Because one of those guys gave his all every second he was on the court and every second he was rehabbing. Whereas the other has been extensively criticized by coaches and GM's for having a poor work ethic and visibly gave up on several teams on the court. It's pretty easy to understand.
who wants to bet me they retire lebrons jersey, he put that team on the map....dan gilbert will get over his butthurtedness and realize why lebron left....living in south beach blows out living in clev and thats why no free agents wanted to join lebron, it wasnt his fault the team was in a bad city and cap hell with horrible deals like antawn jamison
No he doesn't. T-Mac was only a Rocket for 5-6 years. He only had 3-4 years where he was elite as a rocket until he declined sharply. Yao Ming played for 7-8 years. His first 3 seasons he only missed 2 games or something like that. He played more games than T-Mac as a rocket and had more elite seasons since T-Mac started to decline sharply already by his 3rd season as a Rocket. Yao Ming never got to become washed up like T-Mac. He simply could no longer play. In his season before his last season he played nearly a full season and still at an elite level. Whether you think 475 games of elite play is good enough to retire a jersey is up to you but about 200 games of elite play(T-Mac, actually less) is certainly not.
I can see Yao just on the basis of his importance to both this franchise and the NBA... and because I can't think of a nicer, more deserving guy. Most of these guys have no business having their #s retired though.
Yao, I'm 99% sure he will have his jersey retired by the Rockets, not by Morey's choice, but by Leslie. For TMac, I'm 1% sure he will have his Rockets retired. TMac turned his back on the Rockets, so I do not think he'll even be mentioned as long as Alexander owns the team. I'll be surprised, if Yao does not get his jersey retired while Lin is with the Rockets.
That's how it usually is decided... The owner, not the GM, decides the numbers of his/her team that gets retired.
So you wanna take these guys' jerseys off the rafters too? Not that I think any of the players in the original list deserves to have their numbers retired, but I do think rings are not the only way a player can become significant for a team's history. To me it's more the fact that the past 15 years have been pretty unhistoric for the Rockets!
Luckily, we already have #23 retired. Only guys deserving are: Olajuwon Murphy Tomjanovich Malone The other guy that has his number retired is Drexler, and that has a lot to do with his UH days & winning a title. Retiring Hayes would be like Drexler, in that it would have as much to do with his UH days as anything else. You will notice that every retired number we have, was part of a team that went to the NBA finals. Olajuwon/Murphy/Rudy spent over a decade with the team, and Moses won 2 MVPs.
The real question is will any team he played for retire his jersey? he burned a bunch of bridges and he never led a team to any playoff success? Toronto? Orlando? Houston? Atlanta? New York? Detroit? An easy way to figure out if they will retire his number is to see if they gave his number to someone else after he leaves the team. Did anyone give Jordan or Dream or Magic's number immediately after they left? How about Yao Ming?
Yeah, and 12 year olds without a life shouldn't be posting on them. So, you can STFU, SMD, or GTFO T-Mac was actually here about 6 years, more or less the same as Yao when you take into account Yao's injuries. Who carried the franchise when Yao was injured? Yao was only there for about 10 games out of the 22 game win streak, among other things I already explained. Again, people want to blame him for playoff failure when Yao was damn well on the same team, as well as 13 other players. People act like he turned his back on us, and he might have, but that's probably because we turned our back on him since he got injured a little bit too much. I'd be pretty pissed to if my team can't get out the first round for over 10 years, and I'm still dealing with injuries on a yearly basis.
