I’m still ill, and honestly this game didn’t help, so I’ll try to be brief. (Narrator: it was not brief.)
The Rockets offense simply is not good enough for them to be considered a contender of any sort right now.
Thanks for reading!
Fine.
First, let me give you a disclaimer. Sometimes teams go through bad patches, where the shots don’t fall, and the team seems to be flat. That’s fairly normal. The Rockets are currently in 6th place in the Western Conference, but just a couple of wins or losses separates 6th from 2nd. The team is 5-5 in its last 10 games. As are the Spurs and Lakers. The Nuggets are 6-4 (though without Jokic this is pretty remarkable). We have not quite reached the halfway point in the season for the Rockets at 38 games played. There’s plenty of time to get better, for things to change.
But something had best change in the way the Rockets are playing offense, as what we’ve seen for the few weeks simply isn’t good enough. Sure, sometimes the shots just aren’t falling, and it’s make or miss league. But it’s not entirely a make or miss league. There’s more to NBA offense than that. There are reasons why teams make or miss more shots. I don’t believe it’s a random phenomenon that can’t be controlled, predicted, or influenced in any fashion, like some true random number generator. NBA teams must believe this, too. Otherwise why have any offensive system?
I believe how players execute offense can positively or negatively influence their chances of scoring. I believe how a team runs an offensive system, how it coaches and trains its players, is in fact contributory to making or missing shots. Randomness can often prevail, so in my opinion it’s best to do what you can to lessen that influence, to boost your chances of scoring.
The Rockets don’t seem to be doing much to influence that offensive randomness in their favor, and it has become a problem. There’s a real disconnect between what many of us, and tonight, the in-studio crew of Amazon Prime, believe is the problem with the Rockets offensive system. Namely, that there isn’t one. If you don’t believe me, take it from Blake Griffin and Dwyane Wade, who I think can be trusted to know what basketball offenses might look like,or at least if there is one present or not.
The dispiriting thing as a Rockets fan is it appears that the person coaching the Rockets is unaware of this status. He frequently disclaims any power to change or influence the situation in any way other than demanding more “physicality”.
If you listen to an Ime Udoka post game press conference after a loss it can be fascinating. Not for what’s said; he never says anything of substance. Fascinating because Ime describes the problems of the loss in a dispassionate, mumbling, monotone, like a grade schooler forced to do an oral presentation on a dull topic. His stance is that of an observer, a person with no role, and no stake, in the outcome. This is just some schoolwork he’s forced to do. There is no question that would generate a different sort of response, not that anyone covering Houston has asked one. Ime is just a weary observer of the many flaws and failings of this group of un-physical, non macho, guys calling itself an NBA basketball team. Don’t blame him. Ever. For anything. He certainly won’t ever blame himself. Clearly Ime’s preparation of the team, and plan for the game, and in game decisions, were flawless. The team simply failed to live up to his expectation. Again. Try harder next time.
Sometimes people ask “Well, what would you do? They missed.” Yes, they missed. But I’d try something besides the same damn thing, over and over and over, as if repetition of the same failure, as if doing just what the opponent expects every time will, with enough volume and effort, lead to success.
Maybe the Rockets need someone who does think he has a real role in what the team does during half of the game? Maybe they’ve hit a wall with a coach who disbelieves in the concept of offense so much that the Rockets effectively don’t have one? (see above) It’s just an endless series of high dribble hand offs that lead to isolation attempts of some sort. No one really knows what the guy ISOing intends, so movement is perhaps hard to read, moveover it seems deprecated anyway. I’m fairly sure defense doesn’t win any championships when the offense can’t score in clutch situations, or without a gobsmacking amount of offensive rebounds.
Tonight the offense couldn’t score. Yes, OKC is a great defense, but what I saw was a team that when faced with a great defense had no answers, no response, no adjustments, and no plan, aside from hunting around on the roster, seemingly at random, in hopes the team would find some combination of players with some juice.
This season that juice has been Kevin Durant. Guess what? Every NBA team knows that. A team like OKC not only knows that, they can do something about it. Durant has a good handle, for a seven foot tall player. He is a pretty good passer. For a seven foot tall player. Houston is using him as their point guard, but OKC is in the business of breaking point guards. They’re hell even on players who have a great handle, who can really pass it. Durant isn’t that player. Right now, no one on the Rockets is.
This problem is compounded by the problem that when any NBA team, but OKC especially, just knows, almost absolutely, what its opponent is going to do in advance, it’s really tough to score against them. This was a very close game, until the fourth quarter. This was a result of quite good defense overall from the Rockets. At the end of the third quarter OKC had scored 77 points. Unfortunately the Rockets had scored only 75 points.
The problem at that point wasn’t defense, it wasn’t even the final score. Despite OKC running away with the game, the Thunder still scored a slightly below NBA average number of points. The problem was the Rockets couldn’t shoot, and couldn’t score when it mattered. The Rockets don’t take a lot of three pointers, and they played against a team that shoots a lot of them, and does it well. So the Rockets have to excellent in the threes they do take. They weren’t. They have to decisively win the offensive rebounding battle, to generate extra chances on offense, because their putrid (perhaps non-existent) offense can’t really score without those chances. They did, though. 23-7. Overall rebounding edge, 60-44. It didn’t matter, because the shooty, offensively coherent, small-ball Thunder shot it well, and the Rockets could match it, or even come close. Sometimes the answer isn’t more defense, more physicality, more machismo, it’s scoring. This is what the Rockets did instead:
KD – 7-23. Constantly doubled, tripled, trapped. Passes and hand offs almost always anticipated, defenders waiting at his spots.
Sengun – 7-15. He’s the best player on the Rockets. The offense needs to run through him, not KD. When defenses stack on KD, it often helps against Sengun, because KD operates near the basket, where Sengun likes to operate (but rarely, if ever, starts a possession there, because, by law, all offensive possessions in the half court must begin with a dibble hand off at the top of the three point arc). So the paint is always clogged. Sengun was pretty decent anyway.
Jabari -5-15.
Amen – 4-16.
Reed – 3-10.
JD Davison – 2-9
That’s just a terrible shooting night, and OKC will do that to teams at times, but the Rockets don’t have to give them help.
Sorry if this has been a top down look at things, and negative, but I see this as a bad loss. Yes, OKC is great, and against a team that won a title there are sometimes no answers. What’s troubling me is that no one coaching the Rockets seems to be asking any questions of themselves, or searching for answers beyond “Do the same thing better next time”.
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