[WaPo] Rudy T, Robert Horry and the Birth of the Stretch Four

I always found this adjustment by Rudy T in 1995 more of a desperation move (the Rockets were down 3-1 to Phoenix by the time he fully committed to this strategy)....

...but ultimately, it wasn't so much the discovery of a "stretch-four" (in a sense, being a bit of an NBA historian myself, the first "stretch-four" player I ever saw was Bob McAdoo―a legit 6'10''who could shoot the ball from deep...actually led the league in scoring more than a few times)....

...but the hybrid nature of Hakeem Olajuwon that made it work.

If the discussion is about "pace and space"...Hakeem made the traditional inside-out method of offense work more..."traditionally"...because the old feed-the-ball-into-the-post-mantra still applied because of Olajuwon's low-post offense. The idea wasn't so much to create space for perimeter guys as it was to create space for Hakeem.

Easy to forget how much the league has changed from a rules standpoint since then...and how the value of a three-point shot has skyrocketed...more than once I've heard how many teams were looking to emulate what the Rockets of that time were doing with three-point shooting....

...but it was always hard to do when you didn't have a Hakeem Olajuwon in the paint skewering whatever defensive strategy you had.

Not to take anything away from Rudy T or Robert Horry...at the end of the day, playoff basketball is about making adjustments and largely nondescript or obscure players rising to the challenge...both those things and more besides happened that season to deliver the Rockets their second championship.

I just feel that the game's basic premises don't change overmuch. At the pro level, there are unique players who are capable of forcing a "different" dynamic to take shape..."positions" as we like to think of them, don't necessarily exist as team blueprints.

Eventually, it's about discovering what you do best as a team and staying with that.

Amazing to think about that team, still...even after all this time...

 

I thought it was unique that Rudy made him play the 3 when we first got him.
People thought he was the next pippen.
But he is the golden standard for power forwards jacking up 3s in the playoffs.

My favorite horry stat is that he never lost a first round playoff series

 

Sam Perkins was stretching the defense from the post before Horry was.

 

Even more impressive is that he won at least a first round series every year he was in the league.

 

244 playoff games

 

I don't think that's what a stretch four does. It's no so much about shooting 3's as it is about pulling a defense away from another post player in order to create space.

Horry helped Olajuwon have space. It's more about penalizing double teams in the post.

You need a stretch four when you have a awesome deep post threat.

 

Larry Bird is technically a stretch 4. Today's measurements would have Bird @ 6'11...

 

If it was such a "great" adjustment, and a birth of a new innovation, why did the team immediately abandon the concept the following year (and eventually deemed Horry non-essential when compared to an over-the-hill "traditional" 4 the year after that)?

Elie being put in the starting lineup (and Horry thus moving to the 4) was a total last-second desperation move that worked great for that particular team... but the Rockets really never used that starting lineup again following the championship.

 

because that previous owner loved stars. oh wait.

 

Never Underestimate the heart of a champion. ..

 

He also played PF for a significant portion of his career when the Cs brought McHale off the bench and started Cornbread Maxwell at the 3. That said, back then it wasn't a given that guards and wings could shoot threes, and teams didn't take advantage of that potential spacing in a particularly intelligent way.

Rudy was definitely ahead of his time, I mean he tried it again (albeit to less success) with Eddie.

 

Not true. The most 3's Bird attempted in a season is 233, and didn't attempt more than 77 of them in 4 out of his first 5 seasons in the league. Bird could stretch the flour, but he seldom stood at the 3 point line waiting for the ball like Horry. Bird would post up more than jack up a 3's.

 

BTW, Bullard was technically our first stretch 4. He was a power forward that pretty much only shot 3's.

 

Tom Chambers, stretch 4

Manute Bol, stretch 5? haha

 

Just going by my own recollection of those years, I think there is a bit of revisionist history going on here. I don't recall Horry being a particular dangerous 3 pt shooter early in his career - certainly not like he was later in his career. He was also a bit on the small side for the 4 at that point in his career which is okay when your playing Barkley but not the average 4 at the time. Now Rob certainly turned into that classic stretch 4 but I remember him much more as a slasher when Hakeem was in the post or a guy who could take his man off the dribble on a closeout and dunk with authority - again stuff that changed later in his career.

 

You forgot he hit like every 3 pointer in the 95 playoff run?

 

7 Rings, and he was a significant part of all of those championship winning teams. He wasn't somebody at the end of the bench, who only played during garbage time. He contributed in many ways. IMO, I would easily take Horry over anybody else in NBA history (specifically in a "clutch shot" situation), including over Michael, Kobe, and Reggie. He earned the name "Big Shot Bob".

 

I think your memory has failed you. Horry hit 34 and 44 three pointers in our championship seasons which are the highest marks of his career. He shot them at a 38 and 40 percent clip. In other words, if we had a young Horry on this team, we would wreck the league.

People tend to forget how good he was defensively when he cared. He averaged 1.2 blocks and 1.5 steals in the playoffs for us.

 

I thought playing Horry at the 4 was strictly out of necessity: Carl Herrera was expected to be the starting PF after Otis Thorpe was traded away, but Carl never recovered that year from his repeated shoulder separations over the past few seasons.

Now, we had Chucky Brown and Charles Jones in the front-court rotation—and they turned out to be invaluable off the bench—but our opponents were pretty stocked at PF: Malone, Barkley, Rodman, Horace Grant. So, in a sense, we really had no choice but to shift Horry to the 4.

That shift really didn't stick until the Phoenix series. It turned out that even though Robert was undersized in terms of bulk (220 lbs at the time), his length frustrated Barkley. And not only did he provide perimeter shooting and spacing on offense, he was pretty valuable as a weak-side shot blocker.

So yes, credit goes to Rudy T for going—as he often did—with his hunches, and Horry for rising to the occasion. But some credit had to go to Thorpe and Herrera: the former for getting traded away, and the latter for getting injured.