Warriors played small ball, not for 48 minutes. Lakers, Clippers, Bucks, anyone can play small ball, they don't do it for 48 minutes. Andrew Bogut/Fetus Ezeli/Marreese Speights/Anderson Varejao/Jason Thompson/Kevon Looney/David West/Zaza Pachulia/JaVale McGee/Damian Jones/DeMarcus Cousins Rockets also do not have Stephen Curry or Klay Thompson or that 7' assassin (or the DPOY). "Well the Warriors won so we can do it too with 6'5 PJ Tucker and the rest of our bricklayers!"
Rockets did not lose to Blazers because they lacked a 7 footer. They lost because they did not hit their FT, 3's and did not generate enough TOV.
The trade got us closer to a title. Still not likely, but closer than we were. Having said that, we have to add a true rotation big man in the off season. We simply cannot play an 82 game season this way. Every game, regardless of opponent quality, is a fight when you are giving up this much size around the rim. Good teams can sleepwalk their way to victory in half of their games, but this group never gets a night off effort wise.
I understand your point but you forget a little detail, the GSW had players like Bogut or Pachulia in their rotation. The type of small ball that Houston tries to play is suicide. Each match becomes a lottery.
That part.... plus you KNOW Melo was super motivated.... that dagger 3 seemed to suck life out of the Rox - esp. after missed FT's
I have no doubt they'll be trying to find a versatile defensive big that can shoot, but those come at a significant price. well the ones that are actually good. The rockets don't exactly have assets and they have tilman soooo....
I predict if we don't win it this year, they will fire Morey, blame it all on him, and try to build around Harden and Westbrook with taller players. I think Tillman wants to fire him for the Hong Kong post and I don't see Tillman liking sharing the spotlight. DD
Morey knows this. Thats why he mortgaged the team's future for immediate help. Tillman's already screwed. Tilman is playing checker while Morey is playing Magic: The Gathering.
I’m sorry but I can’t root for Westbrook another year. Get a guard next to harden that can at least keep the defense honest on the perimeter and force teams to have to play us straight up
I know you're a Harden fan but there is not one player that is a better friend than WB to JH..... not even KD and that is probably his next target but they won't get him unless he is done over in Brooklyn.
Over the five-year period of 2015 to 2019, the Golden State Warriors made the NBA Finals five times. They won the title three of those years, but won a bigger battle of ideas, and kept winning it, almost from the moment they struck upon their number one weapon against any adversary: their famous Death Lineup. Featuring Steph Curry, Klay Thompson, Draymond Green, Andre Iguodala, and Harrison Barnes (later replaced by, get this, Kevin Durant), this five-man front has indefinitely warped the way NBA teams build their rosters and approach the game. Much smaller in the frontcourt than your traditional championship-level closing lineup—though actually coming out relatively close to standard, size-wise, if you average body types out—their historically effective scoring margins presented the sport with what seemed like a cavernous market inefficiency never previously exploited. With the Warriors in the midst of what’s ostensibly a gap year in their dynasty, this cave is still being actively explored. More than ever, NBA teams are eschewing old baked-in notions of how big your front court needs to be—so much so, in some cases, that actually designating any of your rotation players as proper frontcourt men becomes a strange and difficult task. The closest thing the Houston Rockets’ main lineups have to a center, for instance, is the 6-foot-5-inch P.J. Tucker; the closest thing they have to a power forward is the 6-foot-7-inch Robert Covington. This particular team’s commitment to novelty—and their resulting, demonstrated weaknesses—give us the most extreme example of how the league is trending, and as such tells the story of a movement toward a new gimmick-driven paradigm, inspired by a misinterpretation of what made those Warriors so great. It’s a rising style, and one that’s more than ripe for a new counter-exploitation. In the Rockets’ recent 110-102 loss to the Portland Trail Blazers, this form of exploitation was on rich display. In a close game that wasn’t really over until its final minute, one box score discrepancy glares more brightly than the rest: the Blazers’ 64-to-39 edge in the rebounding column. It should not be surprising, given this figure, that the Blazers attempted eight extra shots, and five extra free throws, despite turning the ball over two extra times. Seven-footer Jusuf Nurkic walked his way to 19 rebounds, surely benefitting along the way from the presence of 6-foot-11 teammate Zach Collins near the rim. In a game of inches, rolling these two guys out against the experimentally undersized Rockets gives you a foot-long advantage. There are three central qualities key to the readily disproven ideal of playing smaller and smaller lineups: a speed advantage, enhanced three-point shooting, and defensive switchability. While maximizing these qualities to the utmost can certainly create frankly unsolvable problems for any opponent, it is the norm that teams going smaller are chasing these qualities rather than attaining them, and tearing massive strategic holes in themselves along the way. For some reason, it is rarely noted that despite being remembered for their lethal bursts of small ball, the Warriors five-year romp included lots of Andrew Bogut and Zaza Pachulia, to name just two of their cadre of classically fashioned big men. Had they tried to play their Death Lineup—only functional, for the most part, because of the nearly unparalleled defensive versatility of Green—for the majority of games, their players would have gotten too tired to breathe after banging around with men so much larger than them. It seems that fleeting instances of big men stumbling all over the place, trying to catch up with free-shooting perimeter players in a high-motion offense, have made too large an imprint on the NBA’s brain, and that undersized lineups being stonewalled from the glass and winded from too many brush-ups with people 100 pounds heavier than them have not made a big enough one. In reality, size matters. So, too, do creativity and intelligence: the actual motors of the Warriors’ Death Lineup excellence. Exercising a replacement-level amount of either pulls you to the conclusion that small ball is a hack for only the most select of moments, and exclusively with personnel that can only be described as Chef’s Kiss. Without hitting those notes just right, small ball overdrive is a course bound for a brick wall built since before the sport was on television. While it may seem so old that it could crumble, there is an easily seen pile of casualties at its foundation who thought the same.
Not a good article imo. No advanced stats or anything, no film. They are looking at our first loss of the bubble. Yet no talk about the first two games. And the comparisons to the Warriors are also tired. We dont do everything because of the Warriors. It's just....lacking in very little substance.
Typicsl GSW fan hating on Rockets. Poorly written GSW propaganda drivel. What stats back up this asinine conclusion? Rebounding variance, LOL?
Thank you....someone on this board actually understands the game of basketball. When you’re relying on House, Tucker, and Jeff Green to carry you to the Finals from taking 50+ three pointers that is the definition of early exit from the playoffs. In all fairness, House has quite an impressive playoff history equal only to Ryan Anderson with his fear of shooting under playoff intensity/pressure.
there gonna have to do something. no way this old ass team survives playing this exclusively the entire season.
Pretty soon 100% of the NBA will be doing it. 5 6-7 guys that can all play. You can call it small ball If you want.
