Note: Reposting to move this note to the top and get rid of all the comments about how long this is and how you don’t feel like reading it. That’s cool. Feel free to skip this post instead of letting me know you don’t care. I’m using Reddit because of the character limit and edit ability to get 2 years of grievances out against an individual who has spent his free time lying about me regularly. I don’t need to hear about your hatred of literacy. I just need a place to record the facts. Feel free to move on with your life and to the next post. For right now I just want to get this initial, long-held complaint aired out in full detail so that it can be properly addressed if I choose to accept Roosh’s invitation onto RocketsWatch (since his home court is the only place he’ll talk). I expect if I go on, they will revert to the standard tactic of interruption and ad hominem attacks, so I want to make sure my primary issue with them gets registered before they try to control the conversation and make it about other things. If you want to respond to the actual content, I encourage it, but please know if you just want to say, “Let it go”, you can move on, too. I’ll let it go once other folks stop blaming Silas for ruining the team, when it is so clear at this point that he was preparing them.

Roosh’s fascination with slandering #OrganicLearning started back in the 2022 season, but it was his unsolicited response to this tweet that made me start to wonder what his motives behind all the lies and insults were. He and Jackson Gatlin had been using their platforms to suggest I said the Rockets weren’t running plays for many months, misconstruing and mocking my explanation for why the Rockets performance and results looked the way they did.

Before sharing my theory as to why these accounts with tens of thousands of followers came after a guy with only a few hundred followers so publicly and frequently, let’s review what I actually wrote about organic learning. As always, these are the facts. After the 2nd game of the 2021/22 season, I wrote this based off an interview in which Silas said he was going to develop the young players “organically” and ‘add plays as needed’:

The goal of this method appears to be allowing the players to discover what they need to do on their own through the timeless process of “trial and error”.

I went on to explain why learning things for oneself by doing them was a superior method to being told to take specific steps. I talked about how this process created more well-balanced, all-around players with higher basketball IQ than would be created by simply spamming particularly effective sets, I showed how allowing autonomy and agency in the decision-making process forced the players to take more responsibility in their growth and could accelerate them reaching even higher ceilings than pigeon-holing them into particular roles. I addressed why traditional accountability was less effective in a process that embraces mistakes as growth opportunities, and pointed out how practice was as viable a way for correcting mistakes as yelling and benching guys. I warned that results would be ugly and slow until the learning took hold, but that it would result in quantum leaps of improvement once things clicked. Most unpopularly, I defended how critical the role of veteran players were as role models and how they establish a level of consistent play around the young stars (this awareness led to my theory that the Rockets were ‘stealth tanking’ a few months later…but I’ll examine that later).

Hindsight has been very kind to my analysis as Silas has referred to his process as “learning by mistakes” on about forty separate occasions, often echoing my words almost verbatim as he described his process. Although arrested rapist Don Knock and Paulo Alves censored me from speaking about this process in their “Safe Spaces” (I suspect because identifying the positive elements of what we were seeing went against their open agenda to get Silas fired), I eventually got to talk in detail about the theory in the Chop Shop Spaces. After intense questioning and scrutiny from the hosts there (and their ultimate belief that such a process could not work), u/ftank eventually ended up admitting that I “was completely right about Coach Silas’ approach to development”, words echoed by ClutchFans’ Dave Hardisty.

So with so much evidence showing that I had properly identified the process Silas was using, including affirmation from 2 venerable figures on Rockets Twitter/X who had intensely questioned the details of what I was describing, why would Roosh and Jackson, 2 people who had never once asked about a single detail about the method, go out of their way to continue spreading defamatory lies about what I actually was saying?

I told Roosh this in no uncertain terms, specifically that he was spreading the utterly outlandish-sounding lie that the Rockets didn’t run plays! I even made a short Space dedicated to him, in which I read the original posts so that it was clear what I was saying. I had said Silas was going to call fewerplays than one would expect a coach to do with rookies, because he wanted the players to be making the decisions of what plays to run based off of what the defense was giving them. We learned Silas was indeed attempting to train the kids to run a Read & React offense…the team just wasn’t able to do it for a variety of reasons (primarily due to sub-par PG play, in my opinion). But despite the continued evidence showing I was correctly identifying the method and its goals, Roosh kept spreading the same lies for months to come.

Spreading slander is the same tactic that arrested rapist Don Knock and Paulo Alves took after censoring me from speaking about Silas’s methods in their “Safe Space” (something no other speakers with agendas were ever victim to). The 2 of them launched a campaign of lies and personal attacks after I complained about not being permitted to talk about organic learning, even though it was already being verified in interviews that Silas wanted the young core making reads on their own and “learning by mistakes”.

Jackson is the obvious connection between Roosh and the Safe Space crew. He spent over $500 to get Paulo to Houston and helped get arrested rapist Don Knock his media credentials, so he was clearly very invested in their success.

It’s possible that he wanted to believe them once they started telling people lies about my motives and theories and to “just ignore him” (I heard this in multiple Spaces after I started using a different account). It would certainly explain why he took my content for his podcast on at least 3 different occasions without crediting where the idea came from (said credit being conspicuously absent, since he is typically very good about citing sources).

So I was personally shocked and disappointed when Jackson’s response to finding out that Silas doesn’t run plays for Jabari was not either:

1. to ask the simple and incredibly responsible follow-up question of “Why not?”

(Side note: to be fair, the entire media dropped the rope on that one! Although I’m honestly not convinced Silas would have been able to answer in a way that would have made anyone feel it was an acceptable answer. He clearly lacks the theoretical underpinnings for WHY his process works - he just knows it does - The same way Richard Jefferson recognizes that letting guys run around and make mistakes is the best way to raise their BBIQ. This is common knowledge and frequently done. Just typically not with top-3 picks or to this extreme or without a veteran influence. You don’t need a degree in mechanical engineering to use a microwave, but if you need to explain how the microwave works, you sure sound dumb without it.)

or 2. touching base with the guy who had been talking for 2 years about how Silas’s process involved not calling plays for the rookies, and why this could actually be a good thing for development. I would have gladly told him the same thing I told everyone else…

Jabari’s growth was a perfect example of the organic learning process! Almost exactly as with Jalen the year before, he started out looking lost and overwhelmed, but was eventually able to get the game to slow down enough to have a true break out game to finish the season strong (Fun Fact: both guys big games happened on March 9th!). When his confidence in his shooting waned in December, he tried to improvise with the ball, improving his ball handling, driving and finishing markedly, albeit incrementally, and eventually breaking out of a bad start to finish the season looking much more like the prospect people were hoping to see. I’d argue BETTER, actually, because he had improved his greatest pre-draft weakness. This improvement was on display in Summer League, well before Ime’s training camp, so the credit definitely can’t be transferred to the new regime!

But alas, not once over 2 seasons of mocking my theories did Jackson even consider seeing if there could be a rationale for not calling plays. Instead, he started publicly calling for Silas to be fired. Finally fully jumping on the bus his boys had started driving over a year before.

Part 1 TL;DR: So to recap this chain of events:

1. I (correctly) identified Silas’s coaching method, explaining and debunking the issues people had with why the product looked like AAU ball.
2. Don Knock and Paulo Alves censored me from speaking about it in the only place I could reach a rabid audience that didn’t understand what they were looking at and uniformly blaming Silas for while ownership listened.
3. When I complained about this and hosted my own Space, they launched a slander campaign against me (which I previously wrote in detail about [here[( )) and started telling people to ignore me.
4. Roosh and Jackson spread misinformation about what I was saying, and called me “wrong”, “delusional” and other defamatory comments mocking both me and the ‘organic learning’ process that the coach was using.

Those are the facts.

In Part 2, I will shift to theorizing why they may be behaving this way.

But this is getting long, so I’ll come back and edit it in another day.

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