Sacramento crowd really into this game. Thunder blew a 23 point lead
Random NBA Observations 2017 - 2018
- Thread starter Big Jo
- Start date
Ya team is frauds BStarters went off for 44, got up 20, then the bench came in & did nothing
Buddy Hield
who_better_than_me
Time to go!!
Tell me the biggest risk you've taken & what happened next?
Morey: So let me set the stage a little bit. I'm in my first year officially as GM of the Houston Rockets. We're having a very solid year on our way to winning mid-50s with Rick Adelman as the coach & it's around the trade deadline. Our strategy at the trade deadline is basically kick every tire. This may not be a good strategy. There's pluses and minuses to it. One deal that came up that trade deadline, I was extraordinarily nervous to do. Our starting PG that year was Rafer Alston. We're playing extremely well, maybe 3 or 4 seed at the time. A player we had our eye on, hoping to draft the year before, maybe two years before was Kyle Lowry. One deal that we were working on was trading Rafer. It ended up being a 3-way. ... Now it sounds like a good deal. At the time, Lowry was the 3rd string PG at the time. We were trading our starting PG with 30 games to go in a strong playoff season for a 3rd string PG. I remember sitting with Rick Adelman in the office & him saying "Are you crazy? We're gonna trade our starting PG when we're doing this well but you got the job, if you vouch for it,... Brett Gunning was instrumental in making Rick comfortable with the move. Doing a move like that in my first year officially was probably the biggest risk I took in my career. A lot of folks didn't know what to think of me, sorta unknown coming from Boston. All the initial moves are extremely magnified as folks like Sam Hinkie found out. That was probably the biggest risk I can remember. If it hadn't gone well, I might not be talking to you. That's the biggest one I can recall.
What made you comfortable making the decision?
A bunch of factors. We thought Kyle would be better. In his limited time, he did play well in those minutes. This is back when basketball hadn't figured out what pioneers like John Hollinger did. If you play well even in shorter minutes, often you can expand those into a larger role. We were able to take advantage. I felt comfortable there. We also felt comfortable because we had depth at the guard position. Even though Rafer was the starter & if Kyle didn't work out, Aaron Brooks could give us solid minutes. To be fair, if you go back & look at the deal, it was a head-scratcher for the local media. Generally, it's not done where you trade your starting PG in the middle of a 50-win season. The key factors were that, both we felt good about our evaluation & our depth.
So what happened next?
Kyle went on to be an all-star with Toronto. Major contributor to that team. We lost Yao & Tracy that year in the playoffs. We lost Dikembe as well. The Lakers won the title that year against the Orlando team with Rafer as the starter so the trade worked for Orlando too you can argue. We were the only team to take the Lakers to 7 games that year, the year they won the title, without Yao & McGrady. It worked out amazingly, which is maybe one reason why I'm talking about this story. I can definitely name ones that didn't work out.
The next key moment also relates to Kyle Lowry & quite a bit of failure. That team took the Lakers to 7 games in 2009 was actually the peak of Yao & Tracy's career here. Neither played significant minutes in the NBA after that. Yao came back one more year & played like 5 games. Tracy ended up playing in a couple of places but injuries derailed both. We found ourselves in the early 2010-2012 range trying to rebuild with a mandate to not ever actually be bad. To be fair, even though being bad is the best way to do it, we had a team packed with very solid players like Luis Scola, Shane Battier, Kyle Lowry that trying to take the path of a high draft pick was difficult so how will we turn our team around without actually getting really bad? We essentially decided to take tons of very risky bets. We did that with mostly terrible failure. A lot of those moves didn't work out with the exception of another Kyle Lowry trade. I'll first walk through the risky moves we did. We traded a 1st for Terrence Williams. He was picked 12th the year before, flamed out with the Nets & we thought he was better than that. We knew we would never pick high so a pick in the 15-20 range for a guy we thought was maybe the 5th-6th-7th best player in the draft a year prior seemed like a great idea. Worked out really horribly. Never turned the corner. I should have been smarter. Any time a team gives up on a first round pick one year in, they're sitting on way more info than you are but we were desperate to find high upside bets in a strategy where we were never to pick high. We were able to trade our way into 3 first round picks in 2011, maybe 2012. We took three players, all high risks, the most famous being Royce White, who we thought again was a top 5-6-7 talent in the league but had off the court issues that we were willing to bet on. We needed high upside players. We took Royce White & Terrence Jones, both out of the league now. Both did not pan out. We then sign Jeremy Lin to a very large contract, knowing he was playing at a high level on a small sample size. Jeremy worked out incredibly well but it wasn't for us necessarily. Here, he didn't work out for reasons I'll go into in a second, weren't really his fault. Those are the high risks moves we did over & over trying to hit one and basically rolling snake eyes every time. The one that worked was trading Kyle out
Inserts into the mind of a brainiac
Morey: So let me set the stage a little bit. I'm in my first year officially as GM of the Houston Rockets. We're having a very solid year on our way to winning mid-50s with Rick Adelman as the coach & it's around the trade deadline. Our strategy at the trade deadline is basically kick every tire. This may not be a good strategy. There's pluses and minuses to it. One deal that came up that trade deadline, I was extraordinarily nervous to do. Our starting PG that year was Rafer Alston. We're playing extremely well, maybe 3 or 4 seed at the time. A player we had our eye on, hoping to draft the year before, maybe two years before was Kyle Lowry. One deal that we were working on was trading Rafer. It ended up being a 3-way. ... Now it sounds like a good deal. At the time, Lowry was the 3rd string PG at the time. We were trading our starting PG with 30 games to go in a strong playoff season for a 3rd string PG. I remember sitting with Rick Adelman in the office & him saying "Are you crazy? We're gonna trade our starting PG when we're doing this well but you got the job, if you vouch for it,... Brett Gunning was instrumental in making Rick comfortable with the move. Doing a move like that in my first year officially was probably the biggest risk I took in my career. A lot of folks didn't know what to think of me, sorta unknown coming from Boston. All the initial moves are extremely magnified as folks like Sam Hinkie found out. That was probably the biggest risk I can remember. If it hadn't gone well, I might not be talking to you. That's the biggest one I can recall.
What made you comfortable making the decision?
A bunch of factors. We thought Kyle would be better. In his limited time, he did play well in those minutes. This is back when basketball hadn't figured out what pioneers like John Hollinger did. If you play well even in shorter minutes, often you can expand those into a larger role. We were able to take advantage. I felt comfortable there. We also felt comfortable because we had depth at the guard position. Even though Rafer was the starter & if Kyle didn't work out, Aaron Brooks could give us solid minutes. To be fair, if you go back & look at the deal, it was a head-scratcher for the local media. Generally, it's not done where you trade your starting PG in the middle of a 50-win season. The key factors were that, both we felt good about our evaluation & our depth.
So what happened next?
Kyle went on to be an all-star with Toronto. Major contributor to that team. We lost Yao & Tracy that year in the playoffs. We lost Dikembe as well. The Lakers won the title that year against the Orlando team with Rafer as the starter so the trade worked for Orlando too you can argue. We were the only team to take the Lakers to 7 games that year, the year they won the title, without Yao & McGrady. It worked out amazingly, which is maybe one reason why I'm talking about this story. I can definitely name ones that didn't work out.
The next key moment also relates to Kyle Lowry & quite a bit of failure. That team took the Lakers to 7 games in 2009 was actually the peak of Yao & Tracy's career here. Neither played significant minutes in the NBA after that. Yao came back one more year & played like 5 games. Tracy ended up playing in a couple of places but injuries derailed both. We found ourselves in the early 2010-2012 range trying to rebuild with a mandate to not ever actually be bad. To be fair, even though being bad is the best way to do it, we had a team packed with very solid players like Luis Scola, Shane Battier, Kyle Lowry that trying to take the path of a high draft pick was difficult so how will we turn our team around without actually getting really bad? We essentially decided to take tons of very risky bets. We did that with mostly terrible failure. A lot of those moves didn't work out with the exception of another Kyle Lowry trade. I'll first walk through the risky moves we did. We traded a 1st for Terrence Williams. He was picked 12th the year before, flamed out with the Nets & we thought he was better than that. We knew we would never pick high so a pick in the 15-20 range for a guy we thought was maybe the 5th-6th-7th best player in the draft a year prior seemed like a great idea. Worked out really horribly. Never turned the corner. I should have been smarter. Any time a team gives up on a first round pick one year in, they're sitting on way more info than you are but we were desperate to find high upside bets in a strategy where we were never to pick high. We were able to trade our way into 3 first round picks in 2011, maybe 2012. We took three players, all high risks, the most famous being Royce White, who we thought again was a top 5-6-7 talent in the league but had off the court issues that we were willing to bet on. We needed high upside players. We took Royce White & Terrence Jones, both out of the league now. Both did not pan out. We then sign Jeremy Lin to a very large contract, knowing he was playing at a high level on a small sample size. Jeremy worked out incredibly well but it wasn't for us necessarily. Here, he didn't work out for reasons I'll go into in a second, weren't really his fault. Those are the high risks moves we did over & over trying to hit one and basically rolling snake eyes every time. The one that worked was trading Kyle out
Inserts into the mind of a brainiac
who_better_than_me
Time to go!!
Clint is the key to beat GSW. Our frontcourt has to better than their frontcourt for us to win.
Like I said GSW lowkey punk a lot of frontcourt. And if they don't do that the. At worst they neutralize other frontcourts.
Harden CP3 and Gordon will win the backcourt battle for us.
Capella, Anderson, Nene have to match West Draymond Looney and Durant.
Like I said GSW lowkey punk a lot of frontcourt. And if they don't do that the. At worst they neutralize other frontcourts.
Harden CP3 and Gordon will win the backcourt battle for us.
Capella, Anderson, Nene have to match West Draymond Looney and Durant.
mastermind
Rest In Power Kobe
Nah b, Wall lookin real funny out here
But he could be a high level NBA player.
Negative
You nikkas gonna be real disappointed come playoffs... it’s real easy to be a regular catch a team slipping on a given night
You nikkas ain’t beating GS in a 7 game series..
You got faith in Clint? If I can see how you completely take him out the game is denying him rolling to the basket then a defensive teams sees it
ALonelyDad
Veteran
Vince Carter needs to be fined 600K for that obvious tanking
street heat
merchant of death
lucky ass shot but ill take it!
<<TheStandard>>
I Am A God
WESTBROOK 
Awww , son of a bytch
