Terse, I'm glad to see that you realized that Luther Head, having played 2310 minutes, was a significant rookie, by your own definition. I was worried about you.
Pretty much every team, from championship teams or horrible ones, have had contributors who were their "own rookies". Charlie Ward and Patrick Ewing wer the old Knicks "own rookies". Saying "having good rookies" is key to winning NBA championship is like saying "having American players" or "someone 6'8'' or above" is key to winning it all... I can make a similarly list of "own rookies" for pretty much every team's roster from every single year... the Heat has them, the Mavs has them, and the Magic and the Bobcats have them, too. In order to say that one trait distinguishes a championship team from the rest of the league, you have to show that the championship teams tend to have it more often then the non-championship teams.
Just curious, since 1980, how many teams didn't meet the condition you described (3 year periods without a rookie getting 1000 minutes)? Let me know if I'm wrong, but I suspect that you could also use this standard to indict the behavior of horrible teams too, just change your sentence to "every worst team in the league had been able to load up on significant rookies no more than 3 years before their horrible season..."
I think you just hit the nail on the head...there is correlation between the variables in each of the above scenarios, but not necessarily causation. I would even suppose that the worst teams in the league have the most "impact rookies" on their roster in any given year. It is your Stars that get you to the show, rather they be rookies or vets...surrounded by a quality group of role players.
Vlade was pretty old at the time. Plus he was playing for Sacramento. Vlade is who LA traded to get Kobe.
The point of developing your own rookies is that they could become valuable assets that you could trade. If you're always giving away your draft picks before you can develop them, as JVG did in New York, eventually you end up with an empty cupboard.
You mean the JVG Knicks? That was my point: they traded away their draft picks in a "win now" frenzy, then had nothing to show for it. They also drafted very poorly. You need to hang onto your rookies and develop them -- but first you have to draft well.
this is a classic, "man i hate van gundy, but all these things i make up about him are refuted in my face, so i'll really reach now cause i got nothing else" thread. there is no evidence of anything here. having a rookie is needed to win a championship is just too random. btw, luther head, chuck hayes and potentially v-span and JL3 fit the bill.
They were just bad draft picks... John Wallace, Walter McCarty, Dontae Jones, John Thomas, DeMarco Johnson, Sean Marks, Fred Weiss, J.R. Koch, Donnell Harvey, basically are not worth spending any time developing... They didn't do anything elsewhere, either. It's not like they drafted Tracy McGrady and decided to trade him for Charles Oakley in order to "win now" after 1 season. Nobody is kicking themselves thinking "If we had just kept John Wallace and Walt McCArty, we'd be a dynasty". They traded scrubby picks for scrubby vets. Their problem wasn't trading their picks, their problem was they picked the wrong guys. Judging by the fact that JVG himself says he doesn't follow college ball and leaves the draft scouting to the front office here in HOU, I'd hardly imagine he'd have much say about the drafting of John Thomas and Fred Weiss. You probably can't blame the draft picks on him. You certainly cannot blame their bad personnell decision over "win now" trades of John Wallace...
No, I only need to prove that teams with 3-year (or longer) rookie droughts never win the first championship of that generation of players. Which I will do in my next post. The significance of my point is that the Rockets are likely to end up in the desert without water, if they continue to follow their "win now" philosophy.
What odd exception? Van Gundy has had really 1 rookie who deserved playing time, Luther Head, and he played him. In the first two years of his Rockets tenure, the Rockets had 0 first round picks. How are you gonna play a rookie if you don't have the picks to draft any. (And no, JVG didn't give them away, they were gone by the time he got here) As for NY, again, the problem was they didn't draft well and had no one worth any playing time in their rookie year (and were not that good after their rookie year, either).
You could said that or you can simply put it this way, Head got a lucky break with all the injuries last season, or else, he won't get that many minutes. So, the question still remain; If our players were all heathy last season, will JVG gives Head enough minutes to prove himself?
1. Between Yao in 2002 and Head in 2005, Rockets do not have a "rookie drought" of 3 years or longer. 2. The "rookie drought" of 2003 and 2004 happened due to no fault of Van Gundy's... the picks were gone before he got here. 3. The NY "rookie drought" was caused by the fact that that 1. They drafted horribly and 2. they had enough vets worth playing over these draft picks and not some sort of Van Gundy "win now" mentality 4. The NY win now mentality was there before Van Gundy arrived and remained after he left... even now, they are trying to "win now"... it's the whole Dolan regime's thinking. The problem nowadays is they take on a bunch of bloated contracts and egos without any defensive presence in the paint...
