And btw, our offensive game with Dwight.... simply keeps sucking. You can say he's terrible 1on1, blabla... ok. Reality is that coaches are not helping him so far, not at all... I'll keep waiting for changes at that.
I have to agree with DD here. If your guys aren't ready to compete at the start of games...bench em. Its too damn hard in this league to have to come from double digit deficits to win...especially on the road. This game had classic "trap game" written all over it. A bad team who played well their last game...we have 2 big rotation players out. And we are looking ahead too much. Jazz take advantage. Tip your hat to them. Mchale should be screaming his ass off at the team right now.
Honestly though, I think we're in trouble if Chandler goes down for any significant stretch of time. No adequate replacement at ALL.
Defense just sucked all night around. I think people just look up to Harden because he's the leader tonight and when leaders fall every gets upset with him. He made some glaring mistakes because he handled the ball most of the game.
The sky is not falling, but it's time for a reality check. The Rockets give up more points than any other team in the NBA, except the Philadelphia 76ers. The Rockets offense is probably good enough to get them into the playoffs, and maybe even home court in the 1st round, but this kind of defensive effort will send them home quickly come the postseason.
There was a height mismatch with Alex Burks at 6'6. One of Lin / Parsons was sorely needed. Probably Parsons more so Harden could guard Burks, who's less of a shooter or Jefferson who's less of a factor. Same story when Lin guarded James Anderson. It's hard to give someone 6 inches in height and still guard them. The Jazz played Jefferson less minutes than he normally gets, forces one of Harden/Garcia to be on Hayward, and the mistmatch on Burks. McHale only tried Ronnie Brewer for 4 minutes. 42 points to 21 pts from Burke/Burks vs Brooks/Beverley. I also thought Jones deserved a slightly longer leash. It's just his first poor game and he's a rookie. These types of benchings kill confidence, and young players need confidence so they don't play tentatively.
A contested one at that. No one was stopping him tonight. This was the exact kind of game you ride your guy to a win and tell Brooks to pass him the ball or sit on the bench.
Honestly, this game was bad since the beginning. Could Brooks do better down the stretch? Yes, but he did pretty well tonight. All you can expect from Brooks is an offensive spark from the bench, which he did. In fact, everyone except for Jones and Omer did well on offense tonight. What lost us this game was defense. So, if you want to assign blame, start looking from there. How did 3 Jazz guards get 20+ points on 50%+ shooting? Harden was being lazy on defense, there's no doubt about it. We can go dig up all the video replays later where he played his "matador" defense or was standing up right while his man blew past him. Not only Harden, but the team is still not playing help defense correctly. I see 4 guys collapsing into the lane on a Hayward drive, leaving half the Jazz team open on the 3. No one was boxing out their man down low, not even Dwight who was always looking for the block. Beverly and Harden were getting caught in every screen, but neither Jones nor Casspi could coordinate on whether to chase down the ball handler or swap defenders.
I don't think we should excuse JH's terrible defense even though the efforts by the whole team was non-existent. If it is one game he played bad defense and we lose, he can be excused. But if he constantly lacks of effort on defense, the team may win some games and lose some. But there is no way we can win a championship if JH doesn't play ACCEPTABLE defense. Period!
he passes the ball with 5 or less secnds every damn time. our other players arent exactly known to create for themselves with the shot clock dwindling down.
I disagree. Players like Melo and Kobe rack up 30 point nights all the time and can STILL kill the offense. Harden put up 37. Great. His D was bad, but we knew that. However, HOW he put up the 37 was by killing the offensive flow. Look back at how many times he got the ball passed on the in bounds and trotted up the floor? Or burned clock unnecessarily? When you do that the entire team stops running. Why bother to run ahead when Harden is just going to trot the ball up past half-court. Why run on the in bounds when nobody passes the ball up court in transition? One of our greatest strengths is the transition game. Not just transition buckets, but transition allowing us to set up multiple passes before the defense is set. How many crappy contested shots were made? And look at how poor the ball movement as a whole was tonight? No, it's not entirely on Harden as it's a team game. However, if you're a Max player and get a big share of the glory, you also take a big share of the blame when the team falls short. As for Dwight, his defense was compromised by forcing him to cover for crappy defensive play on rotations and him needing to come out. Offensively he's very reliant on our offense to create mismatches and to rotate the defense to create gaps. When we fail to do that as a team, Dwight is left hanging unless you just want him to post up all night. And the game was a lot more than the 4th quarter. The starting unit came out without any sort of intensity. They LET the Jazz run all over them. It was the bench unit that got us back into the game. Parsons/Lin being out is NOT an excuse for this team. Look at the roster. You put Harden, Dwight, Bev and the rest of our roster versus the Jazz roster, is there ANY scenario where a 4 win team should be beating us? 48 solid minutes. That's what they kept saying was the priority. I barely saw 10 minutes of good basketball by the Rockets the entire game. And no, that's not Harden's fault per se, but if you're the max player you should be setting the tone Especially if you're the guy with the ball in your hands the vast majority of the night.
1) We were missing 2 of our top 5 players tonight 2) the Jazz shot 54/59/81 from the floor, mostly taking the shots we wanted them to take...mid range jumpers 3) Rockets shot 32% from 3. That's why we lost. We will get back our Lin and Parsons, the Jazz won't shoot like that again this year, and we will typically shoot better from 3. We're solidly better than the Jazz...this just wasn't our night.
Hate trap games like this. Needed Parsons tremendously tonight. Rockets looked confused without a hot shooting Parsons against the Jazz today. Burks looking great tho. I hope Parsons recovers soon, and so do the Rockets.
Not sure why people are focusing on the end of the game so much, as this game was lost in the 1st quarter. Harden held Hayward to 12 points through the last three quarters, but his lack of effort on D in the 1st quarter was awful. The entire team just sleepwalked through this game on both ends of the floor. Harden was the bright spot honestly. No urgency, intensity, no boxing out, and just playing down to our opponent in general lost us this game. Just the classic Rockets let down loss after a big win, if you've been a Rockets fan awhile, you should have seen this coming. We still have growing to do, which is acceptable. These losses are gonna kill us at the end of the year when we are a game or two outside of 2nd or 3rd place. Patience guys.
