PF is still a problem but isn't it nice to see some good guard play from someone other than T-Mac? I never thought it'd make this much of a difference, the Wesley and Barryy trades are the difference between a lottery season and a playoff season. The Rockets look SO much better with those two guys out there, at least to me they do...
Ah patience can be great at times. Prudence is not a slacker either. a 180 degrees turnaround in the polls - who wuda thunk it.
When you consider that we were trying to trade for Mike James, whom we could have had as a Free Agent in the offseason without giving up anybody, and we were trying to get him for Boki and Gaines, I still think this trade got us less for more. Just think about it this way. How many of us would like to have James at the 1 and have JJ coming off the bench? That's what I would have preferred. I have said all along that JJ would have been best providing a little shooting off the bench for us. I look at this trade as botching both Boki and JJ and overpaying for a much needed role player. I can't deny that we needed a small, quick guard to defend 1's and help this team get more uptempo. I have been a proponent of getting JJ out of the starting 5 for a long time. But I still think we gave up way too much especially since we could have had James in the offseason and he actually wanted to come here. We could have had James and Sura instead of Charlie and Sura and we would be sitting in a whole lot better position today with James, Sura, TMac, Yao, and whoever in the starting unit and we would still have had JJ and Boki coming off the bench. Are we better than we were? Yes, but we aren't as good as we could have been if we hadn't racked Gundy's boy to a 3 year deal this offseason. If you think CD is responsible for that signing, you are fooling yourself. CD signed the man that Gundy wanted.
Then we could have moved Boki, JJ, and some of our other assets for more rebounding help. Now we can't give Mo away. To get rid of Mo, we are gonna have to eat somebody else's garbage.........probably Rose or someone with another catastrophic choking contract like that. We could have moved Mo a lot easier with JJ, and Boki in a package. Now we gotta use some of our expiring contracts, or picks, or the TE to move Mo for another overpaid FA. It's not pretty. We would have been better off by letting CD be the GM and sign the right players instead of deferring so much to Van Gundy in personnel decisions. We would probably be at 18-20 wins if we hadn't signed Charlie and gotten a real point in here.
How does Wesley = JJ? I haven't seen Wesley jack 10 THREES a game yet. With a horrible shooting % at that
madmax and pgabriel are both dead on. Talent-wise, JJ and Wesley are dead-even. Fit-wise, Wesley is far better for this team. I miss Boki, but it's not like he was being used anyway. Still, my lone reservation about this trade (remember, I soured on Jackson mid-season last year) is my fear of Boki becoming a 13 ppg guy off the bench for some team. He's got some serious talent, I think, if he could just put it together.
EXACTLY. At least some one sees it. I hate to say it but more than half the board are bandwagoners/followers. I was happy and excited when I heard about this deal and more and more people can see why with the way we are playing right now. Hated to see JJ gone but we needed some type of change and this trade looks to be what we needed to continue to solidify our backcourt. Our PF position is the only glaring hole I see at the moment. We're going to catch the Lakers and hopefully get past being the 7th seed in the playoffs.
it is clearly to me that rox has given up on Yao and started to rebuild around t-mac, as yao himself has recognised long time ago that he is going to play a role of blue collar like cato did last season for the rox.
Blue collar isn't precisely the word I'd use. Hell, if Yao were more blue collar, he would be everything people dreamed of. Let's just say that if we have the new Shaq/Kobe...the roles are reversed.
I always liked this trade as far as the JJ for Wesley aspect was concerned. JJ is as good or better a player as Wesley, but Wesley is an infinitely better fit as far as his mentality goes. That much was obvious to me before the guy even put on the uniform. He gives us a guard with quickness, not quite Lue-like but better than, say, Ward, and he has the shot/skills to go along with it, unlike Lue (and Barrett, honestly). The biggest plus is that this trade tightened our guard rotation so much. We got Wesley, Sura, and Barry getting pretty much all the minutes in the backcourt, no questions asked. That's GREAT for chemistry/continuity, and as an added bonus they are all very much multi-talented guys. Now our guards are set for awhile (well, until they hafta retire ). We've got Yao and Deke splitting time at the 5; I'd say we're set there too. Now we just have to get a starting power forward (duh, though one of the many we have will do fine as a backup), and find a backup for McGrady at the 3 (Padgett/Bowen likely won't cut it long-term). But, all JJ considerations aside, whether this trade was a good longterm idea rests entirely on Nachbar. It will definitely look good this season. Likely into next season too. It's after that that I kinda worry about.
boki is the key to the deal. if he turns out to be a good backup 3 then we lost out on the deal. for now, jj was hurting and wes is helping, and boki is a nonfactor. i agree that our guards and centers seem set to compete at a high level now. where as at the start of the season the guards coudn't compete against the weakest of teams. tmac could use a good backup at the 3. the next trade we make should be one of our 4's for a 3. that would make some room to add a rebounder too. by the deadline i would like to see us trade gaines, our TE and our pick to toronto for marshall and a filler.
I liked this trade from the begining. Basically we traded JJ, a spot-up shooter type of bench player, for Wesley, who is quicker, better ball handling, better D. I don't get why people here think we gave up too much. Wesley is a slightly better player than JJ, talent wise, but he fills our desparate need in the backcourt for ball handling & premete defense. The Rockets didn't extend Boki's contract, and everyone knows that Boki wasn't going to get any minute under JVG, so he was just a throw-in anyway. (I'd like Boki to play a little more to see if he can make it, but it aren't going to happen with JVG here).
Thats exactly what stands out to me, his defense makes a difference. I would take JJ over Wesley in a three-point shooting contest and in a offense standpoint (I think JJ was under-utilized on the block, his post-up skills are amazing) but there is a lot to be said with timing of shots. Wesley can move the ball without thinking about it, with JJ, it seemed the same action took about double the time. It's the same comparison that I like to make about Francis and T- Mac's respective passing skills/intuition. Although they are very similiar stat-wise in assists, I despised the way Francis got his assists most of the time. It all seemed so forced, with T-Mac, it just seems so much more effortless, they aren't as flashy or as memorable, but there they are after the game. Stuart
