I am pretty devastated that we lost the serie. However, I'm a pretty new Rockets fan so I have no bad blood with them. In fact, I am happy for Utah. I live here and they are my #2 team. They are indeed a better team. The only position they are suspect is the SG position, other than that, they are as solid as it gets. Boozer and Williams' stardom matched Yao and Tmac's. After that, their depth completely overtook us. It's no surprise whatsoever. I will root for them in round 2 and WCF.
Look...The Better Team Beat Us... I gotta ay it, Utah had the better team in general. More talent, deeper bench, better starters 1-5 than our 1-5. Their execution on offense, the way they fought in all their road games, the movement without the ball, picks, screens, attacking weakpoints of our defense. On defense, they way they closed out on the open 3's, the willingness to hustle for the loose ball on both ends of the floor. The toughness to give the hard foul and to make it clear that the paint was not a friendly place for us. Utah was simply the beter team. If Okur or AK47 had showed up before game 4, we might have lost the series in 5 or 6. We had a great year, but let's not kid ourselves, we need a decent third scorer (Shane's got the talent but his focus is on the other things, which I'm cool with) and a tough as nails BIGGER PF (I love Chuck, but he's simply too small to be a starter at PF in the Western conf.) if we want to have title aspirations next season. We had a tough day as Rox fans, but at least be consoled in that we were simply not as good as Utah even with our A game (which we played in game 7 in the second half cept for those missed rebounds). They beat us, we didnt beat ourselves.
I agree......as much as i hate to admit it, the FREAKIN jazz exploited the rockets complete lack of athelticism. I think Rafer had a hell of a game 7...he came to play, but the rockets probably would be better served to take the reigns off and let rafer be skip to my lou...with that said, i think the rockets could use an upgrade at point guard and a HUGE upgrade at the 4
Too tired too read it all, but Utah deserves a lot of credit. Much like GSW took Mavs out of their offense, Utah stifled ours. End of story. We had the tools to beat Utah, IMO, but not win the finals.
