It sounds okay in theory and I agree to some extent. Even with injuries, this team has underperformed its roster all season. The only rotation guy we didn't have from the WCF was Ariza, there was absolutely no excuse for that pathetic start to the season. At the same time, Paul is clearly worse than last year, and Gordon is having a career worst season, although he may be turning it around as of late. The biggest difference is defense, last year's team was ELITE defensively and working our ass off on that end was the only reason we had a shot against the Warriors last year. This year, we have one of the worst defenses in the league. We will be no match against the Warriors if approach defense in the playoffs like we have all season. In fact, we won't even make it to the Warriors series.
There has been zero evidence this is the case, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. If healthy, I like our chances against everybody but the Warriors, but we’ll just have to see if that comes to fruition.
Lots of good comments on here. However, they're a all based on "Chris Paul has regressed", which I made a long post dissecting a couple pages ago, or "this team sucks defensively". THAT is true but Capela makes such a huge difference and the swap of Ennis is addition by subtraction. That dude had a catastrophic effect on our switching defense. Earlier when Capela was healthy we were playing Melo, then Knight, and a lot of Clark,etc. Faried wasn't here shoring up our defensive rebounding. We still haven't seen this year's team. Be optimistic or pessimistic or whatever floats your boat, but the sky is definitively not falling yet.
I'm also noting that none of the negative arguments in here are acknowledging just how bad we were after spot #6 in the WCF last year, which was almost the entire point of my OP. Our depth was atrocious in the playoffs.
Fixed. Gotta leave room for finding his rhythm during the remainder of the season plus offseason. If 2018 CP3 becomes only slightly > 2019 CP3 and you take into account that Harden 2019 >>>> 2018 Harden... things might be worth saying they've balanced out. Playoffs are going to be about what they always are -----> performances I ain't worried, I'm just hopeful we're ready to perform.
Plus we've been hit by injury bug worst than last few seasons if I remember correctly. When key players go in and out the rotation (namely CP and EGo) as they have been, how can anyone expect consistency in plays on both ends of the floor? I also understand that our defense (especially defensive rebounds) wasn't great at that start of the season, but honestly, our lack of consistent lineup due to injuries didn't give the team a chance to figure things out. What we should all be doing moving forward is praying, wishing, hoping that our full roster comes back healthy and stays that way. I may be a minority in saying this considering most vocal doom and gloom reactions, at its current roster and fully healthy, Rockets are still the team to take Warriors to game 7. Even more so now since the game has slowed down so much for Harden.
It seems approximately 37% is complaining about that “back in the day ****” when 2 out 3 of best players have missed significant time.
Man I forgot how damn short our rotation was. We had 6 guys play 500 mins in the playoffs then we had Green played 171. We are soooo much deeper now.
