Yao expressed his dissapointment with the Rockets' outside shooting

I think if you start a poll, most members of clutchfans will vote JVG as a good but not great coach, 5% will vote him coach of the year and the other 10% will vote him an idiot.

I am the one who think he is a good coach but he is not championship caliber. But since we can't find one on the market who is obviously better than him, I will say keep him, for now.

 

Well, 31 games account for more than 45% of the games the Rockets have played thus far. So, if you look at this way, even with the much acclaimed 21-10, the team are still near the bottom in almost every key statistical category in offense. The facts do not exonerate JVG from his woefully inadequate offensive coaching ability with the players he hand-picked.

 

fatter tails, but not too far from.

 

Okay, it was a little unfair, but I really didn't want to type them all out. Laziness. KeepKenny listed them for me. But Alston's 3P% has been dropping the last 4 years. Bogan is not a good shooter, it's a general average of 33% which is not good. Ryan Bowen I didn't list as it is a given that he can not shoot. David Wesley can shoot the 3 but my beef with him is not that he can't shoot, but is getting to slow to defend. Bob Sura might have had an upswing in 3pt percentage last year, but history shows him as a bad 3 shooter. I'm not even counting TMac's less than adequate 3pt shooting as he usually hits them when we need them. Overall this group is not good at shooting the three. Derek Anderson can't shoot. His percentage for the last three years has been under 400.

But that's the point of listing theit fg pct and not their 3pt percentage. They have to shoot regular non 3 pt shots usually for more than half of their shots. Shooting under 42% is not a good percentage. I don't think they could even make them if they were just role players.

And why will a 3rd option allow them to hit their open shots. They can't hit their open shots now.

It sure didn't.

But really he wasn't. Looking at his stats, I'm not that impressed. I tend to look at what they have done for the last 3-4 years as a barometer for what they will produce now. And well, his stats befoer here were poor. Players usually don't get better in their 30's usually.

I think our love for Jon Barry was a little foolish. He is old and well, there's a reason his playing time has gone down the past few years.

Over the years, he has been barely an average shooter. And I don't know if we knew he was so badly injured, but we did know that he would be out until at least December.

I'm debating if the James trade was the right one or not, but that we should have expected a drop in shooting as Alston is not nearly as good a shooter as James.

Losing Padgett is bigger than we think. As he offered another good shooter that spread the floor and at least drew the PF away from the basket. Something Stromile/Hayes/Howard does not do. I am now seeing the value of a 3pt capable PF.

We need more than a backup PG and a good 2 guard. Unless Rafer improves his shooting, I'm not that impressed with him and would prefer a PG that can shoot. I do not know if this true point is that important. We need more of a shooter that doesn't turn the ball over often. Rafer is a nice penetrator, but he doesn't convert and his defense is very suspect. He's not even bringing what our coach values the most. Our PF position is still weak. If we don't get a new SG we might as well pack it up. Right now. I only count one shooter on the court and that is David Wesley who is old and doesn't have many years left in him. This team still has many holes. Keith Bogans is great, but only if he doesn't start. And at this point in his career, the same for Luther Head,

That's my point. We went into the season relying too much on yao and t-mac and we just put any old players around them in the backcourt. all the analysts pointed out at the beginning of the year that we might have the best frontcourt, but possibly the worst back court and they were right. we should have been smarter to surround the team with old and injury prone players. JVG wanted more athletes and better defender. That's what he got, but he lost all of the shooting we did have with James and Padgett.

We definitely agree here.

 

Exactly my feeling. I think he's a good, or even a very good coach, especially for Yao Ming. There are better coaches out there, but none of them is available. We don't have a choice but to keep him now, unless the organization is willing to go through a list of unknown coaches. But we are not Bobcats, we are locked up with Yao Ming and TMac. Rockets just cannot go through that kind of risk.

 

If only we had some shooters like we had during the championship years.

If only we had a coach who could actually coach.



Yao & Tracy's careers will basically be wasted for as long as JVG remains the Rocket's coach.

Les needs to fire JVG and bring in some competent 3 pt shooters. Run the inside-out game like we had with Hakeem. That's the way to success with Yao & Tmac.

 

Nice picture! Yao is kung-fu training.

 

Am I the only one who doubts this is an exact translation from Yao?

 

Couldn't say it better, man.

 

When we can't hit from outside - that's the most literal translation. Feel better?

 

GREAT IMAGE!!!!

... I mean... it sucks.... but it's great.

 

my point was not that the named players are good shooters. my point was that they are not bad 3p shooters. i consider everything above 33% form beyond the arc as solid and not bad.

when you talk about rafer and the 4 year decrease in his shooting you have to consider the following points:

he had a good season with the raptors in 02/03. he made 39% of his 3ps. the point here is that he didn't get that much pt and that he didn't shoot to many 3ps. the next year he was with miami. he got the starter job and played more than 30 mpg for the first time in his career. his 3p attempts got up and his 3p% got a little down. that's normal and not really a decrease. last year he was with the bad raptors. he basically was one of the few go to guys on that raptor team so his open shot attempts decreased as did his 3p%. again, i would not see this as a decrease in his shooting ability. this year however is a different story. he was not healthy at the beginning of the season. after he came back he had a good stretch when t-mac was healthy. he started to hit his 3ps. but his 3p% went down again after he became one of our primary scoring options.

when i look at rafer, i see a true pg who can hit an open shot as role player. i don't see a guy who could be an efficient 3rd option on a contending team.

in his last 5 seasons, anderson shot on time below 35 % from beyond the arc. the other 4 seasons he did hit 39.9 %, 37.3 %, 35 % and 38.9 % of his 3ps. that's pretty accurate to me.

i agree, though, that anderson is not a pure shooter. he is (was) a slasher who can hit open shots. that's what we were looking for...

our biggest concern is our poor 3p%. we bricked open 3ps almost every time the last couple of games.

they will get even more space when they're just role players and not the 2nd or 3rd scoring option. and then shooting is a confidence thing. when we have guys that score consistent other guys will get on a role also.

i don't think we were foolish. barry wasn't expected to play big minutes. he should have come in for 10-15 mpg an hit open shots. you don't have to be in your prime to play that role. it was just unfortunate that he got injured and could never recover from that injury. something like this happens. you have no control over it. it could have happened the year before, too.

that's what i basically said. i said he could hit the open ones. and that was what he was known for. he wasn't more than an average shooter, but he could hit an open shot if he was forced to. and open shots would have been there for him...

when you look at this single trade a drop in shooting had to be expected. but you have to look at the bigger picture. anderson and head were signed to erase this drop off.

i was a huge padge supporter. and i didn't think that was a good move from the beginning. the problem is that we needed a backup 3 more than another backup 4. padge wasn't that good suited for the 3. and we expected stro to play about 25-30 mpg. it was a difficult situation. and we lost this gamble as well.

of course we need some other roster tweaks as well. but when you adress shooting it's really just 2 players. we need shooters in the backcourt and a banger at the 4. it remains to be seen if stro is the player we can play 25-30 mpg at 4. at the moment i don't see that. i doubt we can get an upgrade over juwan howard that easily. so we probably have to stick with what we have until december or january.

i agree. bogans is a good 9th or 10th player for an contending team. and david wesley should be a bench player as well. that's why we really need that athletic sg who can be our 3rd option.

i don't think that is completely true. we had a solid young core with players under 30. the problem was that those players were the ones that got injured in first place (t-mac, yao, rafer, stro,..., anderson).

i again don't agree with that.

we knew we had to get younger, so we tried to accomplish that. we signed stro, who is a young talent. we drafted head. we gave guys tryouts in the summer league and in the camp and ended up with a young player in lonny baxter. we even explored our options in bringing over spanoulis.

we didn't have that many other options to add players. so we gambled with derek anderson. if you look at the players that where available, derek anderson was a steal for the rockets. he got a small deal and was considered as a player with decent talent and a couple of years left. as i said, it just didn't play out. on a season like this one, you lose gambles all the time.

and the funny thing is, with all the millions of different bashing threads here, nobody really has a fault. it's not t-mac's fault that he injured his back. it's not yao's fault that he got an infected toe. it's not jvg's fault that he didn't have his superstars for that many games. it's nobodys fault that david wesley cracked his ribs (except the camera man maybe). it's not carroll dawsons fault that we didn't have to many options in the offseason and that the signing of derek anderson didn't play out at all.

people have to stop the bashing and start to accept that this season was just bad karma or whatever you would like to call it. better days will come.

we have a more than solid foundation. we have a good coach in spite of what a lot of people here say. we have two dominant superstars. we just need them to remain healthy for most of the season. we have some other talent as well. we have some good role players. and we basically already have a really good team. we just need to tweak a couple of things and everything will be fine.

 

If our role players were hitting at a 60% rate and Yao still called them out for poor defence, then that would be equivalent to what JVG did after Yao's 36-pt game. Even if the coach's criticisms were true, he was a fool for attacking Yao in public, and after a huge performance too. JVG should have tried solving the problem in private.

And now we are seeing the results. Yao is beginning to pull away from JVG.

 

Heh. I remember the following being said of one soccer coach: that he was defending the local stadium from excitement.

 

Too true.

 

Last night the outside shootings are ok, except for a little disappointment on 3p, we were beated at the other end of the court, especially huge mismatches on PG and PF positions. These scrub players they only have these potentials, they were playing hard and we had to accept it, no choices. But for JVG, he may have more rooms to use yao smartly.

Yao is a unique asset we have, he had monster offensive performance recently, but most of time he showed it in the first half of the game. In the fourth quarter, a slow, mechanical, and out of gas Yao sometimes may even become the liability of Rockets offense, although definitely he could still attract double or triple teams, but we just couldn't take full advantage on it. I prefer Yao to step up a little bit in the clutch time, I know it is hard for him to do it without Tmac, but only be involved a little bit more, even a couple of more FGs, this may become the difference of the game. To my opinion, JVG should cut his time back to 30-33 minutes, save his energy for the fourth quarter, give more trusts to the other players if the team isn't in a very bad shape. Currently this will hurt Yao's great stats, but his numbers is lacklustered anyway if the team is continually losing.

 

Bottomline, this elephant has been standing in the room since the beginning of the season, injuries notwithstanding. So, are the Rockets (CD, JVG, LA, etc) going to remedy this situation or not? Last years shooters look like All Stars compared to the current group, and, frankly, they were quite average by NBA standards. I would still take them though, Barry, Sura, James, and Padgett. No dead-eye sharpshooters, but a world better than the bricklayers we have now. If JVG is too hardheaded to address this, he should move on. The rare opportunity the Rockets have with Ming and TMac MUST not be wasted.

 

At the beginning of the season, we had three above average perimeter shooters expected to play most of the minutes (Wesley, Anderson, and Barry). A healthy Tracy McGrady would also have been a big 3-point threat. That would have been a good perimeter-shooting team. And like most fans at the time felt, it was seemingly a deep team.

But who could have forseen the extent of the injuries we had this season? It decimated the team, and now none of those guys are even on the active roster. This isn't a situation where the Rockets front-office screwed up in the offseason and didn't get good enough shooters. If anything, the problem was relying on older guys with shaky health issues to be healthy most of the season. But even that could have been sustained if it was just a few injuries spread at over the whole season (like how it is with most teams in most years).

It's natural to want to find someone to blame after such a disasterous season. Or to fire. But in this case it's not justified, in my view.

 

that is because for whatever reason, opponents choose not to play 3-on-1 against Yao and 2-on-4 against the rest of rockets in the first half. Personaly, I think it is stupid. if i were to coach a team and play against rox, i'd play that way from tip off. the way rox are playing, that stratigy will gurantee a win 99 out of 100 times.