Mitchell & McHale discuss what is ailing the Rockets defense

Harden is the main culprit here.

There’s no way reducing Hardens minutes unfortunately.

Defense is about culture and effort as much as players and scheme. So it starts from the top. And at the top we have an offensive coach who literally can’t coach defense and an offensive player who doesn’t try.

Ain’t no one else going to put forth the defense effort with that leadership. That’s why you needed both CP3 and Bzdelik and Tucker and defensive wings. All they have left is Tucker.

 

we had cp3 last year and situation was even worse to start the year

 

"Don't throw the ball to the other team." wise words

 

Who's in on a formal petition to rehire McHale????

 

They were giving up 116.6 Drtg through 6 games? Their defense didn’t seem THIS bad.

But they also then jettisoned their worst defensive player for the scheme, brought back Bzdelik and became solid but not great defensively on the way to a 2nd round exit.

 

Hes a clown

 

Milkhair: Gotta tighten up your defense. It's not hard. You have assistant coaches. No one on your staff has to look at you "Mike, we're having problems defensively." You walk in and say "OK, this is what we gotta do." First of all, you gotta quit turning the ball over. If you're giving up 27-30 points off your turnovers, your offense is leading to their offense. When your offense feeds the other team, you're in a world of trouble. You ain't winning any games. Then you gotta get back in transition defense. You gotta get back to the basics. In training camp, people don't work on a lot of stuff. Transition defense, you can't put it on a chalkboard and say "This is what we're gonna do." You gotta drill it. You gotta set up all these situations. Transition defense is a scramble. You gotta scramble because it's odd man situations & you gotta work.

Sam: Two things we practiced every day: transition defense & pick-&-roll defense. That's it. That was our defense. If you can play transition defense & pick-&-roll defense, you've covered everything. ... I know training camp is non-existent anymore. You got three days. Take those three days and work on the things you know you're gonna see every night. Everyone wants to run. Transition defense & then pick-&-roll defense. If you do that every day and get better at that, you can win basketball games.

Sam: When your star players are the main culprits, what do you do? Only way you get everyone to play defense is hold everyone accountable. The only way to do that is cut guys minutes. We're not getting back, I'm gonna cut your minutes, you must be tired. Instead of 38 minutes, it's 30. I promise you when they look at them stats and they played 30 minutes and went from 22 shots to 16, they'll start playing defense then because that stat sheet don't lie.

 

Right on the money, but all things MDA will never do. He doesn’t drill, cutting minutes scares him to death and when you mention holding players accountable he’d say: “accountability means what?”

 

to me it looks like the coaching schemes on defense are CRAP. teams are getting wide open shots in the paint and at the arc game after game, possession after possession. they are getting wide open slips to the basket leaving our defenders screened off as well. add to this that capela is wasting his fuking time on the perimeter and continually out of position to either contest shots in the paint or get defensive rebounds. the switching scheme has failed.

 

There's only so much you can do as a coach if your team is purposefully sabotaging your job

 

sad but true, this rockets team will soon be the laughing stock of the league, yeah golden state sucks worse, but at least they will have a better pick and better team than us next year, what a sad team, i never like westbrook because of his low bb IQ, i guess i am right as always.

 

Losing Chris Paul probably impacted the defense more than people realize.

You can't turn around a defense this bad in just a few games. This will take months, maybe the whole season, to correct -- if its correctable with the players we have. Will D'antoni last that long?

 

i've seen this posted here several times in the past day, but i don't see the basis for it. harden, rivers, gordon, capela are all enamoured with the guy.

 

iF RUSS DOESNT PLAY TONIGHT THAT IS THE BIGGEST SIGN THAT THEIR IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY FOR LACK OF EFFORT. BECAUSE HE GIVES TO MUCH

 

I've posted this before and I'm going to keep posting it. The Rockets last year were the #1 defense in the NBA with Chris Paul on the floor, better defensive rating than Utah or Milwaukee. The best in the entire league! With Chris Paul on the bench, the defense was #22 in the league. He carried our defense.

 

They lost luc and Ariza, it was more about adjusting. They also came off a game 7 WCF defeat and 65 games, they were overconfident. You can’t compare the 2

 

Exactly, @Clutch , me and others pointed this out at the time. This was bound to happen. We traded a strong defensive player and leader so harden could play with his friend. WB individually is actually playing well, but he doesn’t mask the teams deficiencies like cp3 did

 

One of the biggest things that frustrates me is watching how many times we gamble to get steals. One player gets out of position and our help isn't rotating over fast enough and even if they do, they shouldn't be in that situation to play 4 on 5 anyways.

It's definitely not our only issue (duh) but it is frustrating. That was the beauty of a player like Luc. He never got out of position.

 

Right, exactly.

We traded the leader of the defense, the player who orchestrates good defense everywhere he goes and who was vital to getting the second unit to fix problems when our first unit failed on the effort side to start a game. The player we got back is a high effort guy, but is an overall bad defensive player and has a hero mindset when things are going wrong. When it works, it looks great, but when it doesn't work it looks god awful.