Am I the only one that thinks that the James/Howard trade was a continuation of of a pre-arranged trade leftover from the trade deadline earlier in the year. It was created during the JVG era and we had to go through with it after all. It just doesn't seem to make any sense for us now considering our saturation of guards and our draft strategy. I am just wondering.
I'm a Mike james fan, he played great here before. Its worth a shot. Apparently the Rockets seem to want more up tempo players. Mike James shoots a good %, and that was the biggest knock on Rafer last year. It seems to be a good fit. The glut of point guards is kinda odd, but I believe the Rox brass has more inside info on the team than we do. Ala, V-Span not coming back.
It makes sense to me. If we had anybody outside of Yao and T-Mac who was capable of making things happen, we'd have beaten the Utah Jazz, we'd have beaten the Golden State Warriors and we'd have seen what happened in the semi-finals. Mike James can do that. He can take games over. Besides, while we're saturated with guards, we're not saturated with good guards.
We were not saturated with GOOD guards admittedly. Shouldn't we have waited until we knew we had an equal or better replacement for Juwan before pulling the trigger unless we had to do so for some reason.
That's the answer... James is an improvement at a weak position and getting rid of Howard is a bonus. A big bonus I might add. Now lets see the almost all star PF Morey claims to be targeting. If he can pull that off I say we had a good off season. Also Eliyahu? looks good on film maybe he makes the squad and we have enough to start the season. Rafer James and Brooks at the point, Bonzi snyder and head at the 2. TMac, Novak and Eliyahu a the 3, Near All Star, Chuck, Landry at the 4 and Yao, Tsakalidas at the 5.
Power forwards are at a premium this off-season. Rashard Lewis sure picked a damn good time to be a free agent...
Rockets have all offseason to replace Howard. Hopefully, the Rockets can find someone better than Howard or at least someone who fits with Yao better.
Last summer it seemed that we had a glut of PG's too, but then we found out during the season that Lucas and Spanoulis couldn't play, and that Head is not a competent PG, so Rafer was the only PG we could count on. This cost us dearly during the Utah series. Now we have 2 serviceable NBA point guards (James, Alston), and playing both of them about 20-25 minutes each will help keep them fresh and performing effectively. IMO Rafer was worn down from playing big minutes all season.
You can think of it as addition by subtraction. Howard had some of the worst +/- numbers in the league for a big minutes player. Anything he got on offense he would give back twice on defense. Of course he was the "consummate professional".
I think on Adelmans first day on the job, somebody stole his reading glasses and got traded as punishment
With Vspan gone, Luther not being good enough to be a PG, and Sura retired, we dont have as many PG as everyone thinks. Also, people are upset we didnt draft Mcroberts, Big Baby, or splitter, but apparently the guy we wanted most was Landry and they did land him for what should be a late 2nd round pick next year. He was clearly the pf the rox brass wanted most.
Even with all the guards on the roster, I think Mike James is pretty sure to be in the rotation. I don't know if Juwan would be. He wasn't last year until Yao was injured.
Exactly. Hell, we were saturated with guards last year too, and Rafer played 44.1 minutes per game against Utah. Rafer.
