I guessed 100 minutes. Close enough. Give me a prize.

It’s about the rockets having a quality center for in the game for 48 minutes. During the regular season you don’t always face a team that has 2 quality bigs, so when the other team rests their starting C, you rest yours. The rockets don’t have that luxury facing us, where we have a solid center in for a full 48 minutes.

Yao can’t (or shouldn’t) play 48 minutes a game for obvious reasons, so what is houston going to do when they have to give him a rest? Throw some shrimp in there? Newsflash: Joel and Greg eat smaller centers alive. That’s how Joel can bust out 26 boards against the clippers. Without yao or mutombo in the game we will have a solid rebounding edge and will control the paint, and thats just flat out not something houston can afford for 1/4 to 1/3 of the game.

There’s a reason Deke was playing minutes in the playoffs—two actually, Greg and Joel. Most teams don’t have a 7 footer to put out there for 48 minutes, so Yao could simply come out whenever their opponents’ best big man went down as well.

In this series, when Yao goes out the tallest player is 6’9 if I’m not mistaken. That leaves Joel/Greg, LaMarcus and Batum (and I suppose Frye) in the middle to

And the impact he would have had on the series. Portland is one of the few teams in the league that has a physical Center like Oden coming off of the bench. Usually when teams have 6’10" PF/C as their backup Center, Scola can get away backing up Yao. In this series, they needed Motumbo to take some of the defensive pressure away from Yao. Now they can’t. This means more minutes for Yao and more opportunities to exploit for the Blazers.

with Deke out, Yao plays 11 more min per game, if we have Joel and Oden in as we did last night, and have some favorable calls go our way, we could see Yao in foul trouble much earlier, and a Houston team with little presense in the paint. If Yao gets into foul trouble or has to play alot of extended minuets we should see a very tired big man later in this series.

However I do not see us playing Joel and Oden at the same time very often, unless Frye, Ruffin or Shav somehow prove that they can play playoff ball and not make silly mistakes.

Its not a huge difference, but its a difference.

A: The Blazers by not giving him the ball against midgets.

was to provide that veteran presence during the playoffs. The fact that he did not play that much during the regular season does not matter at all. What does he have to prove in the regular season? Nothing but to wear his body down.

We now have 2 7 footers to only 1 for Hou. we win

Yao can’t play 48 minutes a game and I don’t know who their back-up center is.

The point to having Mutombo was so that the Rockets would have a lane-clogging, shotblocking presence in the middle for 48 minutes of every playoff game. Now they’re going to have to either ride Yao for longer stretches of time (assuming he doesn’t have foul trouble) or have 10-20 minutes per game when they’re undersized and vulnerable to penetration.