Biggest surprise to me, by far... HOU getting the second seed in the West. After letting Parsons, Asik and Lin walk for nothing so they could court Chris Bosh, Bosh left Daryl Morey standing at the alter in a tear stained dress. At that point, I honestly thought HOU would be in a 3 way dogfight with DAL and NOP for the 7th and 8th seed - and I thought HOU would be the ones left on the outside looking in.
Then, there were the injuries. Howard, Terence Jones and Pat Beverly all missed significant portions of the season due to injuries, but they just kept winning...
Then they picked up cast offs from crappy teams and just kept winning...
After giving up Parson, Lin and Asik for basically nothing and then getting Corey Brewer and Josh Smith for the same, I started to wonder if there isn't some sort of unwritten rule among NBA GMs that when a team gives away players for nothing, they get first dibs when other teams start to do the same.
And no, adding Josh Smith did not cause the Rockets to implode. He played well for them and Corey Brewer was even better. And they just kept winning...
And when Dwight came back, you heard all this rumbling about how HOU was a better team without Dwight than with him, how he killed their offensive flow, etc. And they just kept winning...
And then they enter the playoffs and it's clear that Josh Smith and Dwight Howard have great chemistry from their AAU days and they easily dispatch DAL in the first round with Smith looking like Andre Miller throwing about 6 lobs per game to Dwight Howard...
And, the most surprising thing of all, they did all this, with Kevin McHale as their head coach!
I still can't figure out how they did it, but HOU won 56 games and captured the 2nd seed in a ridiculously tough Western Conference. Hell, they came in first in the toughest division of the toughest conference in the NBA. I can't believe, after all the players they gave away and all the injuries they had, that they finished ahead of both MEM and SAS in the SW Division and ahead of the Clippers in the Western Conference.
I still hate them, but am amazed by what they accomplished this season. I just wish someone on the Blazers staff could figure out how they did it. I mean fuck, if I look at the two teams on paper, it sure looks like we have a better roster, a better coach and had fewer injuries, yet they won 56 games, took the second seed and won in the first round while we won 51 games and barely put up a whimper of a fight in the first round. We were better than the Rockets last year and should have been better than they were this year, too. So, how the fuck did they do it???
BNM
