hall of fame small forward

Chapter 311 The Second Round of Prospects

Kill the Nuggets cleanly in 4 games, let the melon fall to the ground, and the answer withered. The Rockets will sit quietly in Houston and wait for their opponents in the second round, that is, the winners of the fourth-ranked Mavericks in the West and the fifth-ranked Suns in the West.

The outside world is not very optimistic about the prospects of their two teams. There is no other reason. The Rockets are too dominant this season.

With 73 wins in the season and 34 consecutive victories at the beginning, this defending champion team has strengthened another wave during the offseason last year. It has surpassed the standards of basketball teams on earth. A mountain that the team wants to challenge but cannot climb anyway.

The league no longer knows how many general managers and owners of teams hate the Hornets' stingy old man. This guy obviously doesn't plan to run the NBA market, but he cheated all the other players in the league before he sold the team. The team packed the league's number one star, Chris Paul, to Houston with a half-sell and half-gift package. What they got in exchange were only a few young players with potential or quasi-All-Stars, but none of the fundamentals of the Rockets was moved.

This is equivalent to adding Chris Paul and Tyson Chandler in vain after the Rockets kept the original team that won the championship last season.What is even more exasperating is that a few months after the deal was completed, the stingy boss transferred the Hornets team to the league. If he could make the deal a few months later, he would have taken over the Hornets The team's David Stern will certainly reject the deal for "basketball reasons."
The most disappointing thing is that the Rockets will still be able to maintain this complete facelift next season. Although they are the Big Three in name, they only have Yao and Paul in terms of salary. The Totoro is a rookie. His rookie contract is three years, which means that next year the Rockets can still use the Uranus superstar who only costs $100 million a year.

This concept is quite scary. The biggest disadvantage of the Big Three model is the salary space. After all the money of the entire team is given to the Big Three, the team will have no money to sign starters and bench players who can play. But this problem does not exist in the Rockets. Totoro, a giant, has the third lowest salary in the team. The only ones who are lower than him are this year's two rookies, Jordan Hill and Gibson. Let's just ask. With such a salary at the core, how can their competitiveness be weakened?

Although the outside world believes that whether it is the Mavericks or the Suns, whoever can enter the second round will only play four more games, but they themselves will not retreat. For the team, as long as they can start a new round In the series, as long as a new game can be started, it is a new start. When the game whistle blows, they will not focus on how strong the opponent is in front of them, nor will they care how many times they are behind , They will only try their best to play every game that belongs to them.

Furthermore, compared to the Rockets, whether it is the Mavericks or the Suns, they all belong to the role of challengers. Even if they are really swept away, the outside world will not criticize them too much, because the Rockets were the defending champions last year. The Rockets are the overlord of this year's regular season. It is a matter of course for the Rockets to win. Everyone thinks so. Everyone has no hope for the Suns or the Mavericks. Even if they lose, they will not lose anything.

But on the contrary, if they are lucky enough to have a miracle happen, then the Rockets will face the abyss, and they will get rich overnight. The second round of their series with the Rockets is like an unfair gamble. A chip of 1 million US dollars is placed, and only 10 cents is placed on the table. The Rockets can only get 10 cents if they win, but the Suns or Mavericks can win the whole world. In this kind of series, they What reason is there not to participate?Dreams should always be there, right?
But that is to say, it is not easy to decide a winner between them. The Mavericks have lost two games at home now. Their slow start and positional battle were completely destroyed by the sun's fast-paced whirlwind , but when everyone thought that the Mavericks were cold, the Suns knelt twice in their home court without warning. They were successfully dragged into the quagmire of positional warfare by the Mavericks. In the singles, Stoudemire said that he is not the opponent of the old German tank.

Now that the two teams are tied 3-3, the Rockets may have to wait two more days to know their opponents in the next round. During this period of time, the boring Rockets players almost played cards against the landlord in the training hall. There's no way, it's not that their professional quality is not high, but that their opponents are just too incompetent.

Except for the Rockets that have already won and the Suns Spurs who are still entangled, there is no suspense in the other two groups of duels. The Spurs and the Lakers have easily advanced to the second round, and then they have already started the first game in the second round ahead of schedule.

Today's GDP has not yet completely fallen to its peak. Although the combined age of the three of them is almost 90 years old, Duncan has been like a day for ten years, Ginobili is getting older and more demonic, and Parr is in his prime. With the newly joined former All-Star power forward Jamison, the Spurs are still very competitive this season. Their opponent in the first round is the Hornets, which has undergone a major change. However, the star Paul is gone. The high-quality inside players are also at a loss. The role of point guards is the engine of the inside players. The Hornets are now equivalent to preparing countless high-power machines, but they have thrown away the wires and plugs. up?
4 to 1, Manu Ginobili and Parker broke out every game. Lowry, who is still relatively young, is no match for the two old monsters. As soon as the game was played, there was no cold game, except for the fourth game, the league really couldn't stand it anymore, and the Hornets, who couldn't bear to be hit by the hurricane and robbed by the core players, were in pain, and they were swept out, so they used shameless The home whistle forcibly left a pair of mask pants for the Hornets, and the other games were all victories with more than 15 points, which already explains the problem.

(End of this chapter)