I'm kind of tired of all these people who keep second guessing the trade just because franchise is playing better right now, people everything will work out in the end, T-Mac and Yao will gel just give it some time folks.
even if T-Mac and Yao don't gel...there's nothing that says keeping francis and yao together would have given you a ring. my take on the trade was that the rockets played their very best basketball against the Lakers...and it wasn't good enough. they were out in the first round, and i don't think they were ever going to play much better than they did then. so you can keep being "good"..or you can be bold and try to be "great." you might lose...but you tried. that's the nature of every human endeavor. and let's be real here..the magic aren't a championship team. they're a nice little team...they'll win a series in the playoffs, perhaps. but we weren't going to get grant hill, steve francis, the #1 draft pick and cat on the rockets next season...so the two are incomparable.
no it wont, ROCKETS SUX and their the most boring team in the league. Oh and BTW, if they keep losing, alot of their National TV game's will be taken away and giving to more better and entertaining teams. Ive seen it happen, trust me.
I don't understand when people say this. If you think the Rockets weren't going to play any better than they did, then that means you think that Yao would not make any significant improvements in the near future. If Yao doesn't make any significant improvements, then I don't think the Rockets ever have a chance of playing that much better...even with T-Mac.
it's not just yao, though. this team kept making the same mistakes over and over and over again. even pre-yao. they made those same mistakes in some of those playoff games, as well. and you're right...at this point, it's entirely possible we've seen Yao's best. i'm not saying that's necessarily the case..but it's entirely possible. my problem with yao at this point, is it seems to me the change necessary is an internal one...an attitude change. i'm not sure that's going to change. funny because the attitude change was exactly what hakeem needed, too. he went from being overly aggressive to being assertive in finding his place in the game. yao needs to go the other direction, it seems to me.
Really? I doubt that, considering that the Regular season Yao (pre April fatigue wall) vs. LA was vastly different from playoffs (post April fatigue wall) Yao vs. LA.
i don't think the rockets are entirely yao ming, though. and i think the playoff level lakers turned up their game...the rockets did too. it wasn't enough. i didn't get the impression this team was gonna come back and play any better than that.
No, they weren't entirely Yao Ming - in fact what little success we had against the Lakers in the post season was largely due to the Rockets perimeter players if you recall. The fact remains that the quantitative difference between the Rockets success against the Lakers the past two seasons in the regular season and their playoff performance was dominant performances by Mr. Yao Ming in the regular season that were nowhere to be seen in the playoffs - for whatever reason.
5 stars for this thread. I'm not a big Van Gundy supporter but the 'sky is falling' crowd seems to think that this year's team is a finished product. It's not. It was never supposed to be in the first place. The TMac trade wasn't done so we can win a championship the next year. It was done to give us a 1-2 punch for years to come. You can't build a championship team from scratch in 1 year. We gutted the team over the summer and we're basically starting from scratch. But the foundation is there ie. T-Mac and Yao. That's why we did the trade IMO. To build a foundation. Not to win 60 games and a championship the very next year. I don't like losing any more than you guys and I don't like JVG, but give it some time.
I agree with you that we should give this more time but with some people like this genius... ...it just seem IQ's have dropped around here. The Rox will improve, period. Can you imagine this board if we had not pulled off the T-Mac trade? They would have been screaming bloodly murder everytime T-mac did anything worth of note. Please people, let get ahold of our heads and be TRUE fans and weather the full NBA season before we start this "fire" "trade" torrents.
Isn't it ironic that in the beginning everyone called it the T-Mac trade, but now it seems common to call it the Francis trade. I don't know about you, but that tells me alot.
We wouldnt be 6-9. We would prolly be a good 10-5, I miss watching rocket highlights over and over on ESPNNEWS .
And you know? It would probably be the same people that are starting all the threads about doing the trade. They would have been the first ones to complain about not doing the trade.
could it possibly be because shaq turns his game on in the postseason?? but that's not my point. this team lost in the playoffs because of the same mistakes they always make. still unable to close games out. still unable to handle the ball effectively. when you keep doing the same things wrong, it's time to take a new course of action.
The only thing about the trade that will always bother me was losing Mobley. It hurt to lose a scorer and a defender who could only get better in that area. The lack of depth will kill us this year, especially with the way JJ has been playing. We thought it would be all right provided JJ performed for us like he did last year.
So what if he did? Shouldn't his counterpart be expected to do the same? (You can't tell me that those reg. season games, btw, lacked a playoff style atmosphere - especially the first meeting, with assorted greats at courtside, that drew higher ratings than most playoff game, etc. ) your point was that they showed no improvement and reached a ceiling; that point is undercut severely when they had previously exceeded that ceiling, particularly so when they previously exceeded it largely based on the play of one individual, whose play dropped off dramatically in the playoffs. (Pathetic rebounding by Houston up front, btw, was paramount in the Lakers victory. That problem has not been addressed and rather has been amplified since) Regardless, your whole argument is sort of tricky in that, since the Rox lost vs. LA, it provides evidence that that any individual who played well against LA but still lost is not good enough to beat LA. But any player who didn't play his best - well, the jury's still out on him, since he didn't play his best we can't say whether or not he's good enough. Effectively it rewards the non-performers over the performers.
