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2023 Houston Rockets Offseason Thread - Time to Start Thinking About Winning Again


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1 hour ago, billfromlaketravis said:

Help me understand the Brooks signing if he sends Eason to the bench. 

They want him to be the defender that sets the tone of the team on the court, and hope that trickles down to the youngins. He's a good 1 on 1 defender, and was all last year, he just got blown up by Lebron in 1 game, and got called out for it (rightly so). I don't really like him, but we'll see what Udoka can do with him. Rumor is Udoka is the one who steered the Rockets away from signing Harden to going with FVV and Brooks instead, which I would say is a significantly better path. If the contract turns out to be something like 24/22/20/18m, then I think it will be OK, but he really needs to step up and help this team turn into a defensive force. 

 

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5 minutes ago, SilasCoade said:

It makes even less sense if he's a bench guy. You really want to give $20+M/yr  to a guy coming of the bench who cannot get a bucket?

He is the starting #1 wing defender. He frees up Jabari to be the #2 wing defender and reduces the liability of Jalen's _efense. Freeing Jabari and covering for Jalen is probably worth 7 points a game. 

Brooks is a top wing defender in the league. He's probably the best Rockets defender since... Hell, Battier? 

The Rockets are ass on defense. Amen Thompson might be the 3rd best defender and has played zero nba minutes and has a bad ankle. 

I want a player who believes he can shut down the best in the league. Brooks has mostly done it.

The 20M means dick to me. It's not like some giant offer is going to be made to get some marquis FA Big any time soon.

4 years from now

Thompson, Green, Brooks, Smith, Sengun,  Whitmore,  Eason, and whomever they trade KPJ and a pick for should be a contending 1-8.

 

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, HtownHorn said:

Another decent defensive effort from the 3rd string and walkons. Matthew Mayer is shooting like he is playing Texas, and this Hudgins kid is likely the 3rd PG.

I didn’t watch, but I think Game 3 is the most pure form of the Summer League. The stars go home, and guys desperately fighting to make a team battle it out. 

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I’m fine with Brooks’ contract. Not the issue. But Eason’s playing time is.

Can Ime not coach up Eason on defense to somewhere approaching Brooks’ level? Or did they sign Brooks to teach Eason? Eason is going to be on his second contract before Brooks is up. Is Brooks a trade price? It’s just weird reasoning to me. 

 

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2 minutes ago, billfromlaketravis said:

I’m fine with Brooks’ contract. Not the issue. But Eason’s playing time is.

Can Ime not coach up Eason on defense to somewhere approaching Brooks’ level? Or did they sign Brooks to teach Eason? Eason is going to be on his second contract before Brooks is up. Is Brooks a trade price? It’s just weird reasoning to me. 

 

Eason has always seemed like a 6th man role player type. I don't see a starting spot on this roster with or without Brooks. 

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3 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

I’m fine with Brooks’ contract. Not the issue. But Eason’s playing time is.

Can Ime not coach up Eason on defense to somewhere approaching Brooks’ level? Or did they sign Brooks to teach Eason? Eason is going to be on his second contract before Brooks is up. Is Brooks a trade price? It’s just weird reasoning to me. 

 

When Jalen Green leaves, Eason will become a starter. 

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12 hours ago, ChickenSandwich said:

Eason has always seemed like a 6th man role player type. I don't see a starting spot on this roster with or without Brooks. 

We'll see. Eason works his ass off and believes in himself. 

He's already shown major improvement. For the first 50 games last year, he rarely dunked the ball and was a little timid at the rim. That has already changed. His handle has gotten better, and his 3 point shot looks good too. 

To me he's a future starter or 6th man of the year candidate in the next few years. 

 

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16 hours ago, billfromlaketravis said:

I’m fine with Brooks’ contract. Not the issue. But Eason’s playing time is.

Can Ime not coach up Eason on defense to somewhere approaching Brooks’ level? Or did they sign Brooks to teach Eason? Eason is going to be on his second contract before Brooks is up. Is Brooks a trade price? It’s just weird reasoning to me. 

The Rockets want to win games. Eason will develop more playing 24 minutes a game for a team attempting to win games than he would playing all of the minutes he wants on a team content with lucking into 20 wins with no organizational effort to win.

If Eason ends up too good to play 24-30 minutes being the backup 3/4, that's a good problem to have.

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27 minutes ago, goatsaag said:

The Rockets want to win games. Eason will develop more playing 24 minutes a game for a team attempting to win games than he would playing all of the minutes he wants on a team content with lucking into 20 wins with no organizational effort to win.

If Eason ends up too good to play 24-30 minutes being the backup 3/4, that's a good problem to have.

For him and the team. 

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From the Athletic, in the article “The eight nerdiest things that happened during NBA free agency:

Perhaps the wildest tale of free agency is the entire construction of Houston’s free agency blitz. The Rockets ended up trading five second-round picks and cash just to build up a five-team sign-and-trade for Dillon Brooks, even though Houston had more than enough cap space to sign him without engineering such a monstrosity.

So … what happened here? The tell is in the way Houston built this deal and the contract Brook Lopez signed with Milwaukee. The Rockets were rumored to be very close to a deal with Lopez, and the one he signed in Milwaukee was oddly front-loaded on money, which would have made sense for the Rockets but much less so for the Bucks … it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the Bucks likely matched whatever Houston was offering at the last minute. (Perhaps with, “We’ll sign your barely playable twin brother” as the cherry on top.)

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If the Rockets had signed Lopez for $25 million and Fred VanVleet for $40 million, then they needed to put together a complex sign-and-trade to acquire Brooks because otherwise they weren’t going to have enough cap room.

It appears Houston was well on its way to doing so via the rarely used tactic of under-the-cap salary aggregation. Veterans of the 2014 Ömer Aşık sign-and-trade to New Orleans, when the Pelicans spent several days scraping together the league’s assorted barrels for minimum guys to throw into the deal, may recognize what happened here.

The nitty gritty: Normally you can’t trade for a player (such as Patty Mills), and then immediately aggregate him with other contracts (such as TyTy Washington, Usman Garuba, Patrick Christopher and Kenyon Martin Jr.) to trade for a higher-salaried player. League rules require teams to wait at least 90 days before that can happen.

However, the fine print contains one exception: if a player is acquired with cap space. In that scenario, teams are free to aggregate immediately. So once the Rockets had a deal in place to acquire Mills, they could use him and the four players already on their roster, take advantage of the new CBA’s liberalized salary-matching bands, and be able to take Brooks back in a sign-and-trade even with a frontloaded contract.

It cost the Rockets five second-round picks and cash to put this all together, however, (they got two back for Martin from the Clippers, but still), not to mention drop-kicking three recent first-round picks, and in the end that they didn’t even need the extra wiggle room once Lopez spurned them.

Houston pivoted to using that space by inking Jeff Green and Jock Landale to be walking trade exceptions, with fairly large first-year salaries followed by non-guaranteed second seasons. (Landale’s runs four years and is only guaranteed for the first.)  Green, in particular, was originally slated to go into the Rockets’ $7.3 million room exception but now will have a larger $9.6 million cap hit (including the maximum allowable 20 percent in incentives), enabling him to be used in a trade for up to $17 million in returning salary come January.

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Man, would love to see Whitmore prevent us from stashing him in the G League.  
 

When are we jettisoning KPJ?   Unless he wants to play the role the Clippers have lined up for Westbrook (and a way worse version of that) I really don’t need him stealing minutes from anyone next year. 

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On 7/13/2023 at 7:28 PM, Ignatius said:

If the Rockets had signed Lopez for $25 million and Fred VanVleet for $40 million, then they needed to put together a complex sign-and-trade to acquire Brooks because otherwise they weren’t going to have enough cap room.

It appears Houston was well on its way to doing so via the rarely used tactic of under-the-cap salary aggregation. Veterans of the 2014 Ömer Aşık sign-and-trade to New Orleans, when the Pelicans spent several days scraping together the league’s assorted barrels for minimum guys to throw into the deal, may recognize what happened here.

The nitty gritty: Normally you can’t trade for a player (such as Patty Mills), and then immediately aggregate him with other contracts (such as TyTy Washington, Usman Garuba, Patrick Christopher and Kenyon Martin Jr.) to trade for a higher-salaried player. League rules require teams to wait at least 90 days before that can happen.

However, the fine print contains one exception: if a player is acquired with cap space. In that scenario, teams are free to aggregate immediately. So once the Rockets had a deal in place to acquire Mills, they could use him and the four players already on their roster, take advantage of the new CBA’s liberalized salary-matching bands, and be able to take Brooks back in a sign-and-trade even with a frontloaded contract.

It cost the Rockets five second-round picks and cash to put this all together, however, (they got two back for Martin from the Clippers, but still), not to mention drop-kicking three recent first-round picks, and in the end that they didn’t even need the extra wiggle room once Lopez spurned them.

Houston pivoted to using that space by inking Jeff Green and Jock Landale to be walking trade exceptions, with fairly large first-year salaries followed by non-guaranteed second seasons. (Landale’s runs four years and is only guaranteed for the first.)  Green, in particular, was originally slated to go into the Rockets’ $7.3 million room exception but now will have a larger $9.6 million cap hit (including the maximum allowable 20 percent in incentives), enabling him to be used in a trade for up to $17 million in returning salary come January.

So, do we hate Rafel Stone still, or no? 

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Well our Rockets are in the SL championship game. Cam Whitmore is already the best shooter we have on our squad. I want him on the regular season roster and not on the Vipers. He can hit those corner 3s. Hudgins, Hinton and Mayer can play. Hudgins should definitely be 3rd PG opening day. Ime Udoka is the truth and we have gone from having the worst coach in the league to having arguably the best coach in the NBA. You can see the organization on the floor and improvement from moron Silas is night and day.

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17 hours ago, Macklemore said:

Ime Udoka is the truth and we have gone from having the worst coach in the league to having arguably the best coach in the NBA. 

You may want to tap the brakes on that one. Ime Udoka has all of one total year head coaching experience on his resume. I'm going to need to see a little more than that to call him arguably the best coach in the NBA. The guy who replaced him in Boston is largely viewed as incompetent, but still won 6 more regular season games than Ime did. 

The way he left Boston is noteworthy and says quite a bit about the guy. That they didn't offer any resistance to him leaving says even more.  From what I know of his reputation in San Antonio, none of the Boston stuff was surprising. 

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47 minutes ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

You may want to tap the brakes on that one. Ime Udoka has all of one total year head coaching experience on his resume. I'm going to need to see a little more than that to call him arguably the best coach in the NBA. The guy who replaced him in Boston is largely viewed as incompetent, but still won 6 more regular season games than Ime did. 

The way he left Boston is noteworthy and says quite a bit about the guy. That they didn't offer any resistance to him leaving says even more.  From what I know of his reputation in San Antonio, none of the Boston stuff was surprising. 

I’d only put Pop and Spo above him because of their longevity and hardware. For a young team, there is no else I’d want and is the exact opposite of moron Silas. Ime got that same team in Boston to the Finals while his successor couldn’t do the same.

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16 minutes ago, Dutchrudder said:

Tonight at 8pm CST is the Summer League championship between the Houston Rockets and Cleveland Cavaliers. It will be on ESPN, and it should tell us absolutely nothing about how these teams will perform in the NBA. 

Disagree. You can already see implementation of Ime’s offensive scheme and improvement on defense. Also, Jabari getting the ball in the flow of the offense and wrecking shop in the first 2 games will translate. Improved PG play and Hudgins over Nix for the 3rd string is all Ime too.

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20 minutes ago, Macklemore said:

I’d only put Pop and Spo above him because of their longevity and hardware. For a young team, there is no else I’d want and is the exact opposite of moron Silas.

So, Ime with his one season where he got schooled by Kerr in the finals, is a better coach than all these guys with hardware and longevity:
Rick Carlisle - 22 years, 1 ring
Steve Kerr - 10 years, 4 rings
Ty Lue - 8 years, 1 ring
Michael Malone - 11 years, 1 ring
Nick Nurse - 6 years, 1 ring
Frank Vogel - 12 years, 1 ring

Ok. Gotcha. 

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7 minutes ago, Mitch Cumsteen said:

So, Ime with his one season where he got schooled by Kerr in the finals, is a better coach than all these guys with hardware and longevity:
Rick Carlisle - 22 years, 1 ring
Steve Kerr - 10 years, 4 rings
Ty Lue - 8 years, 1 ring
Michael Malone - 11 years, 1 ring
Nick Nurse - 6 years, 1 ring
Frank Vogel - 12 years, 1 ring

Ok. Gotcha. 

Yes, for THIS team, Ime brings what they desperately lack. Accountability for the younger players and defensive chops. He was the best coach available for a young team. I’d rather have him than Nick Nurse who was also available. 

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4 hours ago, Macklemore said:

I’d only put Pop and Spo above him because of their longevity and hardware. For a young team, there is no else I’d want and is the exact opposite of moron Silas. Ime got that same team in Boston to the Finals while his successor couldn’t do the same.

 

3 hours ago, Macklemore said:

Disagree. You can already see implementation of Ime’s offensive scheme and improvement on defense. Also, Jabari getting the ball in the flow of the offense and wrecking shop in the first 2 games will translate. Improved PG play and Hudgins over Nix for the 3rd string is all Ime too.

This hyperbole will not stand. 

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13 minutes ago, wildcat09 said:

It's so funny that you think a different IP proves anything.

Probably multiple personalities. No way we have 2 Persian christofascists who  are obsessed with Houston sports 

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