July 9th is not March 1st

No LMA. No Llull. No “insert guy who got above the non-taxpayer MLE, and whose contract the Rockets could not have possibly matched”.

What the heck is Daryl Morey doing? Taking selfies on all the iPads he didn’t have the chance to send to prospective free agents? Making Jon Snow sad mopey faces with CyberX at the Toyota Center? Ignoring the Rockets obvious holes in the name of #flexibility and a fool-hardy chase after Kevin Durant in 2016? The West is too tough, and every game counts! We need to get a PG right now; all the good ones are signing!

Step back from the ledge. Put away the crazy pills, take a few plays off, Champ. There’s no trophy for winning the offseason, or having the best Vegas futures odds, or being the number #1 rated overall team in NBA 2K when the game ships. Rosters aren’t locked in until the trade deadline and the day waived free agents become ineligible for the playoffs.

Last year, the Rockets started Tarik Black 12 times in their first 25 games. Isaiah Canaan started 9 games. Joey Dorsey, 12. Francisco Garcia was a 15 mpg player through December. Papanikolaou was a 20 mpg player through January. This team had holes bigger than (your favorite porn star, Greece’s economy, what Demarco Murray was given to run through last year). And all they did was win, win, win, until Morey used his piles of second rounders, trade exceptions, and his unused bi-annual exception to land Corey Brewer, Pablo Prigioni and Josh Smith during the season.

If he had followed the advice of the chicken littles here and made his moves before the season started, the bi-annual gets spent on Marion/Nelson/Okafor, http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=256590 and the trade exception gets you Brandon Bass http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=259690. Hell, if you listened to some posters, Capela was a bust after his debut, and should have been cut or traded immediately.

Sometimes the best move you make is to let the season develop, and see what shakes out. On July 9th, teams still need to sell season tickets, and everyone is undefeated. Every rookie is going to come in and make an impact immediately, and every veteran who signs for the minimum just had a bad year in a bad situation, and their health and athleticism is going to magically return. Prices are at their highest, and teams with cap room are desperate to spend it. Teams with malcontents can pretend that the situation will improve once training camp starts, and you can totally run out 2 centers together, or 3 point guards.

This is a great team already, with amazing chemistry, whom we haven’t seen fully healthy. But they’ve got alligator blood, and incredible mental fortitude. No one gives up, no one blames injuries. Just next man up, you’d better be ready. No matter the holes, no matter the odd fits, I really do believe that they’ve earned the benefit of the doubt that they can persevere through adversity temporarily.

25 games in, 50 games in, things can change very quickly. Teams throw in the towel, coaches get fired, tempers boil over, injuries happen, guys get old, rooks and young guys make veterans expendable. The cost of trades in-season, and the players available, change. Is it really that unreasonable to think that the Raptors go into the tank and might consider handing the reins over to their newly signed Canadian hero? Or Mudiay impresses and makes Ty Lawson available? Darren Collison gets lost in the tire fire of Sacramento? Isaiah Thomas does what Isaiah Thomas does and pisses off his teammates for hogging the ball and winning all the minutes, pushing out one of the Celtics’s tweener guards? What if one of the Rockets young players breaks out? Capela becomes the Swiss Guard, Terrence Jones learns to “drop dat ass”, or Dekker is actually Tayshaun Prince, and two or three of them can be a godfather offer for that long chased 3rd star, or make the guys in front of them tradeable?

I have no idea which, if any of those scenarios might play out. The likelihood of any one of them happening is low. But the probability of something happening is nearly absolute. Teams will look vastly different on February 18th. I don’t think the magic trade to push the Rockets over the hump is out there right now, but I have the utmost confidence that Morey and the rest of the Rockets brass already have every one of a million scenarios playing out like the War Games supercomputer. Throughout Daryl Morey’s time with the Rockets, he has never failed to make a deal at the trade deadline. Great GMs just put themselves in the best situation possible, with the understanding that a lot of the time, it comes down to factors outside of their control. Deals that are 75% likely to happen don’t materialize, or the Commissioner of the league vetoes a trade. But Morey hasn't done things so outlandish that he's lost my trust in the process. Maybe he will. Maybe he's been playing the long con. And maybe Beverley gets hurt again, or Dwight can't make it through 82 anymore, or LMA eats D-Mo alive. But I'm willing to wait until the Rockets get officially faded and are truly playing poorly before I start panicking.

Sit back, and enjoy the ride. We have a great GM, a generational superstar, and the one guy who definitively chose Houston. Basketball matters again in Houston in June for the first time in a very, very long time, and it's gonna be a long season. There's no need to have everything in place before the league year has even begun.