SI Enemy Lines on Rockets

Some interesting comments there on Brooks. Thanks for posting.

 

one of the very insightful offseason articles. good post.

 

That's got to be the first time I heard about Brent Barry in a while.

also, I hope defenders take his advise and Give AB the outside shot. AB will make it rain.

 

I was on board till he started with they have excellent players who would be great on other teams!

 

I like his take on Battier.

leebigez, are you listening?

 

I don't think this guy gives Brooks enough credit shooting wise.

 

I'm going to say that this guy wrote a decent article. Reasonable.

 

"You could put him on the Lakers today and they'd be the favorite to win; he'd be better for them than Artest will be."

Why are we to assume that this guy knows more than the Lakers do about how to assemble a winning basketball team?

"Think of all the teams that could use him -- the Spurs, Lakers, Boston, and he'd be great for Portland. I can't believe teams don't try harder to trade for him."

He can't believe it, huh? I guess it can't be that those teams actually know what they're doing, and they simply don't value Battier as highly as the media and some NBA people value him. No, it can't be that. Clearly the Lakers, Celtics, Spurs, etc, are all wrong, and this guy is right.

 

Topfive, I can bet you that writer hasn't watched shane play nearly as much as I have. A great cutter? Are u kidding me? A great post up player? Why do teams put pg's on him? How can kyle freaking korver guard shane? Gimme a break.

 

Or maybe it's that to this point, Shane has been absolutely unavailable and those teams never had a shot at getting him. It took a top-10 draft pick to pry him from Memphis.

 

Haha, I was kind of thinking the same thing. It was still an insightful article IMO. Thanks, OP.

 

this is exactly what a lot of us have been saying since the trade. we didn't object to shane batter in principle - everyone appreciates what he brings to the table. the problem was that we traded our only real asset to make this guy our 3rd best player. that wasn't going to work.

 

Actually, it has worked. Battier has given us everything they were looking for and more. We've got $40 million + worth of contracts on the bench.

 

Why do you assume the Lakers wouldn't want Shane, if Shane was a free agent and Artest was still under contract with us?

Shane wasn't a free agent, so they couldn't sign him.

 

Shane does have vaule. Every NBA writer talks about it on their weekly chats.

 

That writer hasn't been watching the Rockets much. I don't see Shane cutting or posting up. He just runs to the 3pt line and waits for the pass. JVG tried to have Shane post up in some games. JVG gave up on having Shane do that again, after Shane failed to make an impact. That's why we don't see Adelman doing it with Shane.

 

The part about playing the '4' and defending the '4' was also dead wrong. They tried that experiment the first week of 2006 and it was a complete and utter disaster.

 

You mean the first game of 2006, when Shane was forced to guard Okur (and did a fine job of it) because Yao can't guard the three-point line?

I think Shane can hold his own guarding most fours. But we'll lose a bit on the rebounding without a true big at that position, and we'll also lose his perimeter defense. That's why JVG decided to move him to the 3.

 

You could be right, but the way I remember it, Shane was guarding Boozer and didn't have the size to compete.