Man this guy looks like a stud under playoff pressure. We're always debating Reed vs Castle, but Mitchell might be the best guard out that draft and OKC got him at 38! Our owner needs to look at our GM, coach, & player development program because something is missing. Other young guys in the league just look more prepared and mentally tougher than our young players do. And adding Durant didn't help at all. The Rockets owner needs to start looking at everyone.
The team stopped valuing picks at some point. The best teams and organizations constantly pick because they know they need an influx of young talent on team friendly deals. The Rockets ended up with players like DFS/Tate/Aaron Holiday getting significant minutes because they have a coaching staff that doesn't know how to implement young players. all of this WE AREN'T REBUILDING stuff is silly. Spurs have Castle looking like a superstar playing 40+ minutes. They have rookie Harper putting up big #s. Meanwhile the Rockets say: yea we are good on that, we need more minutes for Clint Capela. The Thunder meanwhile have the best player in the NBA and a team that builds each other up. The Rockets should have traded Harden for the PG13 package when the Clippers approached them first, instead James said I want to stay in Houston and then gutted the team+ future for WB and left a year later.
We missed sitting ajay Mitchell at the end of the bench, standing in the corner and being taken off the floor after his first mistake. Not a big deal!
Ajay Mitchell barely played his rookie season and this season got 26 mpg. Barely any different from Reed Sheppard. Do Reed fans think OKC would allow Mitchell to be out on the court making a bunch of mistakes while they’re trying to win championships? some guys got it, and some guys don’t…Mitchell has it, Reed doesn’t Mitchell can get to his spots, is skilled with the ball, and can handle NBA physicality…none of that can be said about Reed Sheppard Rockets got duped in the draft
Maybe the Thunder coaching staff knew how to coach him up to play properly. The Rockets have had very little noticeable improvement from any of their draft picks. The Thunder have basically improved every season across the board. In fact with the Rockets there's a lot of regression after progression. Maybe the Thunder have the best player in the NBA who knows how to run the offense. That takes a lot of pressure off of the rest of the guys to do more than just play their role. Guys always looked better next to Harden and as far as I can remember there weren't a ton of guys who left Houston and looked better. Parsons/Lin/Ariza all come to mind as guys who immediately lost production without Harden. SGA is a similar talent and he brings the best out of guys. The Rockets were lead by KD and Sengun who constantly sulk.
I’m sure the coaching staff helped and having an MVP like Shai is a real benefit as well, but the Thunder are also really good at selecting guys that can actually play…if the Thunder had the 3rd pick, I don’t see them taking Reed Sheppard over Stephon Castle for instance J-Dub was taken 12th, but looking at his college tape, the skill was there Rockets selecting duds with massive holes in their game
It feels like they drafted Jalen Green because they thought he could be a superstar and then stopped looking for a 1A.
OKC rewards prospects that play well with bigger minutes. The ones that don't get culled. They traded three 1st round picks for lotto pick Ousmane Dieng, but didn't waste developmental minutes on him. They gave up on Pokusevski and Tre Mann pretty quickly too. These were promising prospects, but didn't pan out. People think letting young players play through their mistakes and force feeding them minutes will develop them faster, but that really isn't the case. We force fed Jalen and Jabari tons of unwarranted minutes in their first couple of years and their growth was stagnant. They showed more improvement after getting benched because getting benched sucks and is a motivator to get better.
I agree with everything. The organization is better than the Rockets from top to bottom. Sam Presti has made his share of mistakes in the past but he's always adapting and adjusting. He doesn't get locked into one way of doing things and it shows. The Spurs are a similarly ran organization who also got stupidly luck in the draft.
Even Presti misses sometimes, but his hit rate on not-great draft picks is a lot higher than Stone's has been. Sengun was obviously a great find in the middle of the first round (but we do still need to find out if he can actually start on a championship contender, or trade him for a strong return), but I'm lately thinking Tari barely even counts as a hit since he's spent so much time either off the court with injuries or in crippling shooting slumps. I almost feel like the average poster on this board could draft as well as Stone has since the team has mostly just been following mock drafts / draft boards pretty closely. If we'd found even a couple of good bench players with those later picks I don't think we lose to the Lakers this year, and at least that would be something. Plus we'd have more trade assets. Instead we just found a bunch of dudes we either had to dump for nothing or maybe a second round pick or two.
The Spurs are amazing at scouting regardless of where they pick. They drafted Parker 28th and Ginobili 57th. Scola was also one of their picks at 56th. In the back half of the 2010s they drafted Kyle Anderson, Dejounte Murray, Derrick White, and Keldon Johnson all at the very end of the 1st round. They know how to find real contributors, role players that can play off of superstars but also stand on their own.
I never used to be a conspiracy theorist about the draft lottery, but 2025 might have broken me a little bit.
Lots of teams missed on AJ, but our days of identifying real talent later in the draft have been over since Stone took over. Look at the track record. Look at our laughable bench depth. But a lot of folks seem to just gloss over that.
This team is on the Sacramento kings trajectory, where they don’t select the right guys and the ones they do are basically getting the online University of Phoenix level education and training to save a couple of extra bucks it’s a dogschit franchise and everyone knows it when every single guy you select over a 6-7 year span regresses it’s not just the players
One of our issues is that we haven't had a chance at finding talent later in the draft. We haven't had a 2nd round pick in a decade. It get that it's not a priority when we're trying to develop four lotto picks, but it's a cheap way to add bench depth if you can nail one of those picks as well.
I don't think Kings trajectory is fair. They made the playoffs two years in a row with a first round exit.The Kings had 1 playoff season in like a decade and it was also a quick exit. T-Mac never got out of the first round. This isn't unheard of stuff. I think the Wizards with John Wall / Bradley Beal is a better comparison to this team's likely trajectory. Little to no success and a HARD fall at some point because of neglect to water the garden and keep things moving forward.
