It’s FIVE OUT. Back for the Holidays! Home for Christmas!
I’ve got some bad news for you, though.
These are five things that I think are separating the Rockets from real contention this season, so far. And I really do mean “So far.”. The story isn’t written, the season isn’t over. The Rockets have seen some major changes and injuries and have had to change on the fly. I think Ime Udoka has many fine qualities but “Doing Stuff On The Fly” doesn’t appear to be among them.
ONE
It has to be said that the Rockets
defensive cohesion compared to last season isn’t on the same level. Some of this is replacing Dillon Brooks with Kevin Durant, defensively, though Durant has shown good effort in many games, he’s still 37. Further, this is all understandable as they’ve lost the quarterback of the defense in Fred VanVleet, while adding essentially two new heavy minutes players in Reed Sheppard and aforementioned Kevin Durant. Meanwhile they won’t see a minute of basketball in 2025 from DFS – Definitely Fictional Signing.
Fortunately the solution is likely to be simply playing together more. They need to get guys healthy, like Eason and DFS. Reed Sheppard has played better on defense of late. Although we see the ups and down expected of an inexperienced player, we are also seeing Sheppard gamble and play matador defense far less. We are also seeing that his steals and blocks game is holding up, even so. That a good sign for the future, though how soon that future arrives is a matter of conjecture, still.
TWO
The Rockets play with their food. They play down to bad competition, quite often. This team should easily defeat the Pelicans and Kings. It takes a lapse in focus and intensity to lose to such teams, and those lapses were obviously present in their two worst losses of the season – tonight’s and against NOLA. In that same space they managed to lose an OT game to Denver, that in my opinion was stolen by refereeing, and then defeated the team widely considered the second best in the NBA convincingly. They never lost focus in those games.
In the Kings game? The Rockets gave up 19 offensive rebounds to the Kings. They got 13 of their own. They lost the overall rebounding battle 55-47. Given the approach of this team, they need to win pretty much every rebounding battle, especially in terms of offensive rebounds grabbed, and allowed.
The Rockets are, right now, the best offensive rebounding team of all time, by a real margin. They just lost that battle to a team with a skinny rookie French center, and no one else, really. If that’s not a case of not playing with focus, of playing with their food, I’m not sure what is.
They need to realize that focus against bad teams will get them real relaxation and an easy time, not just drifting through a game assuming they’ll turn it on and win in the end. Maybe one day the Rockets will be good enough to do that. In the words of Aragorn “Today is not that day.”
THREE
Sometimes this team appears to think they’ve accomplished something more than they have, that they’re at a higher level than they’ve demonstrated. Maybe it’s because they’ve added such a high level player in Kevin Durant that they think they too are now at that level. They certainly could be.
But “could be” is in potential. In reality they’re a team that lost a first round series they should have won. A team that, yes, finished second in the West, but by a narrow margin. They aren’t the sort of team that can loaf through wins, that knows they can just turn it on for a quarter and be fine. They’ve shown, so far this season, that they very much can’t do that.
This isn’t to be bleak, the Rockets have shown they can play, and even beat, any team in the NBA. But to live up to the hopes and aspirations Rockets fans have for them, and I believe the team can, and should, have for itself, they’re going to have to find a new level of not fire, but professionalism. Frankly they remind me at times of those very annoying, brash, while having accomplished little, Memphis teams. That isn’t a good look.
FOUR
The offense is now perhaps Ime Udoka’s dream – a high performance garbage truck. What I mean is, the performance is there, but it looks, and smells, terrible for much of the time. I’d prefer more elegance, but obviously winning doesn’t require it.
What winning might require is tiny bit of creativity, of plays, of cleverness, on offense. Not every possession needs to be a heroic mano a mano struggle, or display of athletic prowess. Some could just be a victory of cleverness, of outsmarting the opponent, or just doing something they don’t expect.
I truly believe doing the unexpected would work gangbusters, because they Rockets almost never do anything a decent defense doesn’t expect.
I think I understand the theory behind the offense. In the playoffs clever motions, relying on cleverness and tricksy actions can, and often will, fail a team. So why not practice the hard grind, the “can you beat your man” stuff all season?
Why not? Well it doesn’t need to be every. Single. Possession. Running. The. Same. Action.
Sometimes the team needs a clever action late, because the game is close, time is short, and there SIMPLY ISN’T TIME to win a stirring mano a mano battle out of the same old top of the arc action from an out of bounds pass. Trying to do the regular old thing in irregular situations is a recipe for failure, and we’ve seen that failure in overtime. A lot.
The Rockets need some actual plays that are very different from their standard action. Especially for sideline, baseline and out of time out, situations. Overwhelmingly what they run in those situations is flaccid. at best.
I can’t believe the coaching staff is unaware of this, but if what we’ve seen is all they can give the team to work with, they need to find a way to make the team’s job in special situations easier, not harder. Either Udoka and his black clad drama majors, see the problem and can’t fix it, or they don’t see any problem, nor need to fix anything. Both are troubling.
FIVE
The Rockets don’t ride the hot hand on offense. I’ve watched this closely. The Rockets often have a player, or shot, that the opposition just can’t stop. Many teams might think – “Hey, let’s do this until they stop it, and then take advantage of what they did to stop it for still more easy buckets.”
They Rockets don’t do this.
I’ve tried to see if it’s the opponent that shuts the Rockets hot hand down. In my observation it simply isn’t, for the most part. Instead the Rockets will shut it down on their own. A team that forsakes all but individual elegance on offense refuses to spam successful matchups or shots. They will be pointlessly egalitarian. They’ll just run the same initial action as always and let it go where it will, instead of where it will seemingly do the most good. What this often gets them is (a paraphrase) of how Earl Weaver describes going deep into a baseball bullpen: every time you replace a guy doing well, you’re more likely to find the guy who just doesn’t have it that day.
Maybe they don’t know how to get someone the ball, or run something again, if an opponent doesn’t want them to do it. If that’s the case, who is to blame for that?
So there you go. Grievances aired. Festivus achieved.
I’ll do one of these after Christmas, and hopefully have some holiday cheer to offer. It’s been a tough Hanukkah so far.
