[ClutchFans] As Rockets set to take on Thunder, James Harden must rediscover his mojo

Completely ignores the coaching aspect of playoff basketball. NBA hoops is about exploiting matchups and making adjustments when your opponent is exploiting a weakness. Simply saying Harden needs to "play better" doesn't really do anything.

Here's some needed adjustments in the first game:
Lin was not doing well and should have played a lot less minutes. His poor play could be mitigated by better schemes, however.
More PNRs for Harden instead of isolation. Consider using Parsons as the screener to get him involved in some motion as he was useless the whole game standing there with no space to work and being unable to create his own shot.
Tell Harden to pull up more once he hits the FT line on his drives. The Thunder were literally backing him up all the way to the hoop looking to contest his finish. Harden did it over and over with limited (for his high standards) success. Sometimes you need your coach to tell you what the defense is doing. You just can't let both your own defender and the help defenders sit on you taking it all the way to the hoop. Even Lebron would get his shot blocked over and over doing that.
Risky, but I'd say play TJones more and consider putting him in for big minutes. Only reason to play Smith is if Lin and, to a lesser extent, Harden are doing very well with penetration which allows Smith to finish either passes or misses at the rim. Smith is an excellent finisher but not much else.
OKC running back HARD on defense at the expense of their offensive rebounding. Take advantage of the fact the defenders will have to locate their man and navigate through other players to run secondary fast breaks. I would wager it gets us better looks than going up against their set half court defenses. At least force their bigs to close hard to the hoop to contest shots. That takes them out of the play if we pass or put up a shot fake.
Never, ever take Asik out unless he is literally gasping for air and unable to run. He's so important to our interior defense and opening up penetration on offense it's silly. We need the man.

You simply just have to watch a player as great as Lebron James to see how important coaching is. Yes, he is better than during his Cavs days. At posting up and his outside shot is marginally better. But his Cavs days were basically him trying to create offense for his whole team that stood around. Sound familiar? Him and Harden should commiserate over the summer. Now, the Heat run fantastic sets and Lebron shoots the incredibly high percentage he could have mimicked his entire career.

How many times a game do we run a play and get an easy shot? Or do we call TOs and go into a Harden ISO? Ok..if that's what we want to do why burn a timeout to do it? We can save the timeouts for when Lin gets trapped and is unable to dribble out of nor find a teammate to pass to (since everyone is standing still).

Total lack of coaching. Yes...we are outmatched talent and experience wise. But replace McHale with someone like Rick Carlisle, Adelman, Pop, Doc, or heck even Lawrence Frank and we'd have a punchers chance in most games. Right now it looks like 4 blowouts.

 

You're ****ing clueless

 

Nice solid post, care to add anything else insightful?