okay, full disclosure, I was a little more down with the gay deal after the bonzi deal. now there's a "hind" sight
Durvasa, people dont believe me when i say i didnt have a problem with the trade itself. I've said many times i watched shane from college to pro and liked his game. Before the draft i wanted brewer before any other player. My problem was the cost. I just knew we were getting something else.When they threw in swift and got nothing back, i thought that was a problem. So now I'm telling myself, maybe shane will do better offensively with yao and tracy and the attention they get. I started rewatching memphis games and saw a guy who would defend,post smaller players, cut to the hoop,run the court and all that stuff. When he turned into strictly a spot up shooter, i became a shane must go guy. He settled and became uber passive and became a detriment offenssively to the team.
The question is, when exactly did Gay become a competent NBA player? He wasn't a polished gem like Brandon Roy when he arrived, statistics have consistently shown that Gay had been among the worst NBA defenders in the entire league during his first few seasons. Even if you don't believe statistics like Old School, you only need to look at how Memphis the prior year with Battier in it reached the playoffs while Memphis with Gay landed smack dab in the lottery when they essentially had the same roster those two years except they swapped Gay for Battier. So to argue that we would have had a better record had we kept Gay is illogical, we would have less team success had we not traded for Battier. Flash forward now, do you think we would keep Gay knowing he would be making an inordinate amount of money? Gay's game is exactly like Tmac, except is he has even worse defense and no playmaking ability. Exactly like Tmac he shoots fadeaways instead of driving inside, and he avoids contact even more than Tmac does. You're gonna pay double digit to the max for a player like that? If he had been here we would have let him walk or trade him, which is exactly what Memphis is planning to do now.
Now you are shifting from saying Gay was better than Battier. Yes, Rudy Gay had a better future than Shane Battier, on hindsight. Nobody knew what Gay would turn out. Remember, he was not a "can't miss" kind of player like a LeBron. What I tried to point out was that Battier gave us at least 3 solid years. If we had better luck, we could have been contending all those year. Too bad our stars were never healthy together. BTW, "given McGrady's injury history" is a hindsight convenience. The year before the Battier trade was the ONLY season in McGrady's career (so was Yao's for that matter) at that point in which he missed a significant number of games. Did you honestly predict that he would have something like the 08-09 season? The Rockets were not looking for a McGrady replacement, like some of you were trying to paint Gay as, any time soon then. He was only 27. We were set for becoming a title contender that year, and an unproven rookie was not going to be better than Battier for that role.
This was really one thing I never understood about Battier. When we got him had potential to be a borderline star. I don't know why he limited himself to being a Chuck hayes when he could do so much more before in Memphis.
No one was saying to break Tracy and Yao. People were asking to surround them with talent. Reasons why people questioned the trade: 1) A third scorer was needed. Someone who could create his own shot and create offense for others to take pressure off of Yao and Tracy. Battier did not fit the bill. 2) People were worried about Battier's performance in playoffs based on his history till that point. His first playoff series with the Rockets was a disaster. 3) People thought they overpaid for Battier. Rockets went through a year of hell to fall into lottery. The payoff for a lottery should have been talent. Past Yao, Tracy, and Mavs, Rockets were extremely thin on talent compared to Suns and Spurs - teams that were contending at the time. Battier did not bring in the talent infusion. He is a role player who is completely dependent on star players for offense which cost Rockets a lottery pick. All three were legitimate concerns and which have been proven to be true. Neither Gay or Battier was the answer. However Gay was an appreciating asset while Battier was a depreciating asset. I would lean towards the former. The real answer was Brandon Roy (short term and long term) which Rockets could have had if not for the Gundy factor.
Good summary for the concerns. Fair enough. As durvasa pointed out, they brought in Bonzi Wells and Snyder. Wells was a proven scorer who could create his own shot. Too bad he didn't come ready to play. Which do you think would improve the team's chance for being a contender supporting TMac and Yao? Battier+Wells or Gay+Wells? His first playoff series was not a disaster. He played solid defense as usual and shot 19-43 from downtown. He was brought in to play defense and spread the floor for Yao. He did exactly that. I initially thought that they overpaid for Battier as well. But later I realized that the Swift "throw-in" was actually the sweetener ON THE GRIZZLIES SIDE. Signing Stro at the MLE was a big mistake. They needed someone to take him out of their hands. Yes, they needed more talent. But they needed veteran talent because they thought the Yao-McGrady tandem was ripe for contention. ... and the Juwan factor. We totally agree on this point. :grin:
I say it over and over, shane was a basketball player in memphis. If u just look at his shot distribution,his points were divided into 1/3's. He would get those 10-12 pts equal, but since being a rocket, he only scores from 3. so when he's not getting open looks,he's useless. Utah found this chink early so they tilted to tracy,played yao physical,andplayed a 1/2 step closer to the shooters. Shane couldve had easy baskets against Utah if he wouldve had some kind of agressiveness,but he didnt. I saw a role player afraid to step up and make plays like some of our championship role players. Since then, ive wanted him off the rockets. I never thought he was going to be a star,but i did think he would be a solid 12-15ppg guy with the easy plays yao and tracy were creating for him. Maybe that was my fault thinking he could be that kind of guy. Instead, we had to watch rafer trying to step up.
I defend him because he is an integral piece of the championship puzzle. Ariza in LA, Posey in BOS, Bowen in SA, Prince in DET ... I could go on and on. A perimeter stopper is a must. Not to mention how important he is in spacing the floor for Yao. The move to trade for him after we just missed getting Roy was a sound one. Not only did we get our stopper, but we unloaded an albatross of a player in Stromile Swift. The move I wish we could undue was signing Stro. I will admit that if you are gonna trade Shane, the time to do it is this season or over the summer. (we aren't winning a champ in the near future it seems) I disagree that he is near done; Bowen played til he was 38 and was still very effective. And didn't Kobe just say that no one guards him better than Shane?
My own words were never that i was a hater. I wrote i was hating on you. It's your sig, at least get it right. I would want anyone who could help the team. I wouldnt mind Brandon Roy, rudy fernandez, rashard lewis, a healthy francis and cuttino, a healthy tmac, etc. But i dont dwell on it and bring it up in every single thread that is related to them and make that an overwhelming bulk of my posts. At some point you gotta realize it was a gamble they felt was necesary and it didnt pay off, but at the same time it wasnt such a disaster as you try to make it seem. We've had worse.
I would venture a guess that he and Jeff discussed what his role would be, and he adjusted his game to what the coach envisioned. Random thought - we are all forgetting that Jeff prolly wouldn't have even played Rudy much his first 1.5 to 2 years. JVG had a biyg problem with players who had "motor" and or intelligence issues
We would be contenders with the team that we currently have, but not with the team that we had when we acquired him. He was not the missing piece, and that's usually the time when you trade young talent for a player like him. We weren't a contending team before or after that trade, even when we were fully healthy.
I do have to give you those points, as they're entirely accurate and I realize that Gay didn't become the player that he is until this year, but I remember, as do you I'm sure, that what this team badly needed was an athletic wing. It's okay that you don't like Gay's game, and I know that Morey doesn't either, but why not go ahead and take an athletic player like Sefolosha at that point, who Morey did covet, and who did have the athleticism that this team needed. At that point in time, Mac was starting to lose his explosiveness and he did shoulder too much of the load both defensively and offensively, which is why Battier was brought in. You know, it's not that Battier is a bad player, I know that he's not, but he was certainly not enough to fill this team's needs. Sefolosha wasn't the answer either, but we could have traded down and still got him and another player who could have contributed, and if nothing else, I'm sure that other teams would have taken Gay and given us more for him. I realize that we had to unload Stro, but we could have gotten more than Battier for him. Was Battier a VanGundy player? Yes he was. Is he a good player? Excellent, and I like what he's teaching Buddinger as well. Having said that, he is on the decline now and he didn't get it done at all. He was part of that disaster where four players scored against the Jazz one game. I think that even though Rudy wasn't a great player then, he or another player like him might have done something off of the bench, just like Mobley and Dickerson contributed when they were rookies. There just had to be another way and I think that most people are upset that Battier seemed to be a desperation move of sorts. We could have even gotten Rondo that year in the 2006 draft, which I and some others vouched for. There were other options that would have possibly been more viable while filling needs specific to that team without losing much.
Im not sure why fans see the battier pick up as a third scorer or say we needed a third scorer. We really didnt. At least not what a third scorer is now, which is a Manu or ray allen. Nowadays that third guy is an all-star. That's NOW. Fans compare the "third scorer" role NOW with the "third guy/scorer" battier was brought in to be, but it's not the same role. Back then the team wasn't being built around the 3 star mold, but the shaq-Kobe mold. With the lakers it's was fisher who was that "third guy", not an all-star. Battier was rought in to be that guy. Unfortunately shortly after the trend slowly started to change and teams acquired players or groomed them to become that third "star". I know durvasa has brought up bonzi, and it's a good point to make that bonzi was the scorign help that was really brought in, not shane...but i dont think it was a move made because the team though it needed big scoring. Bonzi just came very cheap and was a spurs-killer, you can't turn down that kind of addition. I think the team expected Yao to grow and become a 30ppg player and tmac would still hover around 25ppg and all they'd need around them would be role guys to pitch in a few points here and there...but it didnt work out.
I understand what you said, that's exactly what the problem with the Ming-Mac combo was: insufficient offensive power. However, as another poster already mentioned, we weren't working with a "Big 3" paradigm, our whole strategy was based on having 2 dominant guys: the Kobe-Shaq model for success. Mac and Yao are supposed to provide all the offensive powers we needed. As far as a 3rd scorer was concerned, you seem to forget we signed Bonzi Wells and Kirk Snyder to help us out as well (as Durvasa already pointed out). Theoretically, that's already more than enough offensive power, what we needed was a "glue guy" who can fill the holes in the rotation,which is what Battier was. What we didn't need was yet another offensive player who was inferior to the players we had at the time. As another poster already said, the moves were made with the assumption Mac and Ming were healthy. Mac was only 27 at the time and Yao was injured due to a freak injury. Nobody could have foreseen 111 would be Ralph Samson part II.
