With Alston it could have been very possible. But without Head and Jackson...Battier only played well in game 1, but than he was just injured and not agressive at all. But we have to understand him
rarely. okur guarded him straight up for the most part. the physicality okur played with just baffled yao at times but yao did his part. 25 ppg was good. the problem was boozer ripped him a new on on the other end. hayes should have been on him more.
i think if you saw how we played defensively last yr, utah got WORSE AND WORSE as the series wore on offensively and started taking shots they rarely don't take, very uncharacteristic of a sloan's team. hayes/scola/landry match up PERFECTLY with boozer/okur. that's why if we play them against next yr, i doubt yao play more than 25 minutes. yao will help us on offense, but you can't risk the defensive end, esp. with artest and scola providing the offense in the low post even if yao's out.
obviously i'm talking about two years ago...and yes, i would like to believe we would have won with yao ming there, but i still need to see it to believe it. We are better defensively against the jazz without him in there.
Now I know you didn't watch or you did so with Tmac color glasses. People ignored Hayes the whole series and Rafer at the time was in a mjor shooting slump. Head for some odd reason played terrible in the series when he did well all season long. Yes Yao was doubled a lot.
Excellent thread, in one move the Rockets have made several small moves look very good. Artest might not be the last piece, but he was a key piece of completing this puzzle. Much can go wrong, especially healthwise, but, otherwise, the Rockets will be a very difficult matchup for most teams in the NBA. That was not the case just a week ago. If Yao (the feet have to say structurally sound) and TMac (must get his shot back) elevate their games, and Artest plays his "A" game (and behaves himself), there are enough complimentary parts to make life miserable for the league. A bigger, better PG is still on my wish list. If that happens, the Rockets could (and I know it is a ridiculous reach for a team that is typically one and done) be the new dy-nasty instead of the Celtics, and that would be a mind-blowing twist of fate.
he said Yao did good on offense and did his part. You said Yao was worthless on offense. So clearly you didn't watch the series. I'm done with you jcmoon. I'm an adult. I don't have time for your tmac doll hugging debates.
I was impressed with that GS matchup this past January. We were running with Yao in the lineup and beating GS at their own game.
watch some of the R2K's highlights of that year's playoffs and u know okur guarded him straight up for the most part. u know yao has never been a volume shooter b/c he's doubled a lot. but in that series, he took 18 shots a game and 10 fts a game -> A LOT OF SHOTS for a big guy, esp. a guy like yao who routinely averages 13-14 shots a game b/c he's doubled a lot. but it's not about double or single coverage. offensively, only tmac or yao showed up. but defensively, the main mismatch was yao v. boozer. yao has no chance against boozer but JVG stubbornly never took him out. deke should have played more.
yao obviously wasn't worthless. but i think he expected yao to do more since yao only faced okur on offense the most and yao should have figured out a way to be more efficient as the series went along since he only faced one defender for the most part. tmac faced at least 4-5 defenders each game so he had to adjust his style of play for each defender (short/strong in dfish, long/lanky/athletic in ak47, always reaching in giricek, and extremely physical in harpring, and very athletic in brewer). but we lost on the defensive end along with defensive rebounding, which yao was responsible for. he only got 6 rebounds for game 7, in a game where defensive rebounds were the reason the jazz won.
If Boozer guarded Yao instead of Hayes it would have been a different story. Boozer was fresh for offense because he completly ignored Hayes on defense. Yao had to play hard on offense with Okur and Ak47 guarding him and work hard on defense too. I'm done. I rarely post here because the Tmac nut-huggers make this mb too political.
Yao certainly did his part on offense, but since his defense was such a liability against boozer, unless he's making up for it on the offensive end, he shouldn't be in there. So yes, that means he should abuse okur one on one, which he didn't. He didn't even command double teams!!
good, that way you can't make up any more BS such as this constant doubling of yao ming..good! go away. I'd like logical debates based on facts, not on myth.
who's jocking tmac? nobody is saying tmac played like god in that series, in which he certainly did not. he struggled in his fair share of games shooting 39% for the series. everybody struggled offensively, but for the most part, tmac and yao did do their job on offense as tmac put up 25 and 7 while yao put up 25 and 10. the problem was on defense, we couldn't rebound the freaking ball and boozer had a field day. the boozer of 2 yrs ago that faced us v. the boozer of last yr are 2 completely different players. you wouldn't even know boozer played last yr and that's how bad he struggled v. hayes/landry/scola. with the team currently constructed, we can play small ball and not make yao a liability when we face teams like this. we know how to guard boozer now.
