The different paths of San Antonio and Houston

These two teams have gone complete opposite routes, even though they both have a lot of talent on their respective teams. The San Antonio Spurs which must people know won the NBA championship last year and continue to have a good record this year. On the other hand you have the Houston Rockets, who were knocked out of playoffs in the first round last year by the Utah Jazz in seven tough fought games. Since 2004, the Houston Rockets have either not made the playoffs because of injury(2006) or have been knocked of the first round. In 2005 they could have beat the revamped Dallas Mavericks but, instead of beating them in the seventh game, they didn’t come to play and got blown out by Dallas. The Mavericks took that playoff experience in 2005 and used it to get them to the 2006 finals. It’s amazing how even winning one playoff series can do to improve a team’s confidence.

This season the Rockets set in 10th place in a extremely hard Western Conference. Tracy McGrady has not shown that he can lead a team to playoff victory and unfortunately Yao Ming doesn’t want to take that leader role.  If the Houston Rockets enjoy getting knocked out of the first round for the foreseeable future they should keep T-Mac on their team and they will be a fun team to watch during the regular season. The sad thing is that I have been watching T-Mac since his days in Toronto and I really thought he had a bright future.  There didn’t seem to be any weaknesses to his game, he could shoot, pass, rebound, and play defense. When Tracy signed that contract along with Grant Hill in Orlando, I thought for sure that he would be the new face of NBA basketball. To everybody’s chagrins, Grant Hill was injured during almost every game McGrady played in a Magic uniform and this were the first round losses started for T-Mac.

Those first round losses in Orlando started up an I can do everything mentality for Tracy and he just took the team on his shoulders. This mentality was then brought into Houston even though he had Yao Ming to help out. McGrady continued to scored in big numbers and would always have the ball in this hands during almost every possession.  Yao Ming didn’t get enough touches and it has taken him longer to develop and Tracy still has a psychological roadblock that stops him from ever reaching the second round. This Houston team has a good chance of going the route of the Miami Heat, if there isn’t something done to fix it. The hard part is finding a team that would give something good back to the Rockets for Tracy McGrady. I think the Houston executives will wait till the end of this year until they revamp this team though.