Afraid to start this thread, hopefully someone else will

No! You turned it into that! This thread was generally about the different attitudes between the Rockets and Astros, until you took umbrage of nWo34Life's picking on your buddy Francis. It's almost like YOU took his comment personal! I mean, what the heck!?



So, you made it that way. Go back and check the first page....Then, enter you....

"What crap did Steve Francis talk and not back up this past season?"

Sigh....poor Francis. We start an interesting discussion about the Astros and Rockets. And you turn it into a "Stop picking on by buddy, Francis" thread. I mean, half your post are about "Leave Francis alone! Yeah, but what about Bagwell?!"

And I'm not saying that those player(s) can't be talked about in the theme of this thread. It's just that you took it way tooooooo *personal* in Francis defense (which is not surprising).

 

So its alright to say something negative about Francis but you have a problem with questioning that obviously false statement.

And if you read the post further, it was about the Astros and Rockets. And if you read the thread further, my first post comparing Bagwell to Francis was in response to MadMax's post. Then everyone responded to me. You see, that's how threads tend to evolve. Get off my freakin back.

 

To be fair, I don't think pgabriel brought up bagwell. i did. and he responded. that's fair game.

 

This one?

So, you think this is false? All you said was, "Not true." But then failed to even address it directly. You mean to tell me that you CAN find a role on baseball team similar to basketball PG? The role of the PG will receive a lot of criticism; period! And if he's our "star" that makes that position all that more important. This is why Francis got most of the criticism and why other players (Baggs choking; Astros or Rockets; Yao's tenure) did not. It was the nature of their role, experience, and differences between each sport.

All your post said was basically, "Yao (enter player of your choice) got treated fairly, Francis got treated unfairly. Leave him alone!"

All your posts are slanted in defense of him. I mean, can't you be objective about *all* our players w/out taking it personally (Francis criticisms). You're just as bad as a YOF (remember them a couple years ago?).

 

I undersand that. But the comparisons was just to simplified. Their games, roles and situation are just too different to make a realistic comparison.

In the end, it still became a "defend Francis at all cost" post. Didn't matter who else was involved; Yao, Sleepy, Akeem, Murphy, the Rocket Mascot...

 

i think you can make a "relative to their own game" comparison, though such a comparison will never be perfect.

having said that, the concept of the thread was centered around a perception that the astros don't take as much heat as the rockets do. that the individual jabs at francis, in particular, seemed pretty heavy-handed relative to criticisms of the astros. so i cited bagwell and biggio and contrasted them against francis' accomplishments as a reason for why.

 

I think that even if Francis had never been on our team, we'd still see the same level of criticism towards the Rockets compared to the Astros. Want proof? Watch what happens this coming year (expectations are high; Yao/McGrady; and will be much more heated compared to this years Astros; even though we had high expectations for them as well).

This goes beyond a particular player. It's almost a historical issue of what we expect from our two teams. Different expectations and reactions based on past performances/history.

Astros + Losing = What else is new? (We roll our eyes...and grumble)
Rockets + Losing = What?! Trade that guy, bench this guy! Fire the coach!

True. Angry Astros fans have similar heated "off with their heads" mentality. But not the same as the Rockets. Winning a championship will do that to a city! (creates a higher standard).

We can thank Hakeem/Drelxer for this. Any players we acquire inevitably will get compared to them; that's your higher-standard for ya! Fair? No. But, oh well! A winning history can foster a winning attitude. Just look at the Yankees, Cowboys and Lakers. They always have their history to give them that higher-standard. As do the Rockets.

 

I haven't read every post in this thread, but I don't see the difference. The Astros have been getting criticized for the playoff failures starting with 1998. They got a pass in 1997 because:

A. They weren't expected to make the playoffs
2. They had not yet established their propensity for offensive failure in October.

They got blasted in 2001 and 2002 for continued offensive ineptitude in October and have routinely been criticized for not playing up to their billing/potential in 2003 and 2004. They got blasted last year for choking away the playoffs with their failures the last week of the season. They are getting blasted again this year.

Bagwell and Biggio have been criticized routinely for their playoff failures. They have also been criticized on this forum by a number of posters for their play the last 2-3 seasons.

While Francis may routinely get ragged on in this forum, around the league he is certainly respected as a skilled player.

It is also much more difficult to make the playoffs in baseball. Only 25% of the NL teams do while 50% of the NBA teams do, so missing the playoffs in baseball is not as much of an issue as it is in basketball. In general, decent teams are expected to MAKE the playoffs in the NBA while decent teams are only exptected to CONTEND for the playoffs in baseball.

 

this is a hugely key point that you illustrate very well here. the texas rangers are currently playing about 14-15 games over .500. i'd say it's pretty likely, at this point, that they won't be in the playoffs. think their fans believe they had a bad year if they don't make the playoffs? of course not.

every team even marginally good make the playoffs in the NBA. if after 81 games, you can't be in the top half of your conference, then you probably don't deserve a shot. in baseball...very good teams miss the playoffs every single year. illustrated most by the 93 Giants who won 103 games and missed the playoffs because the Braves won 105 (back in the two division format).

 

The Astros were expected to be one of the best teams in baseball this season, because of talent, experience, etc. The Rockets finished around right where they were expected to and they lost to a team that went to the NBA Finals.

 

i hear ya...this season is a huge disappointement...are you not hearing that in the press? from fans?? are you not hearing the criticisms of the players??? i sure am.

say what you want about the rockets. it's not where they finished or what was predicted. it's the way they clunked to a lottery spot the season before last...it's the way they seem to never learn from their own mistakes...it's, fairly or unfairly, being labelled as "all-stars" or "franchise players" but not reaching the accomplishments of others who have earned those titles.

 

First of all, I responded directly to the point guard receiving the brunt of the criticism. I said that its usually the best player on a basketball team who receives the criticism. Olajuwon received the criticism when the Rockets were mediocre in the mid nineties. Not Sleepy Floyd. If you only read part of my posts please stop responding to them because its getting old typing everything twice for the clowns who can't comprehend.

Furthermore, Francis receives criticism like the best player on the team, but he doesn't get credit when the team does well. For example, when I mention the fact that he has carried this team to 45 wins with no all-stars on the team, Francis critics such as yourself try to give the credit to Olajuwon who didn't even play that whole season. People blame all the problems with this past season on Francis, but if I write the team still made the playoffs, they give the credit to Yao. That's the point I made.

Lastly, you prove the exact point of this thread. Some clown types that Francis talked trash before the season and its Okay with you even though its a complete lie. I contend the false statement and you have a problem with me bringing in the truth.

Yet you say I'm biased.

 

And this year (as was the case last year) the Astros are being criticized by the fans, the local media and the national media for having a poor season. They would probably be getting criticized even more if not for the remarkable play of the Cardinals.

Most everyone has been criticized from McLane to Hunsicker to Williams to Bagwell, Kent, Biggio and others.

About the only one exempt has been Clemens.

I just don't see that the Astros have been exempt from criticism (at least over the last 7 years or so), nor do I see where the Rockets and their players have been criticized unfairly.

Tomjanovich was given a free pass by the fans and media from 1996-2003 (mainly due to the two championships). Meanwhile, Dierker can't even get a job interview after 4 division titles in 5 years.

 

Ausmus doesn't make near the money Cato does .

I thought Kent argues all the time because he is a jerk. Nothing cultural about being a jerk. Every race and nationality has too large a number of them.

Bagwell and Biggio came of age at a time of Houston baseball renaissance. The team was bad to mediocre between 1987 and 1993. In the early 90s they went with the young guys and the city got excited about their style of play. Bagwell was putting up incredible numbers and he and Biggio became icons in the city. In other words, they were the bridge from a bad team to a good team so they were recognized as the catalysts to making baseball boom agaiin in Houston.

Francis on the other hand was the bridge from a good team to a mediocre team. Houston fans were used to annual playoff appearances. Once Francis arrived, that stopped. It was NOT Steve's fault but he was identified as the player that was going to enable the Rockets to seemingly rebuild on the fly. That did not happen with respect to playoff appearances. As the Rockets have tumbled from regular playoff appearances, Francis was the star player and it's all on his shoulders (fair or not).

 

This response...if you ignore the paragraph i didn't quote ...makes a lot of sense to me as to why the criticism is much more personal.

I'll leave the debate as to who's the 'better' player or which team is the bigger disappointment to you guys...

 

Another Brother, I agree with your perception that the Astros are better liked than the Rockets. But as you correctly pointed out, there are two different situations to account for: when the players are ON the court/field, and when they are OFF the court/field.
For on the court, the Rockets get criticized more and are less liked than the Astros because quite frankly, this is a baseball town before it is a basketball town. Despite the Rockets' two championships, you get the feeling that the city of Houston gets more excited about the upcoming baseball season than an upcoming basketball one.
There are other reasons why basketball players get criticized more on their play than baseball players do and it all has been covered in this thread already: more decisions made in the game, the players are seen up close, basketball has a big stars which the team revolves around and they get all the praise, and also all the heat.

But as you correctly pointed out, all these explanations still do NOT point out the paradox on our treatment of players for things OFF the court. Baseball players seem to get a free pass on most of their off court behavior, whereas basketball players are questioned about their off court behavior for anything and everything. If a basketball player is not performing well, the reasons given are that he's not working hard enough, being lazy, has something wrong with his lifestyle etc. Yet nobody really expands on Biggio's drunken driving, Kent's ego, or other baseball player's tendencies... If a baseball player is not performing... then he's in a "slump" or a "funk" that he needs to break out of. I think Trader Jorge hit the nail on the head on this issue when he was nice enough to provide an example at his expense, so to shed some light on this problem.

Thanks for playing the part Jorge; you are right, there is certainly a borderline-racism being played here; there just happens to be a great article written on espn.com (Page 2) about this. It does not directly relate to our discussion, but close enough as to expound on Trader Jorge's comment.

Here is the link: I'd advise clicking the link for a better read but if you don't wish to, I provided the text below.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=whitlock/040826

By Jason Whitlock
Special to Page 2

I must've missed the memo -- the memo that went out to the red-blooded American sports public and explains exactly when it became OK to throw patriotism out the window and openly root against a U.S. Olympic team.

Yeah, I didn't get that memo. I'm wondering what was in it. Did it mention Allen Iverson by name? Did it have stipulations about the number of tattoos acceptable on an Olympian? Was there a cornrows clause? Or was the memo just straight and to the point?

What's the real reason why so many people are rooting against Iverson and co.?
Americans do not have to support a group of black American millionaires in any endeavor. Despite the hypocritical, rabid patriotism displayed immediately after 9/11, it's perfectly suitable for Americans to despise Team USA Basketball, Allen Iverson and all the other tattooed NBA players representing our country. Yes, these athletes are no more spoiled, whiny and rich than the golfers who fearlessly represent us in the Ryder Cup, but at least Tiger Woods has the good sense not to wear cornrows.

The memo must've read something like that. That's the only explanation for the near-universal hatred of our Olympic basketball team. Oh, you can hide behind a bunch of other excuses. You don't like the NBA style of play (which I don't). You're rooting for the underdogs. Shaq and Kidd and K.G. declined an invitation. The selection committee picked the wrong team.

There are a million excuses, some of which might legitimize a teeny bit of hostility toward USA Basketball. But there's no reasonable justification for the out-and-out hatred of Larry Brown's squad. There's no reasonable justification for the sheer delight that many red-blooded, patriotic Americans are taking from the USA's struggles.

In a poll on Page 2's Daily Quickie on Monday, 54.1 percent of the approximately 20,000 respondents said they wanted to see the USA team lose, and another 19.9 percent said they "kind of" would like to see it lose. I've sat on my radio show the past two weeks and listened to alleged patriot after patriot b**** about and shred Team USA and openly admit they want the team to lose. One guy, who identified himself as a former member of the American military, said he hates Team USA because the team doesn't "represent the America he fell in love with." I asked him to describe the America he fell in love with, and he said, "it was a country you could walk the streets without worrying about being mugged."

So there once was a time when a man or woman could walk the streets without worrying about a wild gang of NBA players whacking them over the head with a bottle and taking their wallet or purse? That must've been a glorious time, because you can hardly go anywhere these days without looking over your shoulder wondering whether Tim Duncan or Stephon Marbury is stalking you. I know it's dangerous to make too much of the sentiments expressed by talk-radio callers. But they speak for somebody. Monday evening I wore my Team USA jersey to the Rams-Chiefs game. As I walked to the stadium, people laughed at me and my jersey and several people made disparaging comments about our basketball team.

If this team doesn't win the gold medal (they beat Spain Thursday to advance to the semifinals), I half expect Americans to spit on Iverson, Duncan, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony at the airport. We haven't fielded a team this unpopular at home since Johnson and Nixon sent Team USA into Vietnam.

This is ridiculous, and it hints at a much larger issue.
Someone call Johnnie Cochran and have him send over "The Card" -- the race one.

This team is being discussed unfairly in the media and being treated unfairly by American sports fans. There's a lot of convenient denial going on. No one wants to deal with the truth because they're having too much fun blasting a bunch of black millionaires for being lazy, unpatriotic and stupid. With the exception of adding the word "millionaires," this is a very familiar tune.

It's just more denial. The truth -- and what needs to be discussed -- is that African-American basketball players no longer have a lock on the game. The rest of the world has caught up, at warp speed. The game has been exported and redefined in superior fashion.

Europeans like Dirk Nowitzki are playing a new brand of basketball -- very successfully.
Go ask the folks up in Canada what the Soviets did to the game of hockey. Don Cherry can tell you all about the Red Army team whipping Canadian and NHL fanny on bigger rinks with faster, more creative skaters. It was 1972, and Team Canada -- the best Canadian-born NHL players formed into a Dream Team -- took on the Soviet Union team, which had pretty much dominated international play since 1954. It was called the Summit Series -- eight games between the world's two hockey powers.

The Soviets won the first game 7-3 and led the series 3-1-1 before the Canadians rallied to win the last three games -- all by one goal -- to win the series. Paul Henderson scored a goal with 34 seconds to play in Game 8, or the series would've ended in a tie. One of the reasons Team Canada eventually prevailed is that the bigger, stronger Canadians began to resort to cheap shots and thuggery on the ice. Several Canadian players later admitted they were embarrassed by what they had to do to sneak past the quicker Soviets. A Canadian newspaperman had to eat his entire newspaper because he'd promised to do it if Phil Esposito, Stan Mikita, Ken Dryden and Co. lost a single game in the series.

Canadians invented hockey in the late 1800s, and once dominated it the way African-Americans dominate basketball. Eastern Europeans reinvented the game and made up nearly 70 years of hockey experience on the Canadians in just two decades.

Sound anything like what we're witnessing on the basketball court?

Eastern Europeans introduced finesse, speed and creative passing to hockey. No longer could you just dump the puck into the zone and maul the guy in the corner. You had to play the game. The Canadians weren't stupid and lazy. They were just slow to adjust to a new, superior brand of hockey.

"Back then, we thought our way was the only way to play hockey; and we found out it wasn't," American Ken Morrow, one of the heroes on the 1980 Miracle on Ice Olympic team, told me Wednesday. "The NBA is kind of going through that right now. Hockey went through it in the 1970s and '80s. The NBA should look at what we went through and learn from it."

Morrow, the current director of pro scouting for the New York Islanders, played 10 years in the NHL. He vividly remembers the 1972 Summit Series.

"You talk to people in Canada, and they'll tell you the Summit Series was like a national emergency," Morrow said. "It really shook the heart and soul of the Canadians."

The similarities between hockey and basketball and the impact that international play is having on the games is indisputable. The high rounds of the NHL draft now favor European players. The NHL in the 1970s celebrated the Philadelphia Flyers' Broad Street Bullies approach, which included beating people up. The game was played at a slow, boring, defensive pace. Does that sound anything like today's NBA?

"The skill portion of the game [hockey] is viewed as being superior by the Europeans," Morrow said. "But when it comes to character and heart and competing, it's still the Canadians and the American players. Just look at the top scorers in the NHL the last few years -- seven or eight out of 10 are European."

Doesn't that sound like Dirk Nowitzki vs. Ben Wallace?

The international style of basketball play is superior to the American game, particularly the NBA game. The wide lane, shorter 3-pointer and prevalence of zone defenses limit the effectiveness of the NBA's two-man game. You can't have three guys stand on one side of the court and talk to Spike Lee while your two best players go two-on-two on the other side. It's boring, and it doesn't work in international play.

It's also foolish and arrogant to believe that we can throw a team together that can take on the world in two or three weeks. We can't do it. Even if we had Shaq and Kidd and K.G., our team would need time to prepare. We obviously need role players.
Would Michael Phelps have been this excited about the Olympics if he was making millions as a professional swimmer?
What bothers me most are the charges that Iverson and Co. aren't trying and don't care. First and foremost, they do care and they are trying. They're competitors. They know what's at stake. They don't want to be ripped at home.

But do they care about the Olympics the way Michael Phelps does? No. And we shouldn't expect them to. American basketball players don't spend their childhoods dreaming about playing in the Olympics. Their goal is the NBA. For swimmers and track athletes and gymnasts, on the other hand, the Olympics is the pinnacle.

If there was a professional swimming league that would make Phelps filthy rich, I guarantee he'd dream of making that league more than he dreamt of making the Olympic team. Phelps might even turn down a spot on the Olympic team, if it interfered with his professional swimming offseason.
Once every four years, Phelps and Carly Patterson and Justin Gatlin get an opportunity to strike it rich. They go all out. Don't romanticize it. They're chasing money -- endorsement opportunities -- just like the NBA players. Phelps, Patterson and Gatlin might be more cooperative and gracious with the media during the Olympics because they only have to deal with us once every four years. We don't know how they'd react if they were forced to talk to us every day almost year round.

The criticism of USA Basketball is borderline racist, is definitely unsophisticated and exposes a lot of super patriots as hypocrites. Allen Iverson is wearing our jersey -- our red, white and blue -- and playing the game the way we taught him to play it.

We owe Iverson support when he's representing us abroad. Save the hatred for when he's back home skipping Sixers practices and boring us to death playing a two-man game with Glenn Robinson.

 

i'm certainly rooting for the US basketball team. i hope like hell they pull this out. but i don't think the only reason someone would root against this team is racism. did the same people root against the first dream team? were they less racist then because they were rooting for guys like jordan, robinson, malone, barkley, pippen and magic?

it's not about color of skin to me....it's about style of play. it's about having a TEAM that is bigger than the individuals on it. a lot of the problems with this current team are problems with the way they were selected...you can't form a winning hoops team by simply throwing out the best athletes and hoping it works. it just doesn't work that way.