Walton Buys Off Me
02-19-2005, 11:43 AM
For the past week or so, I've been on the phone arguing with TwoHandJam that we need to start respecting and acknowledging a certain team in the West. In my opinion, it's not he Phoenix Suns, the Seattle Sonics, the once mighty-now-mediocre Lakers, not the Dallas Mavericks; it's the Houston Rockets. At the beginning of the season, with Shaq being traded to Miami, the only team that stood in the way of San Antonio returning to the Finals was the Minnesota Timberwolves. With the reigning MVP Kevin Garnett and another year of playing alongside Sam Cassell and Latrell Spreewell, the Wolves were arguably the team to beat out West. Turns out, Spreewell was more concerned about "feeding his family" via a contract extension and Cassell obviously has not come close to recovering from offseason hip surgery. This has left the Wolves with a sub-.500 record and has spelled the end of Flip Saunders' nine-year coaching career in Minnesota. You can’t really count out a team with Kevin Garnett and I'm sure that GM-turned coach Kevin McHale will be looking to pull the trigger on something in the next hundred hours, but in reality, the season is lost for Minnesota.
What has this done to the landscape in the Western Conference? Has any team(s) emerged? Well, for starters, San Antonio, as expected sits atop the mountain with an NBA best 41-12 record, including a ridiculous 23-1 clip at home. The Phoenix Suns aren’t far behind, but have been beaten by San Antonio twice already this season (including one in blowout fashion) and just 48 hours ago were beaten at home by Dallas in a game that showcased the Suns' biggest weakness; they scored 113 points, 100 of those came from their starters. Without Steve Nash in the lineup, Phoenix is 0-6 this year. Nash is so good that he makes Jake Voskuhl look like a basketball player and he's hand delivered Amaré Stoudemire into superstardom but anyone with a basketball IQ knows that at 35 minutes a game, it's going to be tough for Nash and Phoenix to improve on a stellar first half of the season. His lack of durability and penchant for second half setbacks was the deciding factor in Mark Cuban electing not to resign the all-star guard remember.This is why I don’t consider Phoenix the biggest threat.
Moving on to possibly the league's most improved team from a year ago, Nate McMillan’s Seattle Sonics. With all the talk of a contract extension, Ray Allen is quietly having maybe the best year of his career and the Sonics sit atop the Northwest division with a 35-15 record. They also hold the distinction of being the only team that has won on the floor of the SBC center this year. If someone were to have told me in September that Seattle would be ten games ahead of Minnesota at the all-star break, I would have presumed Kevin Garnett has sustained a season-ending injury the first week of the year. The Sonics however are starting to show signs that Cinderella may have danced her last dance. They have dropped consecutive games at home to Dallas and to Oakland and Ray Allen, averaging nearly 40 minutes of action a night, has looked tired in both. Rashard Lewis, who came out of the gates averaging nearly 25 points a game for the first two months of the season, has scored over twenty only twice in his last 10 games, indicating that the first time all-star may not be fully healed from a sore left knee that forced him to miss three straight games in January. Seattle is more of a threat than Phoenix but Spurs fans need to focus on one team only now.
Every year, in every sport there are teams that nobody expected to make waves, yet come out of the gates and have everyone asking if they're for real. This year, Phoenix and Seattle are perfect examples of this. However, right around this time of year, something happens in professional sports. Pretenders fade away, unable to deal with the challenges and rigors that the NBA season produces. As teams like Phoenix and Seattle come back down to Earth, contenders arise. The Houston Rockets, coached not by the rookie Mike D'Antoni nor by the barely playoff tested, Nate McMillan, have won nine consecutive games, have also defeated the Spurs twice this season, and the man Gregg Popovich defeated in 1999 in the NBA Finals, Jeff Van Gundy is starting to see the potential many expected from his team before the season started. The Rockets do something that Phoenix could only dream of, play defense and they do it almost as well as the Spurs, which says a lot. The Rockets also have a bench almost as deep as that of San Antonio and boast a bonafide all-star duo in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. Just this year alone, Houston has acquired not only the elite McGrady, but has also plugged holes with dead eye shooters Jon Barry and David Wesley and has for the first time in a long time, a point guard that actually utilizes his teammates in Bobby Sura- a triple double waiting to happen. With Ming, backup center Dikembe Mutombo, forwards Maurice Taylor and Juwan Howard, Houston has over 24 fouls to throw at Tim Duncan on any given night and more than enough length to bother the two-time MVP. In McGrady, the Rockets have a 6"9' scoring machine that has lit up defensive stopper Bruce Bowen to the tune of 61 points in two games this year. I won’t even get into the 13 points he scored in 35 seconds. In the two losses in Houston, the Spurs have scored 80 and 67 points respectively. One can argue that this Houston team was built to beat to Spurs- I mean it's not inconceivable that other GMs see the Spurs as the team to beat, however it's the Rockets that have made the biggest effort in doing so.
In short, the Rockets are strong where others in the West are weak. They have bodies to bother Duncan, they have perimeter defenders to counter San Antonio's speed, they have a coach that doesn't play his players the full 48 minutes during a regular season game in Toronto and they have a bench that contributes on a nightly basis. It would be very interesting to candidly ask Gregg Popovich which team worries him the most in a seven game series. I can almost guarantee, he points to the north and says Houston.
I'm very much looking forward to the game on Wednesday night.
What has this done to the landscape in the Western Conference? Has any team(s) emerged? Well, for starters, San Antonio, as expected sits atop the mountain with an NBA best 41-12 record, including a ridiculous 23-1 clip at home. The Phoenix Suns aren’t far behind, but have been beaten by San Antonio twice already this season (including one in blowout fashion) and just 48 hours ago were beaten at home by Dallas in a game that showcased the Suns' biggest weakness; they scored 113 points, 100 of those came from their starters. Without Steve Nash in the lineup, Phoenix is 0-6 this year. Nash is so good that he makes Jake Voskuhl look like a basketball player and he's hand delivered Amaré Stoudemire into superstardom but anyone with a basketball IQ knows that at 35 minutes a game, it's going to be tough for Nash and Phoenix to improve on a stellar first half of the season. His lack of durability and penchant for second half setbacks was the deciding factor in Mark Cuban electing not to resign the all-star guard remember.This is why I don’t consider Phoenix the biggest threat.
Moving on to possibly the league's most improved team from a year ago, Nate McMillan’s Seattle Sonics. With all the talk of a contract extension, Ray Allen is quietly having maybe the best year of his career and the Sonics sit atop the Northwest division with a 35-15 record. They also hold the distinction of being the only team that has won on the floor of the SBC center this year. If someone were to have told me in September that Seattle would be ten games ahead of Minnesota at the all-star break, I would have presumed Kevin Garnett has sustained a season-ending injury the first week of the year. The Sonics however are starting to show signs that Cinderella may have danced her last dance. They have dropped consecutive games at home to Dallas and to Oakland and Ray Allen, averaging nearly 40 minutes of action a night, has looked tired in both. Rashard Lewis, who came out of the gates averaging nearly 25 points a game for the first two months of the season, has scored over twenty only twice in his last 10 games, indicating that the first time all-star may not be fully healed from a sore left knee that forced him to miss three straight games in January. Seattle is more of a threat than Phoenix but Spurs fans need to focus on one team only now.
Every year, in every sport there are teams that nobody expected to make waves, yet come out of the gates and have everyone asking if they're for real. This year, Phoenix and Seattle are perfect examples of this. However, right around this time of year, something happens in professional sports. Pretenders fade away, unable to deal with the challenges and rigors that the NBA season produces. As teams like Phoenix and Seattle come back down to Earth, contenders arise. The Houston Rockets, coached not by the rookie Mike D'Antoni nor by the barely playoff tested, Nate McMillan, have won nine consecutive games, have also defeated the Spurs twice this season, and the man Gregg Popovich defeated in 1999 in the NBA Finals, Jeff Van Gundy is starting to see the potential many expected from his team before the season started. The Rockets do something that Phoenix could only dream of, play defense and they do it almost as well as the Spurs, which says a lot. The Rockets also have a bench almost as deep as that of San Antonio and boast a bonafide all-star duo in Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming. Just this year alone, Houston has acquired not only the elite McGrady, but has also plugged holes with dead eye shooters Jon Barry and David Wesley and has for the first time in a long time, a point guard that actually utilizes his teammates in Bobby Sura- a triple double waiting to happen. With Ming, backup center Dikembe Mutombo, forwards Maurice Taylor and Juwan Howard, Houston has over 24 fouls to throw at Tim Duncan on any given night and more than enough length to bother the two-time MVP. In McGrady, the Rockets have a 6"9' scoring machine that has lit up defensive stopper Bruce Bowen to the tune of 61 points in two games this year. I won’t even get into the 13 points he scored in 35 seconds. In the two losses in Houston, the Spurs have scored 80 and 67 points respectively. One can argue that this Houston team was built to beat to Spurs- I mean it's not inconceivable that other GMs see the Spurs as the team to beat, however it's the Rockets that have made the biggest effort in doing so.
In short, the Rockets are strong where others in the West are weak. They have bodies to bother Duncan, they have perimeter defenders to counter San Antonio's speed, they have a coach that doesn't play his players the full 48 minutes during a regular season game in Toronto and they have a bench that contributes on a nightly basis. It would be very interesting to candidly ask Gregg Popovich which team worries him the most in a seven game series. I can almost guarantee, he points to the north and says Houston.
I'm very much looking forward to the game on Wednesday night.