Although I have followed basketball most of my life, I find it difficult to generate any enthusiasm for the Houston Rockets.

It has not always been that way. I moved to Houston in 1972 at about the same time as the Rockets franchise moved to Houston from San Diego, so I have always felt a connection to the club.

My late father and I used to attend Rockets games regularly, even back before the Rockets had their own arena. Until 1975, the Rockets played mostly at Hofheinz Pavilion on the University of Houston campus.

Then, in 1994-5, the magnificent Hakeem Olajuwon led the Rockets to two straight NBA titles, the second of which was achieved with the help of local legend Clyde Drexler, who originally burst on the scene with Olajuwon on the University of Houston’s memorable Phi Slama Jama teams from 1982-84.

With the demise of the Oilers before their exodus to Nashville, and before the Biggio-Bagwell era of the Stros led to multiple MLB playoff appearances, the Rockets were the toast of the town for most of the 1990’s.

However, despite the two NBA titles, Rockets’ management has always had a curious tendency to make poor personnel decisions.

For example, after it was clear that Olajuwon would be a far better player than former number one draft pick, Ralph Sampson, the Rockets delayed trading Sampson until his value had eroded to the point that they could only get Sleepy Floyd and the eminently forgettable Joe Barry Carroll in return.

Even more galling is the fact that Rockets management overlooked talented local players such as Ricky Pierce (Rice), Bo Outlaw (UH), Rashard Lewis (Alief Elsik HS), and Damon Jones (UH), the last three of whom could be playing significant roles on the current Rockets club.

To make matters worse, the Rockets management decisions over the past several years have gone from dubious to just plain horrible.

First, they used a second overall pick in the NBA draft on Steve Francis — a good player who has limitations that will keep him from ever achieving elite stature in the NBA — who they proceeded to trade over this past offseason to Orlando as a part of the deal for the talented but injury-prone Tracy McGrady.

Rockets management used another number one draft choice on power forward Eddie Griffin, who was more interesting in the daily police report than the sports section during his short stay with the club.

Finally, Rockets management either gave or acquired expensive long term contracts on such mediocre role players as Matt Maloney, Moochie Norris, Brent Price, Maurice Taylor, Kelvin Cato, Juwan Howard — the list of bad personnel moves just goes on and on.

Comparing the public’s waning interest in the Rockets to the popularity of the Texans, one Houston businessman put it to me in this way: “How would you like to be trying to sell luxury suites to the Toyota Center?.”

Had Rockets management not at least had the common sense to draft and sign Yao Ming, things might be utterly hopeless at this point.

So, it is against this backdrop that Peter Vecsey, the longtime NBA columnist based in New York, absolutely lays the wood to Rockets management over the team’s latest move:

[I]t’s beyond comprehension what [Rockets General Manager Carroll] Dawson and [Rockets coach] Jeff Van Gundy are thinking.

Acquiring [New Orleans Hornets guard David] Wesley, 34, isn’t as irrelevant as the Mavericks swapping Dan Dickau (again, at least the Hornets got potential) for dead end Darrell Armstrong, but it’s not much better. . . Wesley will take shots away from Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming, and maybe even Hakeem.

. . . Wesley doesn’t loosely qualify as a pure point guard. Wherever he’s roamed he’s been a shoot-first, pass-as-a-last-resort type guard. Meanwhile, Jackson’s a deadlier shooter. Moreover, Wesley doesn’t give it up. I’ll say! He wouldn’t even make a pass at Kobe’s wife.

If Wesley’s arrival in Van Gundy’s starting backcourt isn’t opaque enough, this is the worst he’s played since the bad old days in New Jersey and Boston, his first two pro seasons.

And Vecsey goes on to point out that the Wesley deal isn’t the only bad one the Rockets have made lately:

Not to say Wesley, even in his current state of disrepute, isn’t an improvement on what the Rockets have on playmaking patrol. On second thought, I will say it; at best, he’s a Bob Sura clone and substantially superior to Charlie Ward, whose game is so shabby four houses of worship refused him sanctuary.

These are the two pointless guards management chose to sign last summer as free agents to “complement” Tyronn Lue, exchanged last week for Jon Barry, whose poisonous attitude and bad mouthing of coaches when not playing has led to his last three change of addresses.

Obviously, Van Gundy had some say regarding the recruitment of his perennial pet mistake. Ward got $1.7M and $1.8M guaranteed with a $2.04M team option. Why wait, Jeff? Pick it up right now. Nobody else was offering more than a 10-day contract. But Carroll, who helped Rudy Tomjanovich assemble Houston’s two title teams (’94-’95), has the (last) sway.

Carroll has been groping since, overpaying ineligible receivers as if he were bidding against Warriors whiz Chris Mullin. Maurice Taylor, Shandon Anderson, Howard Eisley, Matt Maloney (on the Rockets’ cap this season, his last, at last, for $3.237,250), Brent Price and Moochie Norris were all rewarded with senseless long-term contracts.

Sura was the latest to strike it rich without earning it, unless you deem last season’s stats (7.5 points, 2.9 assists, 1.3 turnovers and 41 percent from the field) for the hopeless Hawks noteworthy. Thanks to the Rockets’ tainted top talent scout, owner Les Alexander owes the 10-year rent-a-wreck $3.2M/$3.5M/$3.8M this year and the next two . . .

Thanks to Carroll (Van Gundy, too), the Rockets are being forced to restock, if not rethink. That might be asking too much.

So, Rockets owner Les Alexander is in a tough spot.

Both of Houston’s other major professional teams and their owners are more popular among Houstonians than the Rockets and Alexander. While the Texans and Stros play in front of record crowds, the Rockets are regularly having trouble drawing 10,000 people to their games. Although I am a regular target of the Rockets’ season ticket sales staff, I haven’t attended a game in years and have little interest in doing so.

Moreover, given the Rockets management’s dubious track record in player evaluation, it’s hard to be optimistic about the club’s prospects. Yao and McGrady are the only players on the Rockets team around whom a playoff caliber club could be built.

Nearly a decade has passed since the Rockets’ glory years. The club has declined dramatically since then, and the decline has accelerated over the past several years.

Absent considerable improvement in the club’s player evaluation process, my sense is that the Rockets will become even more of an afterthought on the Houston scene than they have already become.

This Austin-American Statesman article profiles former University of Texas and current University of Houston basketball coach Tom Penders. It’s an interesting story about the grinding nature of college basketball. Check it out.

Following on Professor Sauer’s excellent post noted here regarding the recent Pacers-Pistons fight at Auburn Hills, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has one of the best op-eds that I have read on the affair to date:

Much attention continues to be paid to Artest, as if he is such a mystery. He is a rough kid from a rough part of the world with what are known as anger management issues. These are the same issues that bedeviled the late Lizzie Borden and now afflict road ragers across the land. Artest has a record when it comes to such matters — this is not his first suspension — and he appears (although I am not personally acquainted with him) a couple of cards short of a full deck. It is authoritatively reported, for instance, that while playing for the Chicago Bulls at the usual multimillion-dollar salary, he applied for a Sunday job at Circuit City so he could get an employee discount.
Be all that as it may, you can surely appreciate the sort of anger that erupts in a man when a fan hits him with a cup full of liquid. . . Sure, Artest should not have reacted the way he did, but you can appreciate what angered him — and why. He deserves to be punished, but he is not all that hard to understand.

But Mr. Cohen finds the people who participated in the brawl almost incomprehensible:

But the fans? What is wrong with them? They are idiots, being played for suckers by a bunch of millionaires who own ball teams. Because they happen to live in a certain area, they root for a certain team. Never mind that the players usually don’t live in the area and they would, for either a buck or a whim, go somewhere else. The fans for some reason identify so passionately with a team that they are willing to risk physical injury on its behalf. Freud, I am sure, had a term for such people: jerks.
Being nicer, I see them differently. They are mere fools being manipulated by teams in ways that would make Pavlov salivate in appreciation. The noise, the choreographed cheering, the booming announcer and, not least, the constant acceptance or encouragement of what used to be called poor sportsmanship — for instance, thunder sticks used to rattle players at the free-throw line — are attempts to bond fans to a team that would, in a flash, desert them for a better arena in another city. It works. Vast numbers of people have turned over a piece of their self-worth to a team. They feel good when it wins and bad when it loses and, in some cases, will risk or inflict injury in a cause so worthless that their children should be raised by foster parents for their own good.
I understand wanting to belong to something and I understand a keen appreciation of the game. But the fan, like “the voter” and “the stockholder,” has become so hypocritically venerated that it has become virtually sacrilegious to call him (or her) a chump and an idiot when they go too far. So, please, sportswriters of the world, spare me any more analysis of Artest and throw some light on the world of the fan. It must be a dim one, indeed.

Read the entire piece.

On the heels of this earlier post on the fight that occurred on November 19 at the Pistons-Pacers game, do not miss Professor Sauer’s analysis of the affair, with a Stros twist:

The Pacers’ brawl is not the first instance of a fan being leveled by a player-thrown haymaker. In one memorable incident in 1999, a fan raced onto the field at Milwaukee County Stadium and jumped on Billy Spiers in right field. Spiers’ Astros teamates were quick on the scene to defend him. I recall Mike Hampton landing a series of blows to the head of that bozo. Billy Spiers (a former Tiger in addition to being an Astro) was one of my favorite players. Put me in Hampton’s shoes and I’d have done the same thing, though not so effectively. Thanks for that, Mike.
Now, how different is Hampton’s defense of his teammate from Jermaine O’Neal and Stephen Jackson’s defense of Ron Artest? While there are differences, they are mostly a matter of degree. The common thread between the two incidents is the out of control fan.
Many issues are highlighted by the fight in Detroit. The NBA paid service to the media with swift and draconian punishment for the players involved. But to me, fan control is a more serious and more difficult problem than player control. Each time fans rush the court or the playing field after a game, they illustrate the raw power inherent in a crowd that no level of security short of an armored division can manage. The trick for sports management is to short-circuit the potential for a crowd to turn into a mob.

Definite clear thinking. Read the entire post.

The Daily Recycler has the video of the hockey game that broke out last night at the Pacers-Pistons NBA game.
The typical reaction to the incident will be outrage and self-righteous indignation. However, I must admit that the riot made me somewhat nostalgic of the bygone days of the NBA when such fights were quite common.
Back in the 1970’s, my late father and I would often go over to The Summit (my folks’ house was nearby) at halftime of the Rockets’ game of the night and get in free to watch the second half of the game (I was a poverty-sticken law student; my father was just, might we say, parsimonious). Even back then, the first halves of NBA games didn’t make much difference.
On one particular evening, we went to the second half of a game between the Rockets of the Calvin Murphy, Rudy Tomjanovich, Mike Newlin era against the Celtics of the Sidney Wicks, Dave Cowens, and Charlie Scott era. It was a close game and by the 4th quarter, the players on both sides were getting a bit chippy. Finally, Wicks threw an elbow at Murphy, and all hell broke loose.
Unfortunately for Wicks, Murphy was a professional caliber fighter and never lost any of his half-dozen or so fights during his NBA career. Combining amazing quickness with a rapid fire delivery, Murphy was on top of Wicks within seconds, had him down on the floor, and was delivering a devastating series of punches to the bridge of Wicks’ nose, opening up a broad cut in the process. It took four players — each taking one of Murphy’s limbs — to extract Murphy from Wicks, who frankly didn’t know what had hit him.
After order was restored and Wicks was carted off to the dressing room for stitches, the game continued in a rather heated fashion. A few minutes later, after a rough exchange under the Rockets’ basket, a big, fat fan sitting in the courtside seats took offense to Cowens’ actions, walked out on to the court, and pushed Cowens. Cowens proceeded to place his right hand on this idiot’s neck and then started hammering him to the chops with a series of lefts that would have made Rocky Balboa proud. Just for good measure, Scott blazed in like a streak of light and did his best Murphy imitation, pummeling several adjacent fans with a deft series of combination blows.
About this time, Wicks returned to the court with a large bandage on the bridge of his nose. My father, a respected Professor of Medicine with a long career at both the University of Iowa and University of Texas Medical Schools, used all of his long years of medical research in analyzing the situation for me: “Murphy really kicked Wicks’ ass, didn’t he?”
After “order” (we’re talking generally here) was restored for the second time, the Rockets went on to score a satisfying victory over the Celtics. None of the combatants in the various brawls were even thrown out of the game as I recall, and certainly no arrests were made and no civil lawsuits were filed.
Ah, those were the days. ;^)

Mark Cuban is the young and dynamic owner of the National Basketball Association’s Dallas Mavericks, which he has reshaped into one of the NBA’s winningest franchises over the past several seasons.
Cuban is a live wire, and he undoubtedly leads the NBA in the past few seasons in the amount of fines that the NBA front office has levied against an owner for criticism of various aspects of the league, particularly in the area of referee evaluation.
For several months, Mark has been running an interesting blog called Blog Maverick. In another first, Mark notes in this blog post that the NBA front office has fined him again, this time for criticizing the league in a blog post.