Rockets have special players. Its intriguing. We have 2 josh hart type players (amen, tari) in terms of defense, getting after the ball and uncanny offensive rebound ability. Good 1-1 defenders in smith and brooks and fred. If we can get some more defensive players that csn shoot and dribble drive while the other shooters develop including sengun we might have something
I think you're dead on! The one player who I think that can vault this team is Lauri Markkanen. He brings size and he can shoot. I would put him at the PF and Jabari at the SF. That would give us the length we need next to Sengun, with Thompson and Green in the backcourt. He is a FA next off season, so maybe you can pry him away from Ainge at a RESONABLE price but I doubt it
His TS has dropped like 5%, that’s a MASSIVE drop. If you think the pacers are good, that’s fine. I certainly don’t. Also imagine how much worse his TS would be without all the help he has gotten from the refs? If NY wasn’t being helped as much as they have been…..oof
Like I said Jalen Green accounted for most of those bad shots, if he improves the team percentage will also improve by a lot.
I don’t get the “3 star” rule. What stars does OKC have? Someone mentioned on here that the Rockets can replicate what the Pistons did. I argue that OKC is doing this with SGA as their lone high scoring superstar. The rest of the team is composed of vets and good young players like williams and Chet. What 3 stars did Toronto have in 2019? They had Kawhi as their top dog. They did have Lowry who isnt necessarily a scorer but an all around great player. But that team had length and defense with Ibaka, Siakim, Fred and great shooters ij powell and green. That was a balanced team. Just like Detroit was balanced. Denver didn’t have any stars but Jokic surrounded by good players and no Murray ain’t no star. Now how stars are defined is another thread. But all this begs the question if teams can just be balanced with one star surrounded by good defensive players, shooters, and depth is this a championship formula? It seems to me to be the case and possible but I think all these teams like the Clippers chasing “stars” isn’t the answer. The Warriors in their golden years pre Durant built the core of that team thru the draft with wise free agent additions. They had balance and depth and 2 stars really. I don’t consider Draymond to be one although he was a very good player who knew his role. And again all this hinges on how you define star. Star to me means elite. Best of the best. I think Rockets can build a championship if one or both Green and Sengun can be that guy surrounded by defense, length, shooting, depth.
Thats not the point. It’s a team game and winning and losing is never on one player. The point was the team as whole is very inconsistent. Just shooting .355 as a player doesn’t mean you’re affecting winning since that can be deceiving. When did the player shoot those 3s? During a tied game? In garbage time? When trailing by 20? That’s why the timeliness of the shot is important. I don’t think you can make that conclusion by looking at one player. You would have to look at the individual performance of every player in every situation in each of those games and see when and how they made or missed those shots. Besides there’s several other Rockets shooting worse than Green including Uncle, Sengun, Amen, and Tate and all those numbers factored in. But the critical point here is the Rockets can’t hit open shots when it matters.
The team average is weighted on players who shoot more. For example Amen and Sengun shot horribly but they take less than 2 threes a game. OTH Jalen takes like 7-10 threes a night so even if he is just 1 guy the team percentage is very similar to his. Pareto Principle and all that. For Rox shooting percentages the only ones that matter are: 1. FVV 2. Jalen 3. Brooks 4. jabari 5. Cam The rest are irrelevant, combined maybe they're like 10% of the outcome and only shoot in outlier situations. Out of those FVV shot 38% from 3 and Jabari, Brooks and Can all shot similarly at around 36% from 3. Jalen Green? 33% from 3. If we consider 38% to be top among 3 PT shooting team average then tbh Rox aren't that bad of shooters if we exclude Jalen Green. The average would be like 37% so like I said if JG fixes his shooting the team would be kosher. https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/HOU/2024.html
Williams and Chet are stars despite being rookies. I put the two of them at the level of Alperen Sengun. It's a new meta look the Lakers got 1-4ed and their roster now is better than when they won a ring. Nuggets about to get swept and they looked invincible the past couple of years. Rather than saying big 3s seems like now is the era of Big3s+deep bench and great supporting cast. The talent level is insane. For example Minny has Ant, Naz Reid and Kat but they also have Gobert, Jaden McDaniels, Conley etc Boston has a big 3 of Porzingis, Tatum and Brown and they also have Derrick White and Jrue. OKC has SGA, Chet and Williams and also have Dort and Cason Wallace etc. Teams like Kawhi Raptors won't be enough to win in this meta imo. It needs to be as good as peak Curry GSW.
Again as I said that depends on how you define what s star is. They aren’t elite. They aren’t voted into the all star game. One can view Rockets players as stars. This is all relative and again a lot of Rockets fans view the glass as half empty and so many don’t believe our players are stars. All personal preference and relative.
What makes you think Chet and Williams aren't elite? They have better stats and averages than some players who are all stars this year. There's a reason OKC got 1st seed and it's not just due to SGA. For example is Jamal Murray not a star? Both Chet and JDub make him look like Daishen Nix in comparison. The two of them played better than Paul George and PG was an all star this year.
Huh? Those players I mention played big minutes and all these shots factor into team shooting. Selectively picking and choosing who you want to count to represent the data doesn’t excuse the fact that there’s other players that factor into the numbers. Combined those players attempted 446 3PA out of the total 2964. Even if you only count the main rotation their numbers factor in. If these players are in the 8 man rotation why selectively just choose a handful of players?
Because Sengun and Amen aren't there to shoot open 3s? They're supposed to do other things and only shoot in edge cases. Realistically will you replace Sengun with Vucevic who can shoot 3s better? No right? So Sengun is a "fixed cost" and shouldn't be included in 3 pt analysis. Same with Amen, Jock Landale and Adams. The whole point of your analysis is to see if the team has a hole and if you need to fix anything. If you include guys like Sengun and Amen and Landale whose job isn't even to shoot 3d then you make the wrong assumption. Are you gonna cut them in the lineup for 3 pt shooters to improve team 3 pt shooting? I hope notm
It's really not that simple. What if we ranked the 5 starers by their on/off team points per possession according to cleaning the glass? It would be 1. FVV 2. Green 3. Sengun 4. Brooks 5. Jabari So Green in spite of your allegation that he is the most responsible for the team's poor 3 pt shooting he still has the second best on/off impact on offense in this team for the season. I checked and he's better than every bench player besides Landale also in this stat. So what gives? Is Green's 3 pt shooting helping the team then have better offense? No. See I agree he needs to improve his three point percentage by either taking less of them or just flat out improving on them but your analysis is reductive in the sense you aren't accounting for things like the type of good open threes Green creates not just with direct assists but with hockey assists from pnr actions where he attracts doubles, passes to the short roll man who then kicks it out to the open shooter. Those good open threes are created a lot by Jalen. And then there is the fact that Jalen is responsible for a lot of bail out attempts when the off drive set falls apart. So it's really hard to say if Green is the main culprit for the team's overall poor three point percentage when we see he has the second best on/off team offensive ppp on the roster behind FVV and the fact that a lot of those made threes from other players in the team come from Green creating it from an assist or hockey assist due to his gravity.
We don't live in a NBA era where a starter's job isn't to shoot threes. We live in the modern ha where if you are a negative floor spacer, you really need to stand out in other areas to sacrifice that spacing. Amen and Sengun definitely do have standout traits that are worthwhile to describe the negative spacing they provide but let's not pretend they don't harm spacing on offense. Rockets have rto get creative with them to minimize their negative spacing. That is still a problem.
You are obviously right but I was responding to the other poster talking about how the Rox are last in open 3 pt shooting ranking. My pt is the overall ranking is misleading cuz the 3 pt FG% would actually be decent if we removed JG's shooting. Whether JG is a net positive despite his bad shooting I mean that's out of scope already.
That problem is outweighed by the positive they bring. You aren't replacing them in the lineup unless you get a superstar upgrade so what's the point of including them in analysis? It's a sunk cost fallacy. For example look at Bucks with Giannis. They traded for Dame because they thought they needed more offense and shooting. But in reality the reason their shooting is bad is due to Giannis. When they "upgraded" from Jrue Holiday to Dame the team shooting barely changed because Jrue is already a good shooter. If they exlcuded Giannis bad nos which is a sunk cost they would have realized that. What I'm saying is outside Jalen the team is already decent at shooting. Even if we get a shooter it's highly likely be won't see play because like I said our guys who can shoot are already good at shooting. Look at Aaron Holiday. He is our best shooter but barely got minutes.
i just said its all relative. Doesn’t matter. You think they are I don’t think they are. Whole point was that how people judge players as stars is all relative and that term is overused and there is not exact definition or measurement or standard.
Ok so don't say OKC is a 1 star team then because it is all relative. Why is it you can define what a star is and others can't? Makes zero sense.
