and we will most likely see Luis Scola starting at Center.
This belongs in the "pretend T-Mac returns to Elite status" thread. I do agree that if healthy, not a lot of teams would want to face us. but lets not get our hopes up on this season or tmac.
I think your sig says more about your basketball knowledge than much else. In regards to Yao scoring only 12-17 points, this has little to do with Adelman's know how to use Yao than the fact that with Yao the Lakers were able to focus on limiting his offense and as we all know how our team is. If we put a star on the floor they tend to wilt and defer to that star. Once Yao went down it was likely more mental that the Lakers slacked off and figured they had the series won that led to the first loss after Yao went down and the second game was there lack of knowledge of who to focus on to stop us -- Or we just out hustled them. Either way to say that RA doesn't know how to use Yao is crazy. If I recall Yao was averaging damn near a double double all season and then what RA forgot what worked for 82 games. NOT.
i think it's good forecast to read. Although, i feel we should give up coming season for the high pick if absent of yao is sured. I don't know what you guys thought, but i strongly agree with Agent 0 last season in term of "giving up a season for TD , why not"
