Go ask Utah regardless of seeding I think you'll find they prefer playing the Rockets compared to anyone else.
I like your post On another note, wouldn't it be extremely funny if Tmac and Yao did get healthy and by result, our whole team elevates to the upper tier in the West Conf, but come playoffs, our first round opponents are the Jazz. I bet Tmac will be thinking "DAMN IT THE JAZZ AGAIN FML!!!". I could really picture it where a potential series like this will go 7 games and inevitably we will lose at home LOL. Oh it be soooo funny if this happened...
people on this forum don't seem to understand that. we need a perimeter scorer. period. AB and Ron are not going to cut it. it was too many times when our offense was terrible and too many missed shots with good looks i thought in the back of my head "damn, tracy would have gotten that" or "our offense would not be this bad if we had tracy". he is not a d wade, kobe, lebron, or carmelo but he is what we need offensively. numbers show that t-mac does indeed show up in the playoffs and a player like t-mac takes pressure off yao and spreads the floor for battier and ab to get shots with better looks. just like ThaBlackKnight said, Miami fans were on the verge of proposing trades for d wade after his injuries but he rehabbed and came back better than ever and now all those fans that gave up on d wade are now eating their own words. seeing how tracy is working with the SAME trainer that rehabbed d wade i expect him to come back with a vengeance when he gets healthy
Numbers show that Tmac takes more shots and plays more time in the playoffs, not that he raises his game at all, he just plays more often. Also, No one is disputing that we need another scorer, they are disputing that TMac is the answer......especially a guy who is probably...NEVER GOING TO BE THE SAME !!! So, the answer to a lot of us then becomes, what can you get for his contract? And, THAT player is the answer to your perimeter scoring issues..... Not Tmac....a new player...hopefully someone that is more efficent at scoring the ball as well. I will be happy once this whole Tmac thing is settled one way or the other.....I would rather we traded him for a lessor known player with a better attitude and work ethic. DD
in 2007-08 he averaged 27.0 ppg 8.2 rpg 6.8 apg in the playoffs. those are excellent numbers for a man playing with injuries even if he did shoot for .425%. but i'd take that over the .394% ron shoots or the .422% AB shoot while only mustering 16.8 ppg in the palyoffs it is funny how so many people act like they go to rockets practices or see mcgrady workout or know t-mac personally can form an opinion on his work ethic. if he had a terrible work ethic im sure JVG, Adelman, Morey, or his teammates would have brought it up by now. unless you can show visible evidence of his poor work ethic then you are just spitting hot air. the stats also show with yao and mcgrady on the court together we are one of the best teams in the nba. miami fans said d wade was never going to be the same again and that they needed to trade him...look how that backfired most people are talking about trading t-mac for a superstar player but also sacrificing key role players like scola/landry/artest/battier/lowry to complete the trade which is not a good move seeing how our bench is extremely good. and its funny when people bring up vince carter as a trade option when he's exactly like t-mac!!! lol but t-mac performs better. now if we were to trade t-mac the only option i would go is rip hamilton, AND THATS IT. i dont want so young talent with 5 minutes of fame. give me a proven winner. you can argue all you want but you cant debate the fact that this lineup is the best group of role players tracy has ever had in a rockets uniform. and the fact that a player like tracy DEMANDS respect from defenders on the perimeter opens up better looks for his teammates around him. look how many times ron was wide open during the lakers series because the laker did not respect his shot, but a player like tracy calls for you to play defense on him. as i said you nor i can truly conclude his status when he gets healthy again but its not fair to judge him off of past seasons with plagued injuries. i've seen tim grover work wonders with some atheletes and if he can get t-mac to at least 80% then thats all we need from him
I can not state his status, all I can do is look at other players and see what we can expect of him. DWade came back fine, but his was not microfracture surgery so let's toss him out as an example. There are tons of players that came back effectively... Stockon, Kidd, Amare etc.... Just the same there are others who never made it back, Alan Houston is probably the best example. Tmac without his explosiveness is a low efficiency player.....the teams honoring him you talk about? They stopped that this year.....they covered him one on one as he could not get by his man.....but he was injured you say...fine...yes he was....and he ignored 4 doctors that told him to strengthen his knee..... So, we thus get to work ethic....during the sesaon he took 2 weeks off to get in shape.....IN SHAPE...yep, that smacks of excellent work ethic. And his teamates know it too, whether you like to hear it or not.... People can continue to ignore all the signs, I mean let's hope some other GM is doing the same.... I will support whatever Morey and Adelman decide to do, but for me personally, I hope they trade him for a better team oriented player. DD
Maybe you are right but i still hope can see following tmac again. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rQ1c9pR-gs&feature=related We all know tmac is tmac, he will not be kobe, he will not be james. he has his own style... I still like his play rather than dirty kobe and king james.
Well, there was an article in the Chronicle last year where they interviewed Dwade, since he had knee and shoulder problems also the previous year. He said it was very hard to work out since you can't lift weights with a bad shoulder, and he said the same goes with any exercise that involves running and cutting, since his knee wasn't right. He said he knew what Tmac was going through. Obviously Tmac's knee wasn't ready by the season, so how in the world was he supposed to work out over the summer? That can probably explain how he was "out of shape" in the summer. The man still put up 15 ppg on one leg, you have to be in some kind of shape to do that. He was also playing his normal minutes, sometimes more, so he couldn't have been that out of shape to do that. Those doctors who told him to strengthen his knee by playing through it didn't realize for some reason that his knee did not get better. It simply didn't. They told him that at the beginning of the year, and he tried to until February, and it got to a point where he at 6'8 couldn't dunk the ball jumping off his left leg. There is something wrong when you can't do that at 6'8 in the NBA. Did the doctors expect the knee to get stronger by March maybe, who knows? But they didn't know what to do with his knee because his knee was appearing to get weaker, so microfracture surgery was probably the last thing left to do, but I don't really know because I'm not a doctor. Just remember none of us know our own body and our pains like we ourselves do...no doctor can tell you how much you are hurting. As for the future, lets see if he comes back like Jkidd or Allen Houston. He is having it on the less weight bearing part of his knee, so according to doctors that helped his chances. On top of that, he's training with Jordan's ex-trainer and the man who helped revive Dwade's career, Tim Grover. From what the reports say, he's rehabbing/training 6-8 hours per day. If that is accurate, then I'm more inclined to believe Tmac will be back. Only time will tell though...
This is the article with Dwayne Wade I was talking about from the Chronicle, where he is talking about the same pain he had the previous year. He simply saying he knew how Tmac felt with his injuries. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bk/bkn/6130807.html
This. Also, I dont get the Wade comparisons, sure he was injured, but he already has a ring. If TMAC had gotten a ring and <b>then </b> had the injury issues, micro, etc. I would cut him a loooot more slack (kind of like Hakeem's decline after the rings, he had the heart issues, was in and out of the lineup, and still making 15 mil per, but NONE of us wanted him retired or gone). The TMAC to Wade comparisons have never made sense to me...
That's completely irrelevant. Just like Tmac, a lot of people thought Wade was done after having major knee and shoulder problems. Tmac is more or less in the same boat. If he were wearing a ring that wouldn't make his rehab any easier. DD, at the end of the day everything you're saying about Tmac is circumstantial. You're assuming he didn't work out over the summer because he wasn't in great shape at the beginning of the year. We know though, that he had two surgeries that off season. Minor surgeries or not, I'm sure its considerably harder to rehab when you are fighting two nagging injuries. Its possible still that you're right and he got disinterested in his rehab and dogged it last summer. But you know what? That doesn't matter. What matters is THIS summer. I don't care what he did last summer if this summer he works his but off and comes back next year completely healed and in shape ready to go. If you want to argue whether or not that will happen, thats fine, but don't cut your nose off despite your face. If he can help the team we'd be crazy to not want him. Trading him would be exceptionally difficult and would almost guarentee that we would have to take on some terrible contracts in the process.
None of you guys are answering Clutch. you're all just stating hypothetical scenarios like "if t-mac was healthy" or "yea he shoots 43% but he's still a closer" I want to see numbers, hard evidence that supports we are better with T-Mac. Throw everything out the window from 3 years ago. The best case scenario is we get T-Mac from 07 again, and even then he was a high volume inefficient scorer. As far as I can tell, T-Mac's inefficient scoring takes away EFFICIENT scoring from our more EFFICIENT scorers. T-Mac wouldn't even get a chance to "close" the game if we already lost it in the 2nd or 3rd quarter. SHOW ME SOME EVIDENCE!
Ding ding ding, winner winner chicken dinner! You are right on. I don't know why everyone just assumes TMac was lazying his butt off last summer? Did anyone see him rehab? Did he EVER in the past come to the regular season out of shape?? Maybe his two surgeries in the off season had something to do with his ability to effectively rehab? If he was hurting well into the regular season, can't we assume that might have hurt his rehab schedule?? Rehabing helps you get stronger faster, it would not a cure what was clearly wrong with TMac. This IS and was a witchhunt and we should be ashamed.
I haven't seen Clutch's numbers in the other seasons when TMac (other than his FG%) was ACTUALLY healthy. You seriously would use the numbers from this year when TMac was hobbling around? How about this evidence for you, our win/loss ratio when TMac (even without Yao) is playing against the record when he is not on team? This year we did better because of Artest. Tmac never had Artest when Yao was out. Think about that.
Another point, its funny how everyone wants to talk about statistics and numbers when it comes to TMac, but when it comes to someone like Battier its all about the intangibles, things that he does to help the team win. Well that actually is MUCH more relevant to TMac. Whenever he is healthy and on the team we win even without our second superstar, and when he is not on the team, we lose. Isn't that the EPITOME of being a key to the team's success? There is no other way to spin that. This year he obviously sucked coz he was clearly hurting, and please don't give me that baloney about how he was out of shape, as if after playing for months TMac would still not be able to dunk... Now the better argument here is and which should be our focus is how can he come back after the latest surgery?
T-Mac getting healthy is irrelevant and numbers are irrelevant. The only number that is relevant is 23 million dollars in salary cap space. If he came back as prime time Jordan or Magic he MIGHT be worth 23 million. The fact is he won't be that good cause he never was. He is not and will never be worth his salary, so, the smart thing to do is to trade him if we can. I like Tracy but I like the Rockets more and the best thing for the Rockets is to trade him.
Sure point well taken, so in this league by your definition no one is worth $23 million or what at that time was a max contract other than maybe Kobe and Lebron? So if max contract allowed now is $23 Million, you are saying you wouldn't give that to Yao?
Part of the analysis of the numbers is impact on the team, not just individual numbers. People DO look at the numbers for Battier - how he affects the team when he is on the court. Similarly, you can analyze how the team's scoring efficiency and defensive efficiency with and without McGrady. By the way "when he is not on the team, we lose..." what is your basis for making such a statement? Arguably, this season as a whole is compelling evidence that your statement is hard to defend.
