Big M...good freakin call! a W is a W no matter how you slice it. we should punk the bad teams. that is expected! There is no doubt the Rox have some problems, but come on...criticism is fine, but coaching changes, major player trades...blablabla....make those calls when we are 3-7, not 2-2. I am not saying that this team is doing well. Let's be critical, not hypercritical at this point. They lose tonight,,,turn it up an notch.......
Sane: withya on the improvement, but if you look at the last two-three weeks of the exibition season, we were playing without major contributors and quite frankly, Cat and Steve have reverted to their own comfort zone. Because KT is clanking non-stop with the finger issue, Rice has the tweaks, Mo has the ganga issue, TMO has the ankle problem, Yao is still adjusting and Mooch is clanking too, Steve and Cat have to score themselves...if you look at the team, everyone else is shooting 30%. Camp started so promising and really ended in disaster. You cannot expect this team to gel until everyone is healthy, sans TMO. I have an insider that tells me Rudy and the staff have been really pressing the team to focus, but until this week, 2-3 players in the 7-man rotation have been missing...so this is exhibition season for them right now..... Let's see how we gel when Mo comes back and we put 5-6 games in there with him, Rice and KT. We have gotten nothing from the forwards except one nice game from Griffin!
montgo, I agree with all of what you said. I must say though, that I've very frustrated by our play. The players playing together right now all had training camp together, didn't they? They were all (except for Ming) participating in ALL of training camp. I guess I'm dissapointed to see that we could've had a very good start, very possibly 4-0, and it would've made our seaosn so much easier on MoT and Ming. They would've been more comfortable coming back and could've been given some meaningless minutes to get back into game shape. But the way it is, if we lose one game, we're below .500. That's not good. We're better than that. We're better than Seattle. Right now, we're surviving on the sheer dominating force that is Steve Francis. What if he has a bad game? If he starts missing, then who's going to help us out? I agree that it's early, and there a lot of kinks in our game still. But all this shouldn't prevent us from playing tougher D, and it doesn't mean that we've been playing well. I am looking forward to Mo coming back. His 1st quarters can be a real asset to this team. If they can get Rice going, he can eb just as good an asset. Hopefully, the Warriors scrappy defense won't throw us off yet again.
Why get upset. 2-2 is not all that bad. We could be the 2-4 Lakers... A win tonight and some progress from the rest and practice and we will be fine...
No, the way to combat pessimism is to actually talk some basketball. I mean the nuts and bolts of the Rockets games. This will make the discussions more objective. If you just say things like "Calm down, the Rox are doing fine." I can guarantee you the pessimists are going to jump on you the second they see it.
