Yeah, if it sucks this hard for us, look at Dallas. They are the queen of parting gifts this season, the best record, the mvp, and not even past the first round.
We failed to get out of the first round, again, and this was our year? No. If Dallas meets GSW in the playoffs again next season, assuming Nellie stays and everything is the same, Dallas will get owned again. That's just how it is. They got unlucky by having the Warriors as their opponent. Had they not, they would have beaten the Jazz in the second round. Just because we match up with the Spurs in the regular season doesn't mean anything. If you realize we didn't get out of the first round, and the team we played is going to lose to the Spurs, how are we supposed to beat the Spurs? We wouldn't stand a chance.
i honestly dont think we wouldve beaten Golden State if we had advanced. Utah beat Golden State because of their great interior presence and rebounding. Our interior presence isn't as great as Utah's nor is our rebounding. No, Yao is not as good as Boozer, Millsap, Harpring, and Okur. We would've been run out of their building. I think we would've lost by at least 50 points at Golden State so i'm glad we didn't advance to save embarassment.
I agreed wholeheartly, this was the season for rockets to have an easy roads to the WCF. This was a chance for the rockets with short handed players to be able to go all the way to WCF. Not saying rockets can't do it in the future, but it would be much tougher to do so. We would have to face Dallas, Suns, Spurs, and a better mature Jazz. We would really need to adde couple of great pieces in order to get that going. This was the year that will haunt the rockets... and JVG.
We would have lost to the Spurs in 5 games, just like the Jazz will. We would have overachieved by reaching the WCF, and JVG would have probably been back. Still, it would have been a fun ride while it lasted.
Denial is what you call it when you think we were light years away from beating the Jazz. The Rox played like crap, vis a vis their regular season performance, and lost largely on unforced errors, in my opinion. In a seven game series with most of the games coming down to the final few minutes, this makes a difference.
Only the games we won(and game 7) came down to the wire. The first two games we would not have won had Kirilenko been a factor. We also had homecourt advantage and still lost. The Jazz are definitely the better team, and not by a slim margin. Their bench players could be starting for us. McGrady and Yao have to go ballistic if we want to compete with top of the 2nd tier (Jazz), we are light years away from being elite.
good points. light years may be a stretch, but the rockets do have a lot of work. and sam...give utah some credit. They stuck it to tmac and yao and those guys just couldnt stick it back.
Either way the whole series came down to a few minutes. Also you forget, we had a shot late in game 6 and flushed it down the toilet with a stupid series of quick shots and bad decisions, mostly by McGrady (that was where Utah was in the penalty because of Tracy's drivingwe had 5 straight chances to take the lead early in the 4th, and Tracy freaking pulls up for a 24 foot three pointer with 18 seconds on the shot clock.... ...then turns it over next series, etc etc etc) Game 3 was also there for the taking, both teams were awful through 3 periods. But if the Jazz were so much better than us, how come they had a worse record (while being much healthier througout the year)? And still you concede it game down to a few minutes. The bottom line is that despite the Jazz' talent superiority, all 7 games and 28 periods down to a few critical moments where our supposed superstars didn't deliver.
thats why i dont think, like others, we need DRASTIC changes or another legit good player. if tmac makes his freaking jumpers (and i don't care if u still want him to drive, what makes him good is his all around offensive game and his J failed him), we'd won. if yao was not so soft, we'd won. but despite those 2 things, we still were a rebound away from winning it. so had our role players make 40-45$ of their shots, we'd win. we're SO CLOSE to breaking through right now. if we add another shooter (MIKE JAMES), we're gonna go far. PF is harder to improve b/c not alot out there that are easy to get. next yr we'll be better for 2 main reasons: 1) tmac will train to work himself back into a lethal offensive weapon 2) yao will learn to be more aggressive and get good position every time utah is not better than us. hell, spurs aren't better than us.
It came down mainly to coaching. They had the better coach in Jerry Sloan. He's been running the same pick and roll system for 20 years, yet no team has been able to stop it in that time. Yes, Boozer came out playing like a freak. However, it seemed to me our coaching staff never made up a game plan to stop or slow him down. It was like they just expected him to slow down on his own. You would think a coach who is supposed to be an expert who preaches defense all year round would have made a game plan and done something about Boozer to force the rest of the team to beat us. It was a pretty even match up but i still think we had the edge. We we're favored to win the series weren't we? They had more depth than us like every other team out there, however we still had the 2 best players on the entire court and are both top 10 in the NBA.
u see why the spurs can beat the jazz so easy? they have more playmakers. but they also have shooters. but more importantly, THEY ACTUALLY MOVE. us, give ball to tmac or yao, stand still at the 3pt line and wait for the open shot. when u rely on the 3, and as cold as we were, ur gonna die.
We can move as well, not like Phoenix or Dallas of course. Just because you only see Yao kick it out to the 3 point line, doesn't mean he can't get it to others. Remeber his crazy passing skills we saw in year 1, that JVG made him stop? Next year you will see random players cutting to the lane at various times and angles when Yao has the ball in his hands. He'll probably do some behind the back and no look passes and all of a sudden we have a guy charging to the basket with the ball undefended, rather than standing still behind the 3 line wondering whether Yao will pass or shoot it.
Actually, 1 team a year (at least) has stopped it well enough each of those 20 years. By the way, that's not a tribute to coaching, that's a tribute to players. If players are running the same plays and the opposigion knows they are running them, it depends on who out executes each other to stop it.
