To comment about hadling pressure, teams do know it and it does work. Remember what happened during the memphis, portland and toranto game. Nevermind the BIG BAD zone D put on by the mavs which makes the rockets clueless every single time they play.
I guess hoping for good team oriented basketball and a decent change in personel for the better is a "mindless one trick pony" run along......
This bickering is pointless. Both Yao's & Francis' games have enough warts on them to go around. To start bashing Francis for not playing championship D is rather silly as he's been doing that for 5 years now. He'll never be a Gary Payton. He's more like Allen Iverson and actually seems better suited for the 2. That's why I was looking for them (Rockets) to go get a true PG in the off season (you know, someone who can bring the ball up court against the press) like say, Travis Best but as usual CD & Co. were in penny-pinching mode so we are stuck with what we've got. Look for a different cast of characters on this team next season. Francis seems to be proving that he simply can't handle playing the point - look at how much his overall game is suffering this year as he's being asked to "run" JVG's offense. I find it interesting that as he tries to do the things required of a true PG, he has begun to struggle more and more. What I find particularly disturbing is that opposing teams have started to exploit his & Norris' inability to play the point. I still feel that there will be a trade of one of the guards before January as JVG now knows that this group won't get the job done.
You know I was all for the Rockets to get a veteran PG, who can take some ball handling duty away from Francis, let him & Cat concentrate more on scoring. But, I don't know if that's going to work after watched Francis closely in the last few games. Most of us know that passing, or organizing offense, is not Steve's strongest suite, that's why many here made the suggestion that we need to move him to SG. One thing I found from watching him closely is that he is not a good player WITHOUT the ball, namely, he has to have the ball in his ball to be effective, either make something happen for himself, or for others. Moving him to SG means he won't have the ball in his hands as much, which will highlight his weakness, greatly reduce his effectiveness on the court. Plus, he would get torched by much bigger & taller SG in the league. Some uses AI as an example to defend moving Francis to SG, but the 76ers are a team running around AI, so he got 90% of the offense, which always put his defender on heel, become too exhaust to attack him on the other end. Plus, AI did get post up quite often because of his height. I don't think there are any easy solution to the current Rockets' back court problem, we only can hope & pray that Steve & Cat will be able to improve their decision making, taking care of the ball soon. BTW, can any veteran Rockets fan explain why we always got SHORT back court? I really think our backcourt size has a lot to do with them unable to see the whole floor in time. --daoshi
