When Jabari comes back, where is he going in the rotation?

I agree with this. It’s hard to bench two guys we have a ton of salary invested in. I’m sure that factored in as well.

 

Rockets had to take consensus best player at #3. It's not like we passed on Paolo or Chet to draft Jabari. Just thankful Rockets stole Tari in same draft.

 

Did jabari get wally pipped

 

I'm not mad ad it. Dillon is shooting lights out this season.

We basically have 6 starters. There will be games where the starting 5 doesn't close depending on matchups / performance. This is how it should be anyways. I like the idea of Bari being the go-to guy of the second unit. Out of all of our top players he's the least likely to force things.

 

7 if you include healthy Tari.

 

Just about everybody predicted this, but you ARE special.

 

Amen,Brooks,Tari are pure Ime guys. So no surprise.

 

I hope we had a long talk with Jabari. He is a very important piece going forward.

 

You think Thads stats of 12 points and 5 rebounds for his career will be better than Jabari’s? I highly doubt it.

 

yea not sure how they got “bamboozled” … lol any other pick at the time would have been insanity

 

I think it's a bad decision, but we will absorb it because we're that talented. We would have won more with Jabari and Amen starting at forward, collectively they're capable of doing a greater variety of things than Brooks/Amen without any impact on our spacing.

 

Yes to this. We are going to do well the rest of the season, primarily because Amen is starting like he should have been all year and Jabari and FVV being back gives us the necessary depth (no matter who you send to the bench) and the sixth easiest schedule the rest of the way. The uneducated will immediately attribute our success to FVV going back into the starting line-up.

Ime is missing an opportunity to make this a much more balanced team by starting Amen, Jalen, Dillon, Jabari, Sengun with FVV, Tari, Tate, and Adams coming off the bench. We have been building leads without FVV, and losing them with the bench unit and because Jalen and Sengun panic down the stretch. A fresh FVV off the bench, to maintain the lead and give leadership down the stretch would make us a very formidable team.

 

Your lineup would be my second option but generally I'm not a believer in benching FVV nor with letting him run the team to be honest. Been consistent with this without changing my mind and it does seem like we're still waiting for winning streaks to manifest with these new lineups.

Offball FVV is by far our best and most complete role player. Amen will run the team x amount of time from whatever position anyway, I would rather he guards a wing than a guard and if he's guarding a wing then we need two people to guard smaller guys ("guards"). I want Amen on Lebron, Luka, Bane, Williams, etc. I don't need him on Curry, Reaves, Murray, SGA. I wonder if when you say you want him at PG what you really mean is offensively? I don't understand at all why we would have the most switchable player in NBA history guard the 1. Who passes that up?

Jalen is our most clutch and best 4th quarter player. Rockets are one of the best in the NBA at closing games. I know people like to touch on this but reality is we're far ahead of schedule in closing games. Not worried about this and frankly Amen has been a small factor in this regard (scoring volume, ability to get shots up against packed paint). His performance there is very dependent on the opponent's choices - if they lock the paint, he just passes off which keeps efficiency high but some poor b*stard actually has to take that shot.

Usually if they close the paint, Amen has to hit a mid range shot or semi floater thing (he's currently 41% on 1 attempt from mid). Sengun slightly better on more volume. FVV is equally good on double the volume. Dillon Brooks is significantly better on more attempts. Is that really a good shot for us?? A Jalen/FVV 3 is more efficient than all of these.

The bigger red flag than all of this is Sengun is shooting 53% TS on the season and something stupidly low in first quarters (around 45% IIRC from Will&Brad). How many fewer games would we need to close if our anticipated most consistent volume scorer got back to that consistency? Fixing this is a greater gain than hoping we win games on middies. FVV helps this a lot. I need him for the first 6 minutes as vocal leader and the last 6 minutes for safe hands. Set sail at the start and bring it home at the end. In between is where we let our young playmakers do the big demolition job.

I applaud your optimism about Amen just as I'm optimistic about Jalen, but I don't understand why we would play people in their future positions rather than their best positions with only 20 games and playoffs remaining. I don't want Jalen to playmake a lot right now even if it's in his future and I don't want Amen to go into the playoffs at PG either. Trust me, if that doesn't go well they will acquire a starting PG, they won't hand it to him next summer. Ime is very reactive. If they make the game easier for Amen and let him COOK at his best current position, he will climb in confidence and coaches trust. Also I want to see Amen attacking sometimes without worrying about setting people up. As PG he has to be much calmer and I sometimes miss his all-out assaults on the opponent.

The best thing for these guys is to win as much as possible right now. I firmly believe that. This is not the time to speculate imo. We should've gone with the lineup that brought us the most wins this season. I would have liked to see Amen replace Brooks in that lineup, but now we're going with an untested and unproven lineup with 25 games left. IMO Ime is playing with fire because he's paranoid about defense. He's lucky we're more talented than he thinks.

Good news is he said "for now" so there's still a chance he starts hating how easily PF's will just shoot over or push Brooks.

One silver lining is seeing Jabari at the backup 5. That lineup with Amen and Green in the backcourt is something I can get behind, it reduces the pressure on their handle and decision making by making the paint so spacious. I hope we see this in the second unit.

 

I'm advocating for Amen to facilitate the half-court offense more than 50% of the time. He should always guard the other team's best player regardless of position. My point is that our offense is functioning fine without FVV in the starting line-up and having him coming off the bench would fortify the unit that is constantly losing leads for us. Holiday should never play another minute for this team!

I know it's not realistic to think Ime would take this gamble, but I really do think we would be a better team both this year and next. It would also inform us greatly what we should do in the off-season. My biggest fear is that our FO is going to extend FVV to some montrous contract over 30M a year, which would set this program back and ruin our flexibility. FVV's defense is good, but an Amen, Jalen, Dillon, Jabari, Sengun unit is better. Jabari was the missing link to our defense, not FVV. I get bringing him off the bench because of rust. Not sure why you wouldn't want to do the same for FVV. Given that FVV is not going to the bench, it is still a mistake to start Dillon over Jabari. We went from one of the best rebounding teams to meh, without Jabari.

 

As playoffs approach the rotation should shorten to 8 guys. That means bench guys are going to be getting near starter minutes anyways. Bari, Tari and Adams should be the main guys off the bench. Adams probably will get 15 minutes and Bari and Tari roughly around 25-30 minutes. Cam probably gets spot minutes.

Can players be assigned to the gleague this late into the season? Because now probably is the time to get the likes of Reed to the gleague because I don't see him getting I the court for the rest of the season outside of garbage time.

 

Not sure if they are still going to load-manage Tari and Adams in the playoffs. If so, they'll need more than 8 guys in the rotation.

Tate is next up on Udoka's trust list. I'm sure he will play some at least. And if Cam can turn it around in the last stretch (a big IF), he'll get his chances. (I suspect that Cam being in the doghouse is not just because of his performance/attitude in games but probably also in practice. I mean, if Reed gets to play more in garbage time than Cam, there must be some kind of message the coach wants to send.)