A lot of words so I will keep it short. When you trade a top 5 player in the league for assets…. When you tank harder than anyone in the league for three years… and have lots of cap space… you should be better than “a top 10 team”… which you seem to think is some sort of accomplishment….. there are only around 30 teams in the league… and are you even a top 10 team if you cannot get out of the first round? Stone has been the Rockets GM for nearly 6 years. The Rockets have never won a playoff series under him…. The Rockets don’t have a franchise player…. They don’t have cap space… their success is largely predicated on a 38 year old and 32 year old… they traded out of the best draft in years and haven’t had a first rounder in two seasons… and while you like to talk about Westbrook, you fail to consider that Stone is a big reason Westbrook was a Rocket. Half of his first round draft pick are no longer on the team… he busted on the #2 pick in a good draft… he drafted a role player with the #3 draft pick… and his head coach doesn’t even want to play He paraded KPJ around like he was some amazing person and find,.. he encouraged 19 year old Jalen Green to hang around KPJ…. KPJ was kicked off his high school team, his college team… his AAU team and even the Cavs…. But Stone thought he was a good guy. Didn’t matter than he blew off practices, treated staff like garbage. The ego of Stone had to be right. Stone wanted to build around Christian Wood. Stone believed that the man to lead and set the culture was Silas. Stone tried to extend Oladipo and was convinced he would get a great package for him in trade… he didn’t. Stone decided to invest in free agents in their mid 30’s with either injury histories or high mileage… then cried when they got hurt. Stone named Wallace as his scouting director, which is on par with Gar Foreman. Stone did not even consider the fit of the players he drafted… there was no detail or vision to anything they did the last 4-5 years, except tank… assistant coaches complained to him…. Players in the draft had leaders doing what they could to not be drafted by the Rockets…. But Stone and TF know better. The arrogance is staggering… the conference at the end of the year demonstrated it.
I thought we were talking about the number of picks Stone has gained in the years he's the GM. The fact that he didn't have a lot of picks to start with is not relevant to our discussion. Your claim is that Stone got more picks than he inherited. My point was that it didn't really prove that he's a good GM. The situation was that the team was going to lose their franchise player. Of course he was going to trade Harden for picks. Of course he would gain more picks than he started with. And since it was clearly a rebuild situation, he traded veterans like Covington (who BTW was a valuable asset) for future picks. I just don't think "gaining more picks" is a good argument to show how good a GM he is. And we aren't even talking about the fact that he squandered a few of the picks he had. Granted those were mid to low FRPs. It's not his fault he didn't get a franchise player through the draft. But except for Sengun, one can argue that none of the players he drafted have outperformed their draft positions. A few of them underperformed so far. So he is at best a mediocre talent evaluator.
