[BallAndOne] What on earth went wrong with the Houston Rockets?

Excellent Read!

 

This year when people pointed out our defensive woes and tried to blame it solely on Harden, I had to point out that Harden was ALWAYS a pretty bad defender. But we still defended well. So the logical conclusion is regression in other areas. Namely Dwight losing athleticism and he is now to slow to cover his man and often gives up. Overall our defense is the result of horrible coaching. Keeping the same coaching staff on this team after firing Mchale was a disaster.

Still thats not the only way Morey failed this team this year. If you are not going to change coaches you need to get different players. And if you are not going to become better at defense then Morey needed to shop for cheap shooters before the trade deadline without hurting our cap space in the offseason. I believe he could have done this but for the most part decided to stand pat probably fearing he would mess up the offseason. Maybe by then they already threw in the towel.

 

I also disagree that Dwight is still a good defender and that it's just because he didn't have a true pf. Thats not really an excuse. He lost something over the summer, his quickness is just gone and he doesn't have the ability to do that the things that he used to do. Otherwise great article.

 

THIS. Yes good article but didn't mention much about the piss poor coaching and who hired the coach!!! I wonder how different this exact team would be under a Steve Kerr or Popovich. Harden still has to play like superman for this team to win just like last season. No matter what anyone says you still have 3 very good defenders in Ariza, Howard and Beverly in the starting lineup so it all points to just terrible "team" defense (coaching).

 

The whole segment about a 4% increase in opponents' 3pt FG %... remember last year all those articles claiming we were historically lucky with opponents' 3pt % on open looks? We all tried to justify it as part of the defensive scheme... maybe there was actually something to that.