ur an idiot, cd was great for the rox and every gm makes some mistakes. lay off of cd punk! he has 2 rings punk! the guy is an icon and u r a idiot!
This one's easy... the mass of posters has simply had enough time to forget about Stevie's shortcomings, but not TMac's. The bitterness is still here. The OP makes a valid point... not that it needs to be a thread. Yeah, 04-05 TMac & Yao were an amazing combination, and it's a shame it went downhill so fast. Coulda shoulda woulda.
CD did some good things for the Rockets and at the same time made some mistakes that took the franchise years to recover from. As I recall, some of the bad contracts handed out by CD (and Rudy) during the latter part of Rudy's reign ended up constraining the Rockets ability to spend well into the JVG era. IIRC, the Rockets had to give up a first round pick to dump salary, too (Glen Rice for Amaechi?) and the team ended up with no first round pick in both 2003 and 2004. Anyhow, Morey has so far refrained from handing out truely poisonous contracts. Any "misses" Morey makes are usually to the tune of $2-3 million a year or 1 or 2 years. One thing about GM work, though... you only have a limited number of opportunities to make big decisions (can't just trade one player every week-- this doesn't even work on NBA2K). One or two misses by even a good GM who does his homework can make him look really bad.
Yep your right: Ming, Scola, Hayes, Battier, and Landry (since it was CD that placed him on the board) have nothing to do with the current roster or success. Oh, and MeMac fading all those game 7's was CD's fault too. I heard he was the personal trainer and coach behind the scenes as well. He also personally broke Yao Ming's foot twice... true story! Seriously... best GM ever? No, but he did a damn good job of keeping the Rockets relevant every year. If your going to to scale GM's by championships then fine, but that means only 6 GM's in the whole league don't suck since '96. How many other teams in the league even thought they had a chance for the last decade? The Rockets were always in the "mix." Or how soon we forget "It's Time" and all the other cliches. But you must have screaming from the rafters that the sky was falling. Damn if only CD had heard you!
Thank goodness Isaiah Thomas was around to happily take our garbage. I remember the Mooch for Meech trade as well as some trade for an over the hill Glen Rice that allowed us to dump that horrible contract to that pansy Mo Taylor.
Lets set the record straight real quick.... CD has 0 rings as a GM Dude...you need to RELAX and get your facts right before you start posting. You're right about every GM making mistakes, but CD's mistakes were FAR MORE than his non-mistakes...Just see the contracts given out to Kelvin Cato, Maurice Taylor, and Moochie Norris...just to name a few.
Carroll Dawson - GM for 11 Years from May 96 - May 07 . Playoff appearances 6 out 11 years . 1 conference finals appearance . 5 First Round Exits . 5 years...NO Playoffs I'm sorry but getting to the playoffs in only 54% of time...and flaming out in the 1st round in 5 out of those 6 playoff appearances is NOT GREAT...it's NOT GOOD...its MEDIOCRE AT BEST. AND THAT MEDIOCRITY is ON THE GM. Basketball-Reference
it's tough to get out of a salary hole once you get in it. CD did what he could, while trying not to waste the precious yao/tmac healthy years. we just didnt have the pieces/contracts needed to land high impact players. all we have to show for that era is a broken/oft-injured center and undying hate for tmac.
Man it sucks for Steve Patterson CD got credit for the two championship teams he helped create in Houston Pritchard gets credit for the Roy and Aldridge moves he pulled off in Portland
So every time T-Mac faded down the stretch because of lack of conditioning, or heart... whatever you believe, it was the GM fault? Yao's injuries... GM's fault, should have seen it coming. The team was in a position to win, they didn't. But I will maintain that the building blocks were solid.. and that is the GM's job.
When first reading this I started to think I was reading a Texans thread. Took me a second to realize you were still talking Rockets. Props for educating the newbies. Dawson made some good trades, mainly by taking advantage of other teams; players not liking their situations. However, trades are nearly difficult to predict which is why he had some hits and some misses. Dawson's biggest fault was that was not a very good evaluator of draft talent. More often than not he was not able to draft good rotation players, and the ones that would pan out were often traded before they could help the Rockets. I truly feel that was his biggest fault. Because he was not able to find players who were able to truly contribute to cheaply through the draft, he felt he had to find contributors in the FA market. Because of the nature of free agency, you overpay more often than not, and he would do so to get players that only shown brief glimpses of what Dawson hoped they could produce on the floor.
Are you talking about Eric Piatkowski? I was actually excited for that move, he had very good 3 PT range at that time.
I think where Morey's approach really shines is in identifying quality non-star starters and rotation guys. Hell, ANYbody can look at Kobe or LeBron and see their immediate value to a team. Morey's the guy who can build that high-quality supporting cast. Unfortunately for him, he's gotten about 25% production from his two superstars in the last couple of years. Now he's got to show us what he can do as far as finding another star player and not giving up too much in return.
As much as everyone has dogged on Mcgrady... you cant deny that he didnt show up in the playoffs. 28ppg, 6.6 rpg, 7 apg (in the CD ERA). And Yao's averages were 23ppg 9rpg. These #s are VERY SIMILAR to what KOBE BRYANT and PAU GASOL has put up in the last 2 championship seasons. Your starting 5 in 04-05 was: Sura, Wesley, Mcgrady, Bowen, Yao NO PLAYOFFS in 05-06 Your starting 5 in 06-07 was: Alston, McGrady, Battier, Howard, Yao Both YAO and TMAC were healthy in the playoffs those 2 years...the lineup still looks pretty mediocre to me. You grade a team's success by PLAYOFF success.. Under CD, there was no PLAYOFF success. I would think that is on the GM... A basketball team has 12 players at their disposal. It doesn't revolve around 1 player or 2 players. When did you ever see 1 or 2 players score every point, and grab every rebound, and defend all 5 of the opposing teams players? You've got to have the superior talent and role players behind the 1-2 punch...which under CD, we clearly did not have.
