What would you do diffrently after the Rockets won the two championships?

I remember hearing a Vernon Maxwell for Jason Williams (NJ) was in the works in 95/96?...If we could have pulled that off, there would have been no need to trade Horry/Cassell for CB4..

 

A headcase for an even more headcase.

Brilliant!

 

Maxwell was a free agent and signed with Philadelphia so that's probably wrong information.

 

Jayson Williams is a madman.

 

I never, ever would have changed the colors and logo of a team that just won back-to-back championships. The end.

 

This board tends to overromanticize Horry quite a bit, his memorable playoff shots aside, his career followed kind of a disappointing trajectory after he left Houston.

His best season ever was 1994, had you told me back then that he'd peaked at 12 ppg and 5 boards I would have thought you were insane; we all thought he was a bigger Scottie Pippen on his way up, but then he moved on and kind of became a journeyman role-player (with some very memorable roles, obviously) who never approached starters minutes or double digits again.

 

I remember a huge Horry complaint even when he was a Rocket was his uneven play during the regular season. That said, it would have been cool to keep one of the best playoff clutch performers of all time.

Quick inside nugget: even though he comes off as a good dad/husband struggling with his daughters health, he really abandoned his wife a lot. She was depressed and he was not in Houston or at strip clubs in Houston.

 

coincidence?

 

top 5 player in the draft for a bunch of scrubs is a bad move?

 

He went from "uneven" in the regular season with the Rockets to more or less an afterthought (offensively at least....to put it charitably) in his later stops.

 

Horry has to be one of the most overrated players ever along with Shane Battier.

Horry is just one of the luckiest player ever.

 

Basically just use the knowledge I have now to draft really well (Kobe going 12th, etc).

 

Letting Kelvin kato go.... Should have signed him to a huge multi year contract and let him become the next dwight Howard...

 

• 
  Brought in a vet instead of Maloney (to be fair they tried to do this with Price but he got hurt). I would have brought in another vet other than Threatt earlier in the season.

• Since I have the gift of hindsight in this scenario, I would have started Willis against Utah and brought Barkley off the bench to limit his time matching up with Malone. I also would never give the ball to Barkley in the low post while Malone was guarding him. It was sad to watch.

• I also would have retained Hakeem at all costs and not let him go to Toronto. I said that from the time it happened when the majority was worried about signing Mo Taylor and Moochie Norris instead of Hakeem and Bullard was on the radio b****ing about Hakeem being greedy.

The problem is once Hakeem lost the ability to jump hook due to knee issues, it was pretty much over for the Rockets. This happened starting in '96. There really wasn't much that could be done to work around that weakness. I don't believe the Rockets would have needed to make the Barkley trade to beat Seattle if not for that. Hakeem dominated Seattle before '96.

 

Fire CD.

 

^^ The Rockets would still only have the 2 championships.

 

Maybe so, but CD has got to among the worst draft evaluation records ever. He was a TERRIBLE GM that was only responsible for the worst years the Rockets ever had post championship.

 

Rodrick Rhodes
Matt Maloney
Brent Price
Bryce Drew
Michael Dickerson

It would have been nice to, you know, have a point guard that actually deserved to be in the NBA. Even last year's Heat with no cap space fielded better PG's than we did.

 

I might be the only fan of Micheal Dickerson on this board, so I do resent him being called a scrub. But it was still a good trade due to Mobley being his backup at the time.

 

Dickerson/Cat was a decent combo. Too bad Dickerson couldn't recover.