Rockets Daily – Monday, August 16, 2010

Daily Factoid: As a measure of consistency and excellence, Scottie Pippen made the playoffs in sixteen of the seventeen seasons he played in the NBA.

  • Mike Kerns of the Dream Shake takes a look at the key contributors the Rockets have at every position to determine if this year’s Rockets is the deepest team in the league.
  • Jerome Solomon – ‘Rockets use Ariza as a steppingstone’: “Only a year after telling us Trevor Ariza could become at least a low-level star, the Rockets figured a star at Ariza’s level is just a moon. And there are many, many moons circling the NBA…You get the sense this is a move to set up a move; the trade to set up The Trade. Remember that lazy dribble before the Dream Shake? The Rockets’ brass will say how much they like him, blah, blah, blah, but initially Lee’s biggest contribution to the team will be his salary, not his play. Rockets general manager Daryl Morey traded a pawn for a pawn, but one pawn cost some $5 million more than the other, earning the Rockets a valuable $6.3 million trade exception. The flexibility that offers and the mega savings to Leslie Alexander’s bank account (about $10 million in salary and luxury tax) made this a pretty sweet deal. It should be interesting to watch Morey work at making a deal in the next six months to move from also-ran team to contender. Little gets in the way of a Morey move. He was on vacation, taking in the USA Gymnastics national champion-ships in Hartford, Conn., when this one went down. Ariza had his chance to show what he could do and too many times he didn’t show up. Now he is off to his fifth NBA team, which officially qualifies a player — particularly one entering only his seventh season — as a journeyman. In comes Lee and more hope Morey can take advantage of the trade exception to land a star. ‘Obviously one of our stated goals is that at some point — and who knows when the opportunity will arise — we want to make a move for a star, who comes loose like Boston did in trading for (Kevin) Garnett a few years ago,’ Morey said. ‘Those opportunities don’t come along often, but if something comes along like that, it’s something we have to look at. And we feel like we’re in a similar or better situation to get those kinds of things done after this trade than before.’ The Rockets are closer to a star than Ariza is to being one, which means they might be closer to contending without him than with him.”
  • Jack McCallum – ‘Bird’s zingers and more snapshots from the Hall of Fame weekend’: “The competiveness of the players on the ’92 Dream Team has been well chronicled, but unless you’re an older basketball follower (somebody like, say, myself) it might not be clear that a couple of the ’60 players invented competitiveness. They were on stage Friday night and I watched the reactions of ’60 co-captains Oscar Robertson and Jerry West after Bird had his laugh line. They weren’t laughing. But that’s what made them great. I loved the fact that the ’60 players — West and Robertson plus Jerry Lucas and Walt Bellamy in particular — gave it right back to the Dream Teamers, even though the older guys were competing on an uneven court. The weekend belonged, without a doubt, to the Dreamers, who two decades after their triumph in Barcelona are still alive in the public’s collective imagination. Try being relevant five decades later”
  • The NBA Playbook analyzes the X’s and O’s of some of the best last minute plays during the 2009-2010 season.
  • ESPN – ‘United States pulls away from France’: “Chauncey Billups scored 17 points, nine in an early third-quarter flurry that broke open the game, and the United States beat France 86-55 on Sunday in its only home exhibition before the world championships.”
  • ESPN – ‘Carmelo Anthony unsure on extension’: “Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony says he has no timetable on when he’ll decide whether to sign the team’s $65 million, three-year extension that’s been on the table all summer. During his annual basketball camp at ThunderRidge High School, Anthony said he’s displayed his loyalty to Denver and the Nuggets over the last seven seasons, but ‘I’m just taking my time, figuring out if I want to take that extension or not.’ The Nuggets are searching for a new general manager but Anthony said that person won’t factor into his decision. ‘I think my decision is my decision,’ Anthony said, according to The Denver Post. ‘I don’t think it’s based on who is in the front office or anything like that. I’m going to make my decision based on my feelings.’”
  • Chris Sheridan – ‘Just call them the ‘B-deem Team’: “‘We can do a lot better, but it’s not bad.’ That pretty much summed things up Sunday as Team USA opened its exhibition schedule in advance of the 2010 World Championship by defeating what can be justifiably called France’s B team 86-55 at Madison Square Garden. Having officially cut Jeff Green and JaVale McGee from the roster hours before the game, the Americans will bring 13 players to Europe on Monday when they depart for Madrid, Spain. They will not be in action again until they face Lithuania and Spain Aug. 21 and 22. We got our first good glimpse Sunday at what this team is going to look like, what the rotations will be, and what its relative strengths (speed and defense) and weaknesses (size and heft) are. But keep in mind it was only a peek, and the caliber of the competition was the weakest it’ll see until September — after it has faced Lithuania, Spain and Greece in exhibitions and Croatia, Slovenia and Brazil in its first three games of the preliminary round in Istanbul.”
  • Basketball Reference takes a look at the career winning percentages of the newest Hall of Fame inductees.
  • Dan Devine of Ball Don’t Lie - “When he got to the microphone, Larry Bird griped about how, ‘just like always,” Magic Johnson only left him 20 seconds to speak. He got more than that – because in Massachusetts, nobody will ever tell Larry Bird to stop talking, or doing anything. But as it turns out, 20 seconds was plenty of time to deliver the line of the night at the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame’s Class of 2010 Induction Ceremony. After Johnson, who was selected to the Hall as an individual in 2002, offered his expected brand of vibrant, loquacious remembrances of the 1992 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team, he left it to Bird to put the finishing touches on the Dream Team’s mass enshrinement… Yeah, he congratulated the 1960 team, all right. ’You know, there’s a lot of debate going around [about] who had the best team, the ones in the ’60s or the one in 1992,’ Bird said, echoing a note that fellow Dream Teamer Charles Barkley sounded at a Friday morning press conference. The 1960 team dominated all eight games it played, rolling up an average margin of victory of 42 points. In 1992, the margin inched up to 44. The Dream Team’s Malone said his boys would take ’60 by 20 points. Co-captain West, shall we say, disagreed, pointing out in both the morning presser and Friday night induction speech how much tougher ’60 had it – staying in dorms during a broiling Italian heat wave rather than top-of-the-line hotels in Barcelona, making a $1 per diem (‘Magic and Michael, I think you two did a little better than that,’ he quipped) and generally living without all the amenities of the modern (read: pampered) athlete. Bird, of course, felt compelled to respond. ’I don’t know who had the best team, but I know the team in 1960 was a hell of a lot tougher than we were,’Bird said, tongue planted firmly in cheek. ‘Because I couldn’t imagine the ’92 team getting in them covered wagons for eight days, going across the country, jumping in the Atlantic Ocean, swimming for six days, then walking 3,000 miles to the Colosseum in Rome – for a dollar a day.’”
  • Dan Devine – ‘Notes from the 2010 induction press conference’: “Throughout his career, Scottie Pippen was often praised for having great court vision, a point guard’s gift to see the right play that paired well with his 6-foot-8 frame’s ability to make it. During a media session after a morning press conference to introduce this year’s class of inductees into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, he proved that his skills were as sharp as ever. The proof came as Pippen was answering a reporter’s question about whether or not it was fair to say that he played on the two greatest basketball teams ever – the 1992 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team, better known as the Dream Team, and the 1996 Chicago Bulls, better known as the juggernaut that decimated all comers en route to a 72-10 record and an NBA title. ‘Well, I’m not going to argue against it,” says Pippen, a soft laugh punctuating his response. ‘I played on some great teams in the early ’90s, as well. Obviously, we weren’t trying to win 72 games, but … uh …’ His concentration is momentarily broken by a fan standing in front of him, clad in cargo shorts and a black pinstriped Bulls jersey embroidered with Pippen’s name and number 33 on the back. Pippen immediately starts gesturing toward the fan with an outstretched finger, moving it up and down in front of him. Not wagging it, per se; just moving it up and down, sliding it on a vertical axis between him and the jersey-wearer.’  The fan, stunned by the fact that the newly minted Hall of Famer has singled him out, manages to reach into his pocket. Producing a cell phone, he seizes the moment, asking Pippen if he could get a photo with the Bulls great. Pippen sees that the fan doesn’t get the hint, so he vocalizes. ‘Zip up,’ Scottie Pippen tells the man wearing his jersey. The fan looks down, realizes that Pippen has literally caught him with his fly down, and sheepishly zips up. Pippen returns to the question-and-answer session. Chalk up another assist.”
  • Kelly Dwyer – ‘Scottie Pippen is a Hall of Famer’: “The awards, the rings, the statistics? They don’t matter, with a guy like Scottie Pippen. The 1.8-second sit-out? That’s part of the package when you do everything right for little payoff for so long. Kind of like those Amish kids who are allowed a fortnight to go inhale narcotics and chase down women with unnecessary vowels in their first names before submitting to a lifetime of quiet obedience to their respective makers. Pippen’s personal maker was this game, the game that I’ve chosen to cover and obsess over, and the one that brought him out of crippling poverty in rural Arkansas. His personal upbringing and formative years allowed him to see the game from all angles — scrub to superstar, unheralded game-changer to too-precious franchise saver — and nobody, I’m convinced, sees this game better than Scottie Pippen. This doesn’t mean he should run a team, coach a team or run the point-forward slot for the 2003-04 Chicago Bulls. This just means that, in the context of a game and how it flows and where it should go, Scottie Pippen was often left constantly disappointed. Not in the same way that Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant toss those too-obvious glares when you muck it all up after they deign to pass it to your lowly butt, but in a way that presumes you’ll know what to do with the ball and where to cut and how to end it four moves following the entry pass I’m about to throw you. Because, for someone who missed as many shots as he did and made as many mistakes as he did, Scottie Pippen was always the smartest guy on the court. He saw things that no other player did.”
  • Kelly Dwyer – ‘Karl Malone is a Hall of Famer’: “Because when some green rookie enters the NBA — be he blue chip or second round, four-year or one and done – Malone is the gold standard that we’ll hold him up to. He’s the best-case scenario. We don’t expect these players to mature and work and develop and sustain like Karl Malone, but we do know that if this particular player took the Malone route while mapping out his NBA career, then he’ll squeeze each and every ounce out of the potential that he was born with. Why? Because Karl Malone is the player that all NBA players should strive to be. Point guard or power forwards. Rural, urban, fast, slow, “I’m the NRA” or, “seriously, man, the NRA?” Every one of them. Nobody worked harder at his game and his development than Karl Malone. Nobody. Just a half decade into his career he was without weakness, after entering the NBA with dozens, and a period of sustained brilliance was the result. Nineteen years in the NBA, 25 points and 10 rebounds as the average. That’s … I’m sorry, but that’s astonishing. Those are numbers that make you think twice (three times, four times; every damn day) when you decide to pass on handing Malone a starting slot on your all-time team. Nineteen years, and he could have played a few more. Nineteen years, and his per-minute efficiency even in the lone gimpy year of his career at age 40 was better than 40 percent of today’s starting power forwards. Nineteen years, and he never let up. He wasn’t a product of the system, he was the system. He set the screens, he made the moves, and he finished from everywhere. He also finished 1,459 points shy of breaking Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time scoring record, and though the idea behind someone like Malone (just one of the greats, your instinct tells you) topping what might have been the best player at the most important position this game has, Malone would have been a rightful and deserved owner of that record had he hung around.”
  • The NBA Playbook explains how to run the pick and roll.
  • SBNation – ‘Eric Gordon is Going to Europe with Team USA’: “We went through the final 15 and predicted the last three cuts earlier in the week.  The two easy ones are done and have gone according to that earlier prediction.  It’s certainly harder now.  With six guards standing 6’3″ or shorter still on the team, it seems all but certain that the final cut will be one of them.  After all, can they afford to have half of their roster in Turkey under 6’4″?… If indeed it comes down to one of the guards, the conventional wisdom has for weeks been that it will be a choice between Gordon and Stephen Curry as the ‘designated shooter’ on the team.  The ‘logic’ supporting this idea is so spurious that I can barely follow it.  Why in fact would the team want to limit itself to two shooters?  Not to mention that Gordon and Curry are far from one dimensional players.  This is not Steve Novak we’re talking about. Of the six guards still with the team, five of them played the majority of their minutes at point guard last season.  It’s not a bad thing to have extra ball handlers on the floor, and offensively that is certainly where the other five candidates have an advantage over Gordon – each of them has a much better handle than EJ.  If Coach K wants to have two top level ball handlers on the court at all times, there may not be a place for Gordon.  On the other hand, there’s little question that EJ is a better defender than Curry or Derrick Rose, and in particularly when the team encoutners backcourts with size in the tournament (Russia and Greece with Spanoulis at 6’4″ and Diamantidis at 6’6″), it might be nice to have Gordon around. I personally feel that the final cut should probably be Russell Westbrook.  I think Westbrook is an amazing talent, but when I look at the six guards left on the team, I just don’t see anything that Westbrook does that other players don’t do better.  In terms of strengths and weaknesses, he’s almost exactly the same player as Rajon Rondo – except that Rondo is stronger at most things, and has valuable experience that may benefit the team in Turkey.  Westbrook’s tendency to play out of control at times and to put up terrible games with regularity also make him a candidate to be cut – in a single elimination tournament, consistent play trumps spectacular play. Finally, given that Rondo and Westbrook at among the worst perimeter shooters in the NBA, I really can’t imagine having both of them on the floor at the same time.”
  • Howard Beck – ‘A Man of Few Words, Dolan Says the Wrong Ones’: “By declining all interviews, Dolan probably avoided exacerbating the controversy. He is an often clumsy speaker and is prone to defensiveness. Yet in choosing silence, Dolan has chosen to avoid accountability to fans and season-ticket holders. He has never explained his fealty to Thomas or the acquisitions of Stephon Marbury and Eddy Curry. He has never offered a public assessment of Walsh, who slashed the payroll and rebuilt a sounder roster. Last week, Dolan might have done something worse. Through another written statement, he confirmed many fans’ worst fears, by publicly affirming for the first time his continued belief in Thomas. Dolan had tried to hire him as a consultant. The league squashed the deal, because Thomas is now a college coach with a clear conflict of interest. This time, Dolan issued a one-paragraph statement that seemed intended to inflame Knicks fans. Dolan praised Thomas’s acumen, vowed to “continue to solicit his views” and indicated he would “always have strong ties to me and the team.” Dolan also praised Walsh and D’Antoni, but the statement fueled frantic conspiracy theories about Thomas some day returning as the general manager. For once, it seemed, Dolan had said too much.”
  • Basketball Reference ranks the teams that performed the best against playoff teams during the regular season from 2000 to 2010.
This entry was posted in Rockets Daily. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

  •  
  •  

  •  
  • All-time Keepers

    A collection of our best from over the years.
  •  
  • Archives

    • 2012 (398)
    • 2011 (428)
    • 2010 (461)
    • 2009 (49)
  • Categories

  •