your friendship with Morey has given you rose-colored glasses. Our starting point guard is an erratic volume gunner that teams will back off to limit his forays into the lane. As long as we have an nbdl player logging minutes at center (Hayes), we will be lucky to win 25 games this year. we are still suffering from the rudy gay/battier dumb deal. we now have essentially the same player ariza, except more atheleticism. no handle, so no scoring other than standstill jumpers. Andersen looks like a good pickup……have to see how he handles extended minutes against competition. imo, we got worse, other teams we won series against got better……i’d love to hear how you figure (honestly) we will get 44 wins.

On paper, the Rockets look like a lottery team.

ahem….they are. you’re right.

 Their best player (Yao) is gone for the year. Their second-best player is probably never going to be the same. Everyone else is a role player or an overachiever.

you’re on a hot streak now!

But they do certain things really well: shoot threes, defend the hell out of perimeter guys, play unselfishly, pound the glass, stuff like that. It’s one of those “whole is greater than the sum of its parts” teams.

for a minute there, you had me. if you’ve ever played or coached bball on a level above jr high, you would know that we will suffer defensively guarding perimeter players this year. pound the glass?? um with who? we don’t have glass eaters, or guys who can get rebounds out of their space/area……or we don’t have a rebounder who can get rebounds on sheer will (scola is the closest thing), intensity, heart and hard work. the guys on this team who hit threes last year, hit them because of dbl teams, not because they’re great three pt shooters…..and even so, they werent consistently hitting them then. hell, even when we had real 3 pt shooters on the championship teams, they weren’t always on, but they were legitimate shooters. K Smith, Mad Max, Horry, Elie, when games were on the line, these guys could and did hit the big shots.
unlike Battier….who shows up about every 8th game on the offensive end.
So we have had success when we do these things with Yao, TMac, but as you said, we have role players, and there has not been a team make the playoffs, or even come close without some legit stud capable of either running the show, or scoring/leading.

I am picking them to win 44 games and make the playoffs.

this bears repeating. I’ll go out on a tree and put that number @ one more in tune with reality. 25 wins if Tracy doesn’t make it back to anything resembling himself.

If he comes back and gels with the team……I give em 32 wins. Adelman gets COY if so. unofficially of course.

 Which brings me to my point: the ’09 Rockets took the Lakers to a seventh game operating with half a salary cap (because Yao and T-Mac were out).

That inspired, impressive effort against a Laker team that hadn’t turned on the lights has no bearing on this year. None whatsoever.

The ‘10 Rockets start out with 80 percent of a cap because Yao is gone; that number might shrink if T-Mac can’t successfully come back. And yet, I am still picking a hodgepodge group of non-All-Stars to win 44.

I’m a lifelong fan, but my bball experience playing and coaching won’t allow me to ignore the obvious. You acknowledged these things, and for some reason…..you STILL see 44 wins. That, I would like to debate over a cold beverage with you.