Take off the homer goggles and stop harshing on the team

I seriously think there's a good amount of delusion running loose on this board. Look, I want the Rockets to win as much as the next guy. But there is a cold, calculating part of my brain that looked at the rosters and said "Probably not". No Yao means a series win is going to be very, very tough. The Rockets give up too much in size without him. They give up too much in offensive firepower without him. Pretty much every sports writer in the national media considered what losing Yao means to the Rockets and predicted the Jazz as winners.

Despite that there were a bunch of members here who somehow thought that losing Yao actually meant the Rockets had a better chance against the Jazz. There's a big difference between hoping that the Rockets could win the series and believing it. Because once you believe it how can you explain why the Rockets are losing? It must be because the players suck, and thus we have:

1) T-Mac sucks or
2) The role players suck and they're letting T-Mac down.

T-Mac doesn't suck. He played a hell of a game tonight--he was an assist away from a triple double. And not a Jason Kidd triple double either, he had 23 points. The role players don't suck. Battier, Scola, Hayes, Jackson--they're tough professionals who play their hearts out. The reason the Rockets are losing is that they just don't have a big enough gun, to paraphrase Charles Barkley. But if they're going down at least they're going down fighting. Adelman refused to criticize the team tonight in the post game press conference. He talked about how hard they played and how he could count on them to work their butts off. You guys might want to follow his example.

If you take off the homer goggles you'll see that this Rockets team is still a tough, tough group of guys. They play their asses off no matter what. What's more important is that they're respectable, which is a huge turnaround from that loss to Philly. They might go out in the first round this year, but so what? No Yao. Next year, with any luck they'll have a healthy T-Mac and Yao in the playoffs and good things will happen.

Are you guys fans, or a pack of rabid weasels?