Chron: Rockets shaking at the core, JVG wants stars....

Chron: Rockets shaking at the core, JVG wants team stars....

Rockets shaking at core
Van Gundy wants team stars to lead

By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle

From the start, Jeff Van Gundy was clear and consistent. A team is led, he said, not by a new, high-dollar coach, but by its best players. They set the tone, often the personality, and in the end, usually, a team's ultimate success.

This was long before the Rockets headed to Phoenix without Steve Francis, before their losing streak reached a painful four games in a blowout loss to the last-place and injury-weakened Suns, before alarms had begun to sound.

But Van Gundy had said again last week what he believes works in the NBA.

"Getting the right best players or the right core, is the No. 1 trick," Van Gundy said. "It's not just talent. It's how they lead the group and the franchise."

Four days later, Francis was in Houston when the Rockets were in Phoenix and little about his team's true potential was clear.

More than halfway through Van Gundy's first season with a core the Rockets have generally kept together for four seasons -- with the notable addition of Yao Ming and subtraction of Eddie Griffin -- Van Gundy said he would not draw conclusions about the Rockets' increasingly shaky foundation.

But neither was he ready to declare that the Rockets have just what they need.

"The only way you can judge if you have it is if you get the results," Van Gundy said. "It's so easy to know. If you're getting the right results, you've got the right core. You'll be able to judge by what we do from here.

"There's 10, 11, 12 other teams in the West saying the same thing. At the end of the day, four or five teams are going to say `we didn't measure up.' "

But when the Rockets lost Saturday to the Nets, Van Gundy said his team lost its heart. A day later, it misplaced its point guard, top scorer and highest-paid player.

Van Gundy said Monday that he became the Rockets' coach in part to coach Francis.

Sunday's incident -- Van Gundy said Francis told him he skipped the team's flight to attend the Super Bowl, and Francis' agent said Francis attended to personal, family matters -- has not changed his mind.

Francis vehemently disagreed with Van Gundy's decision to suspend him. But Van Gundy said that for him, the issue ended with Monday's game.

"I came here because of the players we had and particularly because of Steve," Van Gundy said. "This is just an unfortunate thing. It is just a small bump in the road. Hopefully, we'll make some progress and start to play better.

"I've disagreed with my best players about many things strongly, and they've disagreed with me. It shouldn't be a problem.

"My feelings on the matter really don't matter. I'm just trying to make the best of things to give us the best chance to win long term."

Evaluating a team at the lowest or highest point is likely to produce inaccurate conclusions. The Rockets face the Bucks tonight at the lowest point of the season. If the Rockets were not troubled enough by their losing streak, they tormented themselves with the knowledge that they have gone down so easily, so relatively effortlessly.

A week earlier, they had become the league's top defensive scoring and top defensive shooting-percentage team. On pace to set league records, they openly called themselves the league's best defensive team with the numbers to back the boast.

They have not played hard enough since to maintain that standard. They were whipped off the dribble by the usually unspectacular Miami and Phoenix offenses and outworked by Sacramento and New Jersey.

Before the losing streak, Rockets opponents were making 38.8 percent of their shots and averaging 83.3 points per game.

In the past four games, Rockets opponents have made 47.5 percent of their shots and averaged 95.3 points.

"We're not playing defensively the way we were playing a week ago," Rockets forward Maurice Taylor said. "For whatever reason we lost it, we need to get it back."

In hindsight, the losing streak is probably not much of a shock. The Rockets had found ways to win despite their deficiencies, rather than to correct them. When the slide began in Miami, Jim Jackson even warned that it was possible. He said Monday that he did not see it coming but has no doubt about what has gone wrong.

"The effort is not the same, playing smart, the little things, defensively," Jackson said. "That's how it goes in this league. You let up on a couple things, your stronger points, you're going to get beat. Losing is just as contagious as winning. If you don't correct what is wrong when you're losing, you'll keep losing."

In the short term, the Rockets believe the correction is as simple as the suggestion of every elementary school gym teacher, try hard. Long term, they will have to determine if their current nucleus and particularly its leadership will do.

For now, they know they are not what they expected to be by now. They might not be as bad as at their worst or good as their best, but they have proved little even to themselves about what they are.

"Consistency at either end or approach, I would have hoped we would be further along with," Van Gundy said. "That's `This is our game, we're going to play every night this way.' "

That begins, he said, with a team's best players. But when Van Gundy was asked last week if these are the right best players, he could only say that he doesn't know.

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/sports/bk/bkn/2386581

On a side note, TJ Ford will make his return to Houston to face the Rockets. http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/printstory.hts/sports/bk/bkn/2386554

 

Good point. Our offense has not really been "rolling" this season, but our defense is what kept us in games and eventually gave us the victory. Now that the defense has fallen apart, and the offense is still no where to be found the Rockets have no chance of winning. They need to bring back their intensity to their D.