It sure does, but then what about the previous 4 games in the playoffs in which he was a combined 9-43 from the field. Maybe I should downgrade him to a 20% player rather than a 33% player. Finally let's discard the thing about him being especially "streaky" - he's no more or less streaky than anybody else, the difference is that on his bad nights, he continues (partially because he is forced to by the other team) to shoot, so a 2-7 start, that a normal player might stop shooting after, then balloons into a 5-16 masterpiece. Cause he's a classic security blanket - we know absolutely what we are going to get from him - bad volume shooting most of the time, low TO's, run the offense, and the occasional decent game every 3 or 4 games or so.
I seriously doubt morey has watched more rafer than us. Rafer wasn't great or even that good, but when he played well, we won. Do the magic get to the finals without rafer? I doubt that they do. He had some big games when he needed to have big games. I am glad we got rid of rafer, but don't diminish what he did.
But then there's value in that consistency. Whatever the reason is, coaches consistently trust him more than any of their other options. That suggests he's better at doing what the coaches need from the PG for their teams to win.
I think coaches overvalue that consistency on many occasions, which is probably one reason why Morey was willing and able to trade him. I seriously doubt you are making the argument that the Houston Rockets General Manager and his staff has spent less time evaluating his players than the Clutch BBS.
That's why I blame the owner/management/coach to Rockets' failure of this year. After Rockets lost TMac, they lost the faith on this Rockets. The rafer trade is for future. It's not 'win it now' attitude. It's hurts. So now we saw the results. If Yao's healthy, Rockets very likely defeated fakers and they would own Cav/magic because of matchup. But most likely, they would be a couple of TOs away from defeat fakers. Rafer would help Rockets pass lakers. Rockets is full of scorers, they don't need him be the 3rd options. They need him to be the stabilizer and run the offense and play defense. He's good at it. But the reality is yao went down, so Rockets don't have real chance to beat Fakers. Rockets' fans would not feel the pain of missing Rafer.
Even DM is very good to evaluate players, they really underestimated 'the heart of champion', the intangibles. scola, battier, Hayes, alston are winners. Now Yao's injure saved owner/management/coach ***. Otherwise, The Rafer trade will look very very bad.
The Rafer trade was bad for the fact it came too late. Morey should have traded Rafer before hiring Adelman. It was so hard to move Rafer. Morey knew it best.
Not sure why anybody would think that - If you look at the numbers this year, the Rockets were slightly worse with Rafer on the floor than off the floor - only including his time on the team - it's a substantial change from previous seasons. Getting him off the team for Brooks/other backups made the Rockets better immediately, according to the numbers. This is probably for a nubmer of factors, declining/poor performance by rafer being chief among them, and also, as pgabriel theorized earlier, having a non-scorer like Rafer around and playing heavy minutes w/no Tmac was a luxury the Rockets could not afford.
Maybe with not with most players, but rafer alston, I think most people know his strengths and weaknesses. It is not like morey has some magical insight on rafer. Rafer is a slightly below average starting point guard.
Fan: watches a player on TV or at the Toyota Center... talks about a player on the internet... rarely has a background working in any facet for the NBA GM: watches a player on TV or at the Toyota center... watches a player at practice... talkes to the coaches on a daily basis, if desired, about a player... talks to other professionals about a player... knows more about other players around the league to use as a basis for comparison... has more in depth data regarding the player (esp. in Morey's case)... knows the player off the court... sees the player in the locker room before/after games... actually converses/interacts with the player on a regular basis, etc... Being able to identify the basic strengths/weaknesses of a player as a fan that watches his favorite team from afar as a form of recreation is completely different than working for the Rockets organization as the General Manager, getting paid to evaluate players and having your job depend on doing that successfully. Morey lives and breathes player evaluation. Daryl Morey has far, far, far more knowledge about Rafer Alston, the player and person, than every CF member combined... that is assuming Morey isn't secretly a member. And this is still completely true despite the fact that Rafer was with the Rockets longer than him.
It's been reported that the Rockets have their own proprietary performance metrics that they don't share with anybody, for one, let alone their degree of expertise aside from that is greater than that of the casual fan.
Nope. That's completely inaccurate. Maybe you should've listened to Morey when he was interviewed on SR 610. I can see either you didn't, or conveniently forgot what he said. pgabriel has it right: It's quite simple indeed. This was a move needed to help the team immediately. With McGrady gone, we needed Brooks' scoring punch at the point, even if he's not a real PG. This was not about Morey's desire to get rid of Alston. If that was the case, don't you think he would've been traded long ago? It's pretty simple. Rafer Alston doesn't get traded if McGrady doesn't get hurt and the subsequent micro surgery. If T-Mac was still playing, it wouldn't be us "regretting" the trade, it would be you wondering why a PG with such awful statistics is still our starting PG.
Artesticles, I'm well aware of that reasoning... that was obvious and talked about hundreds of times around here, including by myself on a number of occasions. I was talking about whether Morey thought that Brooks' increased scoring punch would guide us to a championship. I say, obviously not. Morey has been trying to replace Alston as our starting PG since he first took over. How else do you explain the fact that he drafted Brooks, signed Steve Francis, brought back Mike James, etc... ? More importantly, I go back to the same question: Why did he trade Rafer Alston a few months ago? It wasn't simply because Brooks added a scoring punch in the short-term. Morey isn't that short-sighted. With McGrady out of commission, he did not think Brooks was going to compensate for Alston + McGrady and guide us all the way. The fact is he wanted Kyle Lowry for a long time and under normal circumstances, wouldn't have been able to convert Rafer Alston into Kyle Lowry. Orlando's desperation created the perfect storm and Morey took advantage of it without any hesitation.
not arguing with your post, but tmac and jameer nelson going down the same time made this absolutely the perfect storm. i don't know if he can move rafer with a healthy tmac. rafer was clearly tmac's guy
I don't think Morey made the move thinking we would become a championship team, but there's no doubt he thought it would make us a better team and give us a better chance to have playoff success. We pretty much lost any chance of winning it all once it was established that T-Mac just couldn't help us anymore, so he decided to go a different direction, which was the Aaron Brooks experiment. I'd say it worked. We got out of the first round and gave the Lakers a good run. That pleased the customers. Again, the trade was specifically a result of McGrady going down. I know there's a lot of T-Mac bashers out there, but hopefully everyone can agree that if T-Mac was healthy, we'd be a better team and have a better seed and record. You think Morey would try to destroy team chemistry by trading away its starting PG for a young backup point from the Grizzlies? You're kidding me if you really believe that. There's absolutely no way anyone can say for a fact that Morey was trying to replace Alston as the starting PG with the offseason moves he made (ironically, Rafer outplayed them all to keep the starting job). All I know is while I think Alston is a competent starting PG, he had no business playing 40+ minutes in playoff games EVER, especially on a team that was short on offensive talent. But that's exactly what was happening. Seems to me Morey was trying to address the PG DEPTH, not necessarily the starter. Alexander/CD/Morey or whoever tried to throw money at the problem by signing James and SF3, but it failed miserably. I don't remember if Morey made the moves, but if he did, it was one of the few mistakes, along with not being able to get Memphis' 2nd round pick (Lowry) in the Battier/Gay trade. So again, I think it would be more reasonable to say James/Francis/Brooks was an attempt to address the depth and versatility of the PG position, not to replace Alston. Did you notice how all three players are more scorers than a pure point? Looks like the plan was to combine one of those scoring PGs with a pure point like Alston. That basically spells out versatility.
I am glad that stromed happened then, we have to get rid of player's guys...and just get good teamates. DD
You could say that, but it wouldn't be true. They were brought in to replace Alston's minutes to the greatest extent possible. You can play semantics all you want, but when you bring in 3 new PG's in the offseason, at a higher price point in the case of one, it's pretty obvious that you want to get your old one off the court.
