[The Athletic/Hollinger] On the Rockets and the early-season 'when do we worry' question

Good read - and agree we are too short and don't play D.

DD

 

We have only lost by double digits once and had a few more shots have gone down the Rockets could just as easily be 6-1.

Last year was still more alarming. Unlike some I'm not that concerned about Westbrook (I thought I would be). Good luck adjusting to a team that takes off on fast breaks and is deadly from half court. The defense needs to be addressed but if we know it, Morey and Co have to already be trying something.

 

Yeah the Dunc’d on podcast went into how teams are shooting against us and that it’s wildly unsustainable how hot teams are shooting against us so far.

They even said even if guys were to get wide open shots against us at an even higher rate that they wouldn’t expect teams to continue to shoot as well against us as they have.

 

Can u copy and paste it so I don't have to sign up?

 

I brought this up in another thread but I wanna reiterate it here and see if people agree or disagree. Is it possible that our "bad luck" is actually due to the height of our defenders? These stats typically measure expected outcome based on defender distance, if I'm not mistaken. So we see something like "teams are shooting 10% higher when the rockets have a defender within 0-2 feet" or something like that. But my theory is that maybe our short lineup has a huge impact on that. To use my same example as my other post, if Chris Clemons is within 1 foot of Jonas Valanciunas, that's easy buckets. But the stats would show that as "bad luck" because the other team is scoring easily on "close contested shots." If a lot of our "close" or "good" contests are from players who are 4-6 inches shorter than the shooter, maybe that's part of why we are getting so "unlucky".

 

This might be a reason i guess, to me, i always thought it's probably more about lack of intensity, lack of intensity = more confidence for the opponents. I said this again, but there's probably a reason why in almost every game we let other teams or scrubs reach new records or career highs...might be a coincidence or bad luck, but i don't think so.

Two years ago actually happened the same but in our favour, i remember there was a piece by Lowe in which he wrote that opponents missed more open shots then usual against us and it could've been just luck, but i don't think it was, having Chris healty, Ariza and Luc made that happen imo.

 

I don’t believe they were discussing stats based on closest defenders in the podcast. Just straight up shooting percentages against.

It was prior to our last game but they had said we were dead last by 4% in opponent 3 point percentage and 2nd to last in opponent mid range %.

They seemed fairly confident that those percentages weren’t sustainable at all.

As to your scenario I think being shorter obviously can play a part, who knows exactly how much and how often these scenarios are happening.

 

As a team, in fact, the Rockets lead the NBA in shot quality by at least one metric and have assisted on a great percentage of 3s than a year ago — a good proxy for shot difficulty and off-the-dribble chucks.

All this brings to mind Klay Thompson’s 3-point “slump” of a year ago — he started the year 5-for-36 before making an NBA-record 14 the next game — and the generally high variance involved in 3-point shooting attempts. Our own Seth Partnow discovered that 3-point percentage doesn’t stabilize until about 750 attempts; even for a prolific flinger like Harden, that takes a while. Overall, I wouldn’t lose sleep over this one.

Our brick layers need to get it together. The progression to the mean for Harden is gonna be ridiculous. He might average 45 or more a game during that stretch where he gets his 3 point percentage back to his career averages.

 

ib4 haters call you a homer

 

Yes, our defense will be a problem, lol

 

Great graph. Well, OKC and Philly have are in the top 10 of defensive rating this year. The thing that is worrying is that we are such a outlier in terms of height, and that could really be one of the main issues defensively. We already close out late due to being slow footed and the low height means our close outs are even less effective.

I hope the averages kick in and that it proves teams are just hitting lucky shots, but right now it seems to be more than just a lucky coincidence.

 

Oooo, I like this and had not considered height when accounting for "closest defender" before.

 

I agree with Hollinger's assessment but it must be noted that a few weeks ago Hollinger also picked the Warriors to make the Western Conference Finals which was absurd even WITH Curry in the starting lineup.

 

I think without even using trigonometry we can see that it doesn't matter how close a defender is if the defender is half as tall.

 

I get where you are going with it but I don't believe this is true. This seems like it would be fairly easy to validate considering we had nearly the same height roster last year. I'm too lazy to look it up, but if you are serious about your theory, I would suggest diving into the performance of last year's team where I am sure you will find our small roster was at least average if not slightly above average relative to longer rosters. You would think that height would also mean we shoot lower percentages at the rim but I don't think that is the case either.

It really could just be the perfect storm of us being "unlucky" as well as us being sloppy/out of shape to start the season making us look much worse than we actually are. Hollinger mentions in his article that those first few weeks generally aren't indicative of overall season success OR specifically for this team(we have several seasons of evidence starting slow out the gate but finishing strong).

...jumping back to the "we need taller players" suggestion - I think that is something easier said than done. The Bucks and 76ers are the only two I can think of who have been able to operate successfully that way and I think it's because both started by prioritizing that type of player in the draft and having high draft picks. I think generally that type of player tends to be more coveted and thus overpaid making it hard for a capped/near cap team to acquire those types of players. Not saying it's impossible, but clearly the road for Milwaukee and Philly was long, arduous, and even painful at times.

 

switch on d boom. problem solved.