If that's the case then I guess we should thank him for making one of the most lopsided trades in team history when we acquired TMac. Nope, he doesn't get the credit, CD does. Because CD made the trade.
I just find it hard to believe that Juwan was such a irreplaceable piece for not 1, 2, 3, but 4 damned consecutive years. Yes, the PFs were just falling off planet earth, left and right.
After 46 games last year, the Rockets were 29-17 Right now they're at 26-20, 3 games worse. Not as bad a falloff as people act like it is Take last year's 29-17 record and apply to today, the Rockets would be a only a 7TH seed. Not sure if Van Gundy would still get support or not. Probably not
Actually, I do credit Gundy AND CD for bringing in Tmac. I have no problem crediting him (although who wouldnt say no to that trade? ). I also have no problem crediting him for instilling discipline and defense in the ball club. What I find humorous is that Gundy apologists cannot see his obvious faults.
Look, I'm with you. I never liked Juwan either. But his contract made him pretty much untradeable....he was filler in the TMac trade. We could have traded him for James I guess before the trade deadline last season but then we would have Chuck as our only PF. His contract ate up a lot of cap room and his play made him tough to take on...that contract he has was terrible
I'm not a JVG apologist. I understand that he was stubborn, he ran a slow offense, he was an eternal pessimist, etc...AND he didn't win in the playoffs. I was all for a regime change after we lost against Utah, though I don't really blame him for the loss, but he's the HC, and something had to be done. I have no problem with him getting criticisms. I even said in this thread that I think that RA has done a better job of in-game adjustments. I just get annoyed when people make things up that just simply are not true in order to rip the guy.
That was part of it. The other part was that Gundy liked/trusted Juwan, so he was not desperate to get rid of him. He should have been desperate but he wasn't. 4 years is plenty of time to get rid of an unwanted contract. Rockets found a way to get rid of Swift within one year, who Gundy despised. If Gundy didn't like Juwan as much as he did, he wouldn't have lasted 4 years in Houston.
Donkey gets so defensive when it comes to St. Gundy. I know its hard to believe but he did have flaws, Donkey.
You forgot Rockets "stole" Swift and then traded for Battier and draft Novak (pick 32) to try to upgrade PF position. But none worked. Just like this year, they got MJ and SF3 to upgrade pg position and neither worked. But lucky, they don't sell Rafer and they got three Rookies all fit in well and Bonzi is back to rotation.
last year's team also had less talent and depth than this years team. Last year Yao missed 34 games, almost half the season and Tmac missed 9 games. Last year we averaged more points per game and gave up less points per game. Maybe by the end Adelman will have lived up to his expectations. I haven't ever called for him to be fired. In fact I expected him to do better than JVG just based on the off season roster moves. It's just amusing that anything positive that happened under JVG is credited to the players and GM while anything negative is held against the coach.
John Lucas III got minutes and plenty of opportunities under JVG and he isn't half the player Brooks is.
its such a ridiculous myth that JVG wont play young guys and has been flat out disproved, but these people are too stubborn, ignorant, or both to see the facts.
Wrong again. Show me where JVG said Juwan was all we needed at PF. If JVG thought Juwan was all we needed, why wasn't he in the rotation in the beginning of the season? Explain that one. Oh, and it has been confirmed that JVG wanted to trade JUWAN for MIKE JAMES but pulled back because he thought it would ruin the chemistry. So wait, he wanted to trade "the guy that he thought was all we needed at PF"? I guess you almost tend to forget that when Yao went down, Deke and Juwan stepped up and helped us win lots of games. It's also kind of hard to upgrade positions with no cap space and no trade assets. What did you expect the Rockets to do? Sure JVG had a hand in the roster management but at the end of the day, CD and Les had the final say. But I guess we have to blame JVG for all the bad roster moves and draft picks after the Dream era right?
on CLUTCHFANS , we have no qualification to bash on JVG , for this board itself is JVGlish , JVG forbid rookies start ,here forbid rookies open a new thread , it dooms to be a drama of a rookie , say hello to all rookies and ADELMAN.
I disagree, but anyway, we can go back and forth on individula players all we want. It's pointless. I was talking about the big picture. Generally speaking, JVG will play play rookies. He does give everyone a shot at the beginning of the season. The problem is that (A)He tends to leash in the rookies by cutting down their mistakes, which also cuts down their freedom. (B)He has the tendency to pull people out for making mistakes on defense and turning the ball over, which all rookies have a tendency to do. Especially with rookie bias from refs. The thing about Juwan Howard isn't that JVG plays favorite, but that Juwan doesn't make the mistakes JVG cares about. He takes good shots.... he just can't make them. He doesn't turn it over... he just doesn't throw good passes either. He doesn't make mistakes on defense... he's just not gifted enough anymore to play GOOD defense. So like I said, he turns rookie into one-dimensional robots so they won't do anything wrong. And wants to make sure that everything is mistake free come crunch time. He also has to maintain a certain level of defense, which prevents defensive meltdowns like we've been prone to having way too many times this year. You may notice that when our rookies are in(Brooks for Alston, Scola/Landry for Hayes), our defense falters a bit. JVG would've rectified this "mistake" by putting back our good defensive players. Whereas Adelman just let them played through it.
In the big picture, JLIII was viewed by many as the most NBA ready rookie on the roster. He was the best the Rockets had (other than Luther) and he got his opportunity. Where is he playing now since he is no longer under JVG? Maybe the truth is that this team has not had a decent rookie since Yao was drafted and JVG did the team a service by not forcing players into the rotation that do not belong in the league (or at least in a winning team's rotation).
CD and JVG both sucked, that's the explanation for 4 years of no winning in the post season, and a roster that had no depth nor prospects for the future at the end of it. Under the tenure of CD/JVG, we couldn't win now, and we had no future. CD has been a p***y yielding to JVG's over demand for over the hill scrubs that don't stick long ever since they began to sign a brigade of the ex Knicks. Over so many years, CD never had a team whose bench couldn't score a single point in a playoff game until JVG came along. To repeat and insist policies is what a production line manager does, to change along with changes and create new policies is what a real CEO does. JVG is a production line manager with a bull horn promoted to CEO. There's no Rick Adelman level of flexibility of maturing rookies in NBDL and give them second chances. When rookies don't do well, JVG did two things, he either stuck them to the end of bench growing cow webs all over themselves, then starting a rusty rookie against western powerhouses like the Pheonix to prove his point that the rookie suck, or better yet, choice no.2, get raw young players traded for over the hill, ready to play scrubs who disappear the next year. JVG is a production line blue collar manager promoted to CEO. He doesn't adjust to changes, he never wowed us with a timeout.There's no variations in his offense. He only knows to repeat what he knew, and he didn't know too much to begin with. JVG needs to read and reread "who moved my cheeze". A winner is made of flexibility and resolution, a combination of two opposites. It's hard to achieve the blend of two opposites at the same time, which is why winners are rare. JVG didn't have much capacity for flexibility, but an abundance of resolution. When resolution is a good thing, overdoing it turned it into rigidity and stubborness. JVG stole a page from CEO Riley's defensive playbook and maxmized it by repetition. He maximized repetition by applying the approach of low mistakes, low risk and low gains. He then maximized the low mistakes part by over relying on veterans, and compensated for the low gains part of this approach by emphasizing efforts. What he did reflected this line of thinking.Low mistakes high efforts scrubs can crank out enough output to outwork the lazier and higher mistakes teams that made up the majority of this league, in the regular season, but succumbed to well coached, talented, low mistakes, movtivated and intense teams in the playoffs. In the regular season, we regularly won over the bad teams and regulared bowed to the good team under his leadership. This pattern is what JVG did to put food on his table, yet a pattern that never had much potential to begin with.
