Super Basketball Manager

Chapter 339 A Not So Gorgeous Turn Around

Step by step, wholeheartedly, left and right...

We all fell down.
We fell like toy soldiers...

...

"The Houston Rockets have won a league-record 34 consecutive victories all the way to the last division opponent they need to surpass...Dallas Mavericks..."

"It's also a passionate collision between the new concept of basketball and the old school of money first concept..."

"Forgive Houston...if they didn't celebrate all night...they still have a good reason to take the win here...Even though they almost fell to Washington, the bottom of the league yesterday, and even though the technical tape after the game was thoroughly studied by every team's scouts...but in fact, it was just at the beginning of last year's 34-game winning streak.

"If you can beat Dallas today, Houston will be able to enter the top eight in the Western Conference with a record of 35 wins and 18 losses...In a sense, this may be more convincing than 35 consecutive victories..."

Barkley: "Keep one thing in mind... The stats are useful for a whole season, but narrowing it down to a game, or even a game-changing key shot, throws the stats out the window..."

Kenny: "You like Dallas?"

Barkley: "I just expressed my worries...because all the teams are now studying the Rockets...this will make any of their small loopholes infinitely magnified..."

The Houston players are fighting hard…

What greeted them was boos all over the sky from Dallas people...

"Hey! McGrady, you-come-back-ahh?"

"Look at you, George, you smell worse than my grandma's ass..."

"Shh~~ shhh them to death..."

Cousins ​​pulls Chandler out, then turns and rolls down…

Chandler let out a smirk.

"I know... when you roll down, actually!!!"

Harden made a test shot from outside the 3rd line, and a big hand directly slapped the ball from the backcourt to the frontcourt...

"...bait!"

Accompanied by the applause from the audience, he swaggered at the Houston bench and said mockingly, "Better than our Rockets last season? ahh?"

...

Looking at the bright red scoreboard on the big screen, Ron, who witnessed the whole game for the first time this season, buried his head deeply...

...

Step by step, wholeheartedly, left and right...

We fell like toy soldiers...

Bit by bit, everything was wiped out, never victorious...

But the game continues because of us toy soldiers...

I'm supposed to be like a soldier, keep my cool and my head...

Even if I resist all of this...

...

"Nowitzki forced his way into the paint... Cousins ​​can only pretend to jump... Facing the master PF, he still has a long way to go..."

"Jason Terry... how should I put it? He completely suppressed James Harden...He is not a versatile player, but as a substitute, he can blow up the Rockets as soon as he comes on the court..."

"Tracey seemed very uncomfortable facing Caron Butler's melee defense...Although he dismissed the opponent's provocation, his physical fitness was completely inferior..."

"Stevenson is a lunatic, his three-pointer can detonate the audience..."

"Heywood...Chandler...under the attack of these two people in turn, Shaq is like a shark without fangs..."

"...the talented European Serb Teodosic pales in comparison to Kidd..."

...

"Houston lost! Lost as expected! Since their weakness in the last game, they have already shown signs of failure..."

"...Nowitzki raised his hands! He stepped on the bones of the Rockets who had won 34 consecutive victories, and was crowned the emperor..."

"What the Dallas Mavericks have shown is that the Houston Rockets haven't always been a solid, dynastic team..."

"...their manager came up with an inherently flawed theory and convinced the owner that they could redefine basketball..."

"...but you can't play basketball with the statistics of counting beans, hard work on the court and building role players around real superstars is the key to winning..."

"You have to grab threes, you have to break fast, you have to use your All-Stars to tear apart defenses, and you have to sacrifice sometimes... You have to intentionally let a player score high to disrupt the opponent's offensive rhythm... You also have to do little tricks sometimes to piss off the inexperienced rookies...It can't be done with a bunch of statistics..."

"No one can redefine basketball...Miami with the Big Three, the highest-paid Lakers are still the favorites to win the championship...Houston? Just a short-lived premature baby..."

"Because of the most frenetic, spending money Mark Cuban's macro deployment, Dallas has also joined the battle of the two heroes, and now it is a three-nation battle! ...Houston? Oh! Well, the winning streak is over...Everything is over..."

...

McGrady stretched out his left hand to cover his face, revealing a pair of light brown eyes and blurred sleepy eyeballs between his fingers; Shaq lowered his head, rolled his eyelids and scanned the carnival of Dallas people in the stands; and Harden and Paul George, they looked at each other silently, their eyes were as still as water... These men who are no longer young and the newcomers who have not yet been completely refined leave with different expressions of regret, but there is exactly the same emptiness and resignation in their eyes. Perhaps they all recognize the cruel reality: their own The era has passed like quicksand or is still in the distant future.

First came the Spurs, then the Lakers, and maybe the Celtics. The playoffs are about to be written on the agenda. One dynasty after another is thriving. The only thing left is to hold a press conference and announce that they will start playing with you. Whoever touches who will be in trouble...

This makes this year's playoffs a strange atmosphere.However, Wang Qi's change of color is not the most grand theme of the playoffs. When people are unable to extricate themselves from the fear of the retro trend created by the Grizzlies, and are surprised by the Mavericks' clean and neat means of killing gods, the Rockets, which gathers the backs of three generations of old, middle-aged and young players, are drifting away in the bloody setting sun.

Those players born in the 70s are disappearing like endangered rare animals. There are 84 such players left this season. After one summer, this population must be even rarer.The oldest active "post-70s" player is O'Neill. On the day he was born, the US Immigration Service refused to let a guy named John Lennon enter the country.Now O'Neill is approaching the age when Lennon was assassinated. His biggest enemy is not his little brother Wade, but his old legs that don't obey.

After more than two months of 8-game losing streak, O'Neal recovered in the Rockets' third victory. He played [-] and a half minutes and only made one goal.Although Houston coach Adelman talked about O'Neal's "hidden contribution" to the media, claiming that he could bring deterrence by standing on the court, he also had to admit: "The side effects of games and training on Shaq are indeed great. Just look at the uncomfortable look he made when he got on the team bus, and you can see how much pain he endured."

Now that O'Neal, who once proclaimed himself "the most dominant player", is already showing his old age, how can the blunt knife of time let his peers go?When Iverson first entered the league, more than half of his teammates were born in the 60s. At that time, the boss of 76, Snow, was old enough to be his father. From time to time, he would pull him to talk about the legacy of Tianbao in the era of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chamberlain.Later, almost every time Iverson played against a team with a super center, he had to look back at the era dominated by those super centers. He was not bored, he said that he could handle everything.

Of course, the final price is only his early suffering from injuries, and repeated failures... As everyone knows, Mutombo, whom he despises, is already one of the best inside partners in his career...

Now it's Iverson's turn to tell his story to his younger teammates, from the indifference he suffered when looking for Jordan's signature in high school, to the hard-won experience of leading his CBA teammates to the playoffs every time.

Today's fiasco will be an inescapable chapter in the story of Iverson, his second-best team.Many years later, people will not remember Cousins' inability to do anything to Nowitzki, nor will they remember George's powerlessness, they will only remember Iverson's failure to save his team.Let the hard-won 34-game winning streak fall apart...

Perhaps the only comfort for Iverson is that he was not defeated by those "post-80s" young people. When the Rockets needed to score most, it was another veteran Kidd who defended him. The 38-year-old Kidd also belongs to the generation that is about to end. However, in the most critical 7 minutes of the fourth quarter, Iverson, the best "one of the key killers" among active players, scored only 2 points in front of him.

"I don't know how Kidd did it." Mavericks center Tyson Chandler said, "His movement speed, his blocking of passing lanes, and his control of Iverson... These can only be described as incredible. Many times I stood not far from Kidd, thinking about whether to go to help him defend Iverson who killed the red eye, but soon I found that he can completely control the situation, and I don't need to worry about it at all."

Another Mavericks teammate, Stevenson, felt he knew the secret to Kidd's "rejuvenation," saying the future Hall of Fame point guard had a hungrier heart.In his 17-year career, Kidd made it to the finals twice but never won a championship ring. Maybe this is the driving force of his inner hunger.Of course, the root of the Mavericks’ strong comeback this year is their leader Dirk Nowitzki, a German genius who is the same age as Kobe but a few years younger than Iverson. Almost his entire career has been labeled as "failure", "soft guy" and "unlucky".

But there is no way, he has never had an inside partner like Gasol and Bynum, let alone Shaquille O'Neal and Yao Ming, and the center is the stable foundation of a giant.For a team like the Mavericks with a strange lineup structure for several years, the leader needs to bear all the responsibilities and pressures.

And now, although only Chandler and Heywood are standing in the 5th position, it is much better than before. Dirk finally waited for the opportunity to explode.The Rockets who have won 34 consecutive victories, you can't see the drag of age and physical fitness from the Germans, desire, only desire is burning.

On the other hand, those "post-80s" superstars in the Rockets, most of them have achieved success and fame, and their eyes lacked the sharpness of their youth, and their hearts also lacked the hunger of Dirk and Kidd.

Battier's elbow and Tracy McGrady's knee are just symptoms of Houston's failure, and it's disrespectful to Dallas to overemphasize them.Stevenson's close defense limited Harden's dribbling, Bledsoe found that there was no room for accelerated breakthroughs in the crowded penalty area, and O'Neal was struggling to deal with Tyson Chandler, who was 10 years younger than himself.As one of the greatest centers of all time, Shaq was the cornerstone of "various dynasties," and when cracks appeared in that rock, the foundations of the "Rocket Dynasty" faltered.

An interesting comparison case is McGrady, another "post-70s and 80s" super small forward. He and his waist are not ready to succumb to the years.For O'Neal, Iverson and Tracy McGrady, the best of the three "post-70s" players, a championship ring is indeed too little. Unfortunately, their gathering came too late, and the ambitious "post-90s" Harden, George, and Cousins ​​matured too late.In the co-starring of the old and new two groups of "Big Three", the old guys sometimes feel scary, but the self-esteem of the old guys can't be underestimated-when A Weng rotates normally, sometimes they even get angry...

Anyway, Houston's 35-game winning streak, a Midsummer Night's Dream, fell in Dallas...

As young Paul George wept tears of remorse, no one was in a worse mood than their manager, Ron...

This is a not-so-flashy turn around, something depends on people... what happens depends on God...

The Dutchman Peter Heier once said, "History is a play without an end, and each ending is the beginning of a new plot of the play." The winning streak is about to end, and the show will continue.

(End of this chapter)