[ESPN] Rockets to evaluate GM Daryl Morey, interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff after season

Yep, I know exactly what you mean. The Rockets were the injury riddled team in the play-offs last season not LAC. The Spurs simply were not good enough to get to the 2nd round last season but the Rockets were somehow lucky not to have to play them, even they beat the team that beat the Spurs.

 

Golden State swapped out a veteran coach for a completely unproven rookie head coach whose previous job was GM'ing the Suns, then they turned historically great and won the title.

Then he got injured and Luke Walton, who just started shaving yesterday, took over and led the Warriors to the greatest start in history.

The human factor is really hard to predict especially when it comes to coaches, and if you can't base it on track record (Kerr and Walton had no head coaching experience) then what is the point of even trying?

 

Wrote this in a previous thread, but it applies here:

Since 2006-07 (Morey's first year), the following teams have made at least one conference finals - with many of them making more than one appearance or advancing even further:

- Pistons
- Cavs
- Suns
- Thunder
- Jazz
- Spurs
- Bulls
- Celtics
- Lakers
- Heat
- Mavs
- Magic
- Nuggets
- Pacers
- Grizzlies
- Hawks
- Warriors
- Rockets

That is 18 teams by my count. Par is doing something that everyone else is doing/has done. The Morey fanboy section of the GARM has also attributed the entire WCF run to the out of shape number puncher and has somehow convinced themselves that the coach of the team actually held them back (which is asinine considering we went literally as far as our talent vs. the league would take us).

I know it's hard for you fanboys, but Morey has not done anything exceptional with his decade. Time to move on.

 

Fair enough. Adelman was a very good to great coach over his career. And he did wonderfully during the Lakers series. But the Twolves did have talent, and his personal issues (completely not his fault, and I am very sympathetic to him and mourn his loss) basically has put a possibly permanent end to coaching his career. Had he been extended, he would not have been with the Rockets for more than a year. My point was that hiring McHale helped lead to Howard, and a WCF. So the McHale hiring was NOT a failure. I'm not sure that Adelman would have done more with the team.

 

Youre stupid, this mess we see on the court is a direct result of morey decisions.

Dummies like to medicate the symptons and not uproot to source of the problem.

 

I think the "assets" and "flipping assets" is pretty overblown in terms of chemistry. In the Adelman years no one was complaining about the guys not liking to play with one another, the narrative was the "little train that can".

Even with the chemistry issues this year, it's not like we have a radically different group than 2-3 years ago.

With that said, I do agree that culture has been the issue. I don't think this is an issue of analytics/Morey as it takes remarkable individuals in an organization to create that type of culture. I imagined McHale was a culture guy on paper with his pedigree but that didn't work out. Its pretty underrated over overlooked the luck that SAS and GSW has had on top of being well run, but that's how it usually works out.

 

Good point about the conference finals appearances. I'd mentioned in many threads prior to their run to the WCF last season that the Rockets had the worst record in terms of playoff series victories of any team since 1997 other than the Raptors(who have only been in existence since 1995) and the Hornets(who don't even count since they didn't exist before 2003).

The Rockets prior to last season had won only a single playoff series since 1997(defeating Portland in 2009). The Raptors also only have one win(I believe in 2001). Every other franchise in the NBA had won at least 2. Now in fairness, they did rectify this embarrassing stat by winning 2 series last season.

But the point is that even prior to Morey, this was not a very impressive organization when it came to playoff success in the aftermath of their 5-year run from 1993-97 when they were legit title contenders in Dream's prime.

 

The Spurs didn't have HCA. We did. That was the difference between the two series.

The Spurs lost HCA because of a freak loss at the end of the season. You can say that it's their own fault and they deserved to lose like that. Sure. But you can't say that just because of the results of two 7-games series (both won by the home teams) prove that we were a better team than both the Clippers and the Spurs.

About injuries, we lost DMo and Bev in the playoffs, but got Howard and Smith, who fell on our lap in the middle of the season. Howard and Smith were the key to our reaching the WCF. The Clippers, on the other hand, lost Chris Paul their best player at the beginning of the series.

Maybe you are tired of people say we were lucky, I am tired of people using the WCF appearance as proof that we were the clear cut second best team in the West. Even Morey admitted that he was mistaken by the "success" of last season's playoffs run.

 

Wrong, they lost HCA because they were pretty lousy at the beginning of the season, idling around the 8th seed for a couple of months, and had to rally down the stretch to move up to the top half - unfortuantely for them they left almost no room for error and they needed it.

And "HCA" being the diffrence is a silly thing to argue - in the Rockets clippers series last year - the road team won 4 times, the home team won 3.

 

Coaching is just one part of the whole picture. I for one do not blame all of this season's problem on coaching. Not having the right players is a much bigger problem than who the coach is. This group is pretty much uncoachable.

The Warriors had the right players. All they needed was getting the right coach to push them over the hump. I am not even sure if Kerr was the only coach that could have got it done. By the time Luke Walton took over the interim, the team was pretty much a machine that ran by itself.

 

And where are most of the teams now. Morey maybe hasn't done anything with the subjective notion of "exceptional" but he hasn't done anything on the other end of the spectrum. It's not about being a fan boy, it's objectively looking at the body of work in the context of everything else in the league.

 

I think you're missing the context (though kudos that you did the search to list the teams that made the conference finals). It is true that a lot of them have made it, so give them all credit. But keep in mind the further out you go back since a particular team's high point, the worse it often is. So Pistons, Suns, Magic, Nuggets, who made it a long time ago should probably be taken with a grain of salt given where they are now. Also, until this disaster of a year, the trend with Maury has been UP. He inherited a team with money committed to two almost immediately broken superstars. The year Yao went down, if he had been there we could have won it all - without Yao we took the champions to a 7 game series. Then it became 2 years of unloading or dealing with perpetually injured stars, and after that he had to lift the Rockets without being able to tank, unlike the Cavs (who got three top 4picks), the thunder (who had 3 top 4 picks). The last 3-4 years have increased in win total, culminating with a WCF loss to a historically great Warriors team where (1) we were shorthanded and 2) a lot of the games went down to the wire.

I would also say we are better positioned than a number of the other teams. I would take us in talent and cap flexibility over
- Pistons
- Suns
- Jazz (this is close; they're on the rise)
- Bulls (at least we have cap space)
- Celtics (they have lots of assets, but 1 star not quite superstar, but I'd take the coach in a heartbeat)
- Lakers
- Heat (about to be stuck with Bosh and Wade on bad contracts, about to lose Whiteside or pay max; but Riley can fix this if anyone can)
- Mavs (stuck as an above average team, and only bc Carlisle is so good)
- Magic
- Nuggets
- Pacers
- Grizzlies (team old and falling apart)
- Hawks (Pistons-lite; good team but not contender status; but this is close)

So Warriors, Spurs, Cavs, Thunder, Clips are the teams whose talent I would probably take over ours, right now. Toronto is close to us in talent once we get back some chemistry.

 

And the Rockets team was riddled with injuries as well. Cry me a river.

 

"Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity"

We were a bit lucky last year and a bit unlucky this year.

 

Morey is one of the only things to actually keep.

 

Then Morey hires another scrub coach even worse than JBB. lol

 

So? That is why teams play the regular season.

Yes you can, that is why teams play for seeding and then have a post season. The Rockets were a better team than the Clippers and Spurs. The Rockets beat the Clippers in a 7 game series and the Clippers were knocked out the series before.

There is really nothing to debate here.

The Rockets were 1-1 without Paul in the line up and were 3-2 with him playing for the Clippers. The Rockets were down two starters the entire series.

The Rockets won the series and it wasn't a fluke, the Rockets 3 of the last 4 games in the series.

The Rockets were the second best team in the West, they played the regular season to have the #2 seed and then made the WCF. You may not like it, but that is the reality of the situation.

Also Morey never said the Rockets were not the second best team in the WC last season. What he said was that the organization did not handle success well.

I don't even know why it matters, what matters is what happens from today forward.

 

There is nothing to debate here...what are you off your rocker today?
I can't help but think that it took effort to actually type that drivel out. You can't honestly believe that the rockets were better than the spurs, hell, they probably weren't even better than the clippers. This season should show you that more than anything. I think I was going to bold the parts I thought were straight up wrong, but I realized that it would just end up bolding the whole thing, apologies for the asymmetry (its not as aesthetic )

Quick question though, how does one become so delusional? You seem to excel at it.

If Easy replies to you, your first response should be to thank him for it.

 

Stop it man, you're posting contextual information---it would actually make for a meaningful and intelligent discussion if you did so. Its not enough that the same players jumped from their (allegedly deserved 2nd seed) to the 9th in one season....they were actually better than every other team not named GS last year. Some people like to live with their heads in the sand, and its their choice, you shouldn't waste your time with them.