I am okay with shipping out Sheppard and Eason for a better single player -- I want no part of the Jalen Green show, I got to see if up close for nearly half a decade
Sheppard looked much more confident on the court if compared to last year. He had a large responsibility to cover up PG duties and did fine on that job. Not great stats, except +\- was positive. It was great to see that Ime trusted him the whole game.
Amen Thompson is a year and a half older than Reed Sheppard. Having said that, I never have expected Sheppard to be as good as Thompson ---- who would have gone #1 in the Sheppard draft and other drafts weak at the top. All Sheppard has to do is be an NBA starter in the next 18 months to justify his draft position because that draft was so soft at the top. Until Sheppard gets more consistent with his shot and his play - he is going to not make the impact needed.
He was a Rocket for 4 full seasons, and well over 300 games started. For good or bad, he is what he is when it comes to the Rockets.
Dude! You opened my eyes! It’s not what you wrote, but your profile pic. Matt Maloney, that’s what we got here!
Two bigs have been done since forever, it was just called "twin towers" back then. Hakeem and Sampson, TD and Admiral, Gasol and Bynum, even OKC have a front court of 7 footers in Chet and Harty. Most of these have been very effective and resulted in a ring. The triple tower with Brendan Haywood, Dirk Nowitzki and Tyson Chandler even beat Miami Heatles. I feel like the anti Two Big people just backed themselves into a corner snd cant admit they are wrong. Sengun just shot 5/8 from 3 but the two big destroys the spacing. Huh??? lol wtf Guys it wasnt KD, Reed, Amen and Jabari blanking their 3s its clearly the two big's fault!
What concerns me is really he hasn't shown any better than average abilities at the moment. At his size, he really needs to be truly elite in some categories to be effective in the league. If your handle is average to below average with average or below average quickness, you are always going to be a liability on offense. Steve Nash was able to do what he does because his handles are really tight and can dribble around people who are more athletic than him without picking up his dribbles and keep the possession alive. Maybe he should just focus on shooting at the moment, your pg can't be picking up their dribble at the top of the key every possession
Interestingly though, people aren't completely tearing Reed apart for being incredibly underwhelming for his pick the way they did Jalen and even Bari early on got more abuse until everybody resigned themself to him being a roleplayer. Reed's numbers are like if Jalen played a whole season with none of his good games. But worse.
I mean Jalen was also the 2nd pick in a solid draft class whereas Reed was the 3rd pick in terrible one. The expectations are justifiably lower. I think we have to be treating him as something more like a mid-first rounder than a top 3 lotto pick, honestly. That means accepting that just being a roleplayer doesn't make him a "bust". It also means he should have a shorter leash. We don't have a lot of choice but to run him out there up until December 15th, but after that if he hasn't at least shown something I don't care that much if we trade him, just like I wouldn't care that much if we cut bait on a late lotto pick who was consistently underperforming.
Even though I'm out on Jalen. The way people glaze everybody else is still pretty crazy when you compare the 30 and 40pt games on high efficiency. Jalen still has more than everybody not named Alpi combined. Like genuinely more star potential that he actually achieved than all of the rest of our young core and the scrubs we jettisoned along the way put together. It is a massive shame he never managed to iron out the crappy ones (actually about a 3rd of his games rather than a majority when you look at the numbers honestly) and then fell apart in the playoffs.
Even Bari got a LOT more hate than Reed gets with again much better performance at this same point in their careers. As a former Jalen fan I'm not sure why we're propping up a player who hasn't even remotely looked even a quarter as good as our bust did.
Reed Sheppard gets treated like a Make A Wish kid or the ball boy with a disability that the team let suit up and hit the court on Senior Night even if he’s bad, we’ll pretend he did alright and showed some “promise”
You have to look at the players in the respective drafts - and the roles that the players had right away. Jalen Green was in a very good draft, was the first high draft pick for the Rockets in over a decade -- and started every game that he played. The expectations by the organization and by proxy the fans was far higher than Reed Sheppard, who was in an underwhelming draft. The draft position only carries so much weight. With Jabari Smith, the expectations were not quite as high as Green, but he was also in a draft with Banchero, Holmgren and guys like Jalen Williams and Dyson Daniels were taken after him. It isn't a simple comparison -- the quality of drafts at the time were very different, the roles for the players were different, the expectations were/are different and the quality of teams on the court are very different.
Same. Jalen won WC player if the week a couple of times but posters here act like he is the one with Reed's nos and Reed is the one with all these flashes JG had showed.
A top 3 pick is a top 3 have you seen Buzelis play? How about AJ Wells? If Jabari was shooting 47% TS role player or not people would be tearing his ass apart.
Sure but Reed is TRASH compared to both. Look at the numbers, he was supposed to be "Cocaine Curry" or "CP3 with a better shot" people genuinely said those things. He has moments where he looks ok but look at the actual numbers. We slated Jalen for 33% and Reed would be over the moon to hit 30...
