So I just noticed that even though we have a lot of time off here this month and some of next it is like the NBA was purposely trying to F%*& us over. It gets super nasty in the last month with back to backs and many games played just in time to get us nice and tired for the play offs. Conspiracy or NBA really wanted to stick it to the Rockets?
Woah. Fully expected Spurs to get up over the Knicks even with a couple mins left. So 1 win behind with 4 more losses. And Celtic helped us yesterday also.
2.5 games behind but we are probably not catching them at this point. We're still 4 games behind in the loss column which matters the most right now. The Rockets have played 3 more games than the Spurs...assuming that the spurs win all 3 of those games (not a huge assumption) we would be 4 games behind the Spurs. The gap unfortunately isn't as close as it may seem.
Assuming you are using March as the last month, the Rockets have 2 sets of back to backs. (one set in April). They played more games in December and January than in March and the same amount in November. Obviously less in February due to the All Star break and only having 28 days. Out of the 15 games in March, 8 are against teams that currently have winning records. 8 home games, 7 on the road. In April, they have 6 games in 12 days split 3 home/road, with the game against the Clippers the only one against a team with a winning record.
I'm guessing it was by design, but... I don't understand the difference between your two polling options. I think the Rockets got screwed by the schedule makers, but I neither believe that it was intentional nor that it was a conspiracy. Just bad luck.
How are they 'screwed' by the schedule makers? What is 'bad luck' about the schedule? Including March and April there are 43 days and 21 games. 3 back to backs in that time. Less games in March than any other month except February. 11 home games, 10 road games. 9 games against teams with winning records, 12 against teams with losing records.
I think it's the first half of the schedule that people think was unfair. I get that sometimes mitigating circumstances(the rodeo in San Antonio for example) can create the need for a lengthy road trip. But I'm still trying to figure out why exactly the Rockets had to play so many more overall games than nearly every NBA team up until that Chicago game recently. They had racked up 6 more games than Cleveland at one point. Is there a reason for that? Is it just an anomaly. I suppose you can make the case that the flipside of the brutal first half schedule is that the second half will be much easier, but there's also a case to be made that they'd have fewer losses right now if their schedule had been similar to that of Cleveland's up until this point.
You're hallucinating our martyrdom. That looks like a normal NBA schedule; in fact it will be one of the sparsest, given that almost every other team has currently played 43-45 games and Houston has played 47. Now, there should be some sort of internal NBA rule against scheduling the second night of a road back-to-back in Denver, but that's the only egregious scheduling twist that caught my eye.
My response is directly to the point of this thread which talks about the 'super nasty' schedule in March. The schedule is routine in March. Nothing 'super nasty' about it.
Thorough 51 games we played the 5th most road games in league history, Also a top 10 most games played in that time span. To start the season we a had the most road games by any team in 47 years. We've also played the most b2b games. Those last two are the ones that bothers me the most. Why would we get a schedule that hasn't happened in almost 50 years? That's odd and then you give us that start to a season, okay fine but then you give us the most b2b games, road games and overall games through the first 50 games. Our schedule really was hard, and we shouldn't be surprised that we had a dip in play during January. I don't think it has anything to do with the team or the talent, it all has to do with our schedule. Not to mention we spent half our preseason in China, we've been on the road for a very long time since training camp. We're lucky to have the 3rd most wins in the NBA one of three teams with a .700 winning percentage, really shows how good this team is.
I agree about March. It's actually not that bad. Tough, for sure. But that's par for the course when you have the play the likes of the Warriors, Cavs, and Spurs. There are only 2 B2Bs though.
