The amazing thing about this playoff series aside from the dejected demeanor of all our players is that we beat the Blazers 3-1 in the regular season. And we easily handled them each time. Yet, for some reason our coaching staff decided to completely change the Rockets plan of attack for this series. 1) No D-Mo in the rotation. On offense Motiejunas helps the team tremendously by actually moving the ball. Something the team simply is not doing at the moment. On defense, he is much better than Terrence Jones. 2) We did not force feed Dwight Howard at crucial points of the game all year long, but for some reason that is now our go to strategy. We need some different pick n roll scenarios happening. Right now, our offense is completely stagnant. 3) A huge problem facing the Rockets is the 3 point shot is not falling. If the Rockets were making their 3's, a lot of our offensive spacing issues and lack of direction on offense would be solved. The Rocket dominated the Blazers during the regular season. I'm sure there are other reasons for this than just the aforementioned ones. But, regardless, whatever they were doing they should go back to that. Game 1 was stolen. That's fine. Game 2, however, it seemed like McHale abandoned everything that got us here in the first place and tried to implement a completely new strategy. We've had success with Rockets' style of basketball. I'm not convinced that it fails to translate to the postseason. The Rockets simply just abandoned it too soon.
I think we can as easily take games 3 and 4 there as they took 1 and 2 here. Will be interesting to see how the team responds to the hole they're in.
