I couldn't find a good thread to fit this TL;DR post into, so I'll just let it fade into the night in an entirely new thread: Watching the Rockets play in the preseason and reading some of the predictions from the national pundits, I think it's a good time to check our rose-colored glasses at the door and really get a good assessment of what our team is headed for this year. The first obvious thing to me is that, on offense, we clearly have a better gameplan than last year. Our initial half court sets might start out the same as last year, but we execute the secondary and tertiary plays much better. If a team takes away our initial PnR, we are instantly ready to run an alternate PnR between the two guys it's most convenient to do it for. This even got to the point that we've seen KJ and Ryno PnR's. Last year there were no secondary plays. Everything just broke down after the first play was defended, and Harden was left to his own devices to do whatever he wanted in a 1 on 1, iso situation as a last resort. Nevertheless, I would not want you to believe that our team is all of a sudden an "elite" offense. Last year for all our struggles, we still avged about 22 assists a game. This preseason, take a look at our totals. At best we will be 2-3 assists above this number. It's a big jump from year to year, but the other important thing you have to realize is that it's only a few people doing the assisting. Look at the box scores this preseason and you'll see only three guys capable of getting 3+ assists in any game: Harden, Gordon, and Ennis. The rest of the guys are all three outcome players once they receive the pass: score, brick, or turnover. This includes Beverley who not surprisingly has never learned court vision during his entire tenure in the NBA. The Rockets will not be as good as d'Antoni's Suns. Those teams had triple threats at both SF in Marion and at the pivot in Amare. Teams could not focus on Steve Nash because Marion and Amare could also create shots off the dribble OR dish it out to an open man. This team would be like the Suns if you surrounded Steve Nash with Kurt Thomas and three Jason Richardsons. If you want to watch an elite offense, go look at what the Warriors did to the Lakers Wednesday night. It's not about the final score: look at their assists distribution. EVERYONE in the starting lineup had 4-8 assists. 34 total. Sure they only shot 48% and won by 12; but it was clear they were executing their style without any resistance from the opposition whatsoever. After fifty years of coaches wracking their brains training to get a leg up on one another, Greg Popovich and Steve Kerr have figured out how to be more efficient on offense than any other teams in history. They're on a different level. These Rockets are James Harden collecting stats and little else. When the good teams try to shut him down, they'll do it, and we'll be laughably unable to adapt. Now, that's still good enough to beat the bad teams, and I think 46 is a pretty healthy number for expected wins baking in some injuries here and there. To arrive at the Vegas total of 41, you're pretty much assuming season ending injuries to both Gordon and Anderson. So maybe in that sense we can still maintain our rose-colored glasses (read: red goggles) with a sense of evenhandedness.
45-47 wins but i disagree with the caption. I don't think we will have a significant injury. Maybe multiple guys only play like 72 games, but it's scattered and doesn't really cause a problem. I say 47 wins because our offense will be top 10, but our defense will be bottom 15 which is good enough to be over .500 but not good enough to be .600.
I think we've got 55 plus in us. I'd be more cautious about the playoffs, but we were a decent team last year (aka made the playoffs in the west) and everything I've seen tells me we're better. The cancer has left the locker room. All I worry about is Ariza buying in.
We'll be good enough for 45-50 wins during the regular season... then our evident weaknesses will be fully exposed in the playoffs....
It will all come down to defense and injuries. I am bullish on our defense, as I firmly believe last year was an anomaly. If we can be literally average on defense and top 3 offense then I like our chances to do a little a damage.
50+ More than 50 depends on who Morey brings in by trade deadline. Even if MDA surrounds Harden with D specialists, D will still not be the focus. I love D but this the way for this team to win as long as Harden is the centerpiece. And I for one am looking forward to the ride. Let er rip Rockets!!!
rockets offense this Rockets offense has hardly been all Harden about stats so far under MDA. do you even watch these games?
I know the offense is more sophisticated and better coached this year. All I'm saying is that, at our core, we're still overly reliant on Harden. If you shut him down, there's not enough of an infrastructure in place to win in spite of that. We're pretty much cooked. And that's not on MDA, that's probably on Harden. You can tell it in his body language when he is having a bad night and his shots aren't going in. It just seems to me that Harden is cool with the mentality that, if the Rockets don't win through him, then the Rockets won't win period. No elite offense works like that. Anderson fits this scheme to a T, and Gordon is one of the best secondary scorers off the dribble we've had since Cassell. But the offense isn't set up where you can take James out of the equation and then have one of these other guys take over the responsibility of orchestrating it to a level where you can win a majority of nights in the NBA. So you'll see good teams doing this all year. Double James early. Get the ball out of his hands. Push him around, knock his hands on shots and hope for no-calls from the refs. Eventually if James gets frustrated enough, he'll just call it a night, take his ball and go home. And the Rockets will be toast. End of story. No different than last year, MDA be damned.
Harden needed pieces around him that can shoot the ball. If Capella averages a double double , we are winning 50 plus.
The only people that don't think the Rockets will (at the very least) win at least 50 wins are the national media types that specialize in bashing Rockets and repeating whatever narrative happens to be in vogue at the time, or those media types that are afraid of saying what they really think for fear of being ridiculed by the former. Taking off your Rockets Red Colored Classes doesn't mean giving in to the insane crazy national media types and adopting their narrative. My suggestion is to find the episode of Locked on Rockets where Ben (The Cat) DuBose interviews David Lock. For those that don't know who David Lock is, he is the voice of the Utah Jazz and the guy that started the Locked On podcasts. I first heard the guy a few years ago on an episode of Rockets Cast with Craig Ackerman. One of Davids strengths is "statistical analysis". Point being is that he has absolutely zero bias towards the Rockets but lays down a statistical analysis of the team as is and concluded the Rockets would be a +50 win team and one of the best in the league. There have been a few other media types outside of Houston that did an honest statistical analysis and came to similar conclusions as David. For those national media types that bash the Rockets they always point towards last season and the Rockets lack of defense last season as their iron clad, bullet proof reason that the Rockets will be an 8th seed at best (if they even make the play-offs). All of those same talking heads conveniently ignore the fact that a team with James Harden has never missed the play-offs. Additionally, the Rockets looked like a disorganized team with no direction coming out of the preseason last year. This pre-season the Rockets have looked a 100 times better than last pre-season and look like the team that David Locke described in his interview on "Locked on Rockets". Personally I have the Rockets at 55+ and challenging for the Southwest Division Crown with a top 4 seed in the play-offs.
Why pump the brakes? This is like spring training in baseball. Hope springs eternal. Everyone is 0-0 and everyone has a chance. Let's save the brake pumping if we come out of the gates like last year. Until then, we're going to win 74 games and stomp GSW on our way to the finals. It's probably the time of year we can hope for that.
We can make 50 wins but it'll be hard. I can't expect Anderson, Beverly, Nene and Gordon to play over 65 games each, it just won't happen if you look at the history of the players. D'antoni offense is 8-9 man rotation with 4 questionable/older/unathletic players. Having said that, Harden is that good that he can be a one man offense. So I take last year + better defense (I see improvement in that aspect, top 15 in the leauge)+ some 40-50 games when most players are healthy, and we can squeeze 50 wins. Barely