[ClutchFans] Hey, Remember when Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik were on the Rockets?

I don't think it's going to take two first round picks to dump Lin. His contract is bad, but it's not that bad.

 

You make a legitimate point. But you have to keep that in perspective. IF we had slid past Portland we would have been trompled in the second round just as Portland was by the same Spurs machine.

You have to understand the games. You have to watch the games. You have to understand what triggers what. Offense does effect defense.


There's a little column over to the right on the stat sheet. It's labeled turnovers. The more turnovers a team has the more runouts their opponents get. The more runouts an opponent gets the better the scoring opportunities are for the opponent. The better the scoring opportunities of the opponent are converted to points at a much greater rate. Which means your defense takes a hit.

Now......our team turned the ball over more times than any other team in the league except the Philadelphia 76ers. Even adjusted for pace we turned the ball over at a greater rate than every team besides the Sixers.

There are 2 possible solutions here:

1. More efficient offense
2. Steal the ball back and even out the turnover count.


I'll leave you to surmise which of those two things is easiest to do. Especially in the playoffs...when we are going against teams like the Spurs and the Clippers and the Trailblazers and the Grizzlies.

If we fix our turnover issues...we will elevate our defense another couple notches automatically.

Our turnovers are a result of a lack of offensive spacing and Harden (and Lin) having to force things too much. Our offense needs spacing in the worst way so Harden can roam, get his turnover count down and can create more catch and shoot 3-point shots by great 3-point shooters.

If we fix this issue, not only will our offense become even more efficient but the cut down in the turnovers will help the defense. THEN you can go get you a nice 3&D defender off the bench and add him to the mix.

Priorities matter.

 

See the post right above.

 

He is a pretty useful player when he is on, despite all his faults. Which team with cap room, will want him is my question?

 

Actually it seems like our offense struggles too in the playoffs when looking for a needed basket lol

 

Talent has a much longer, better, more proven track record than chemistry. And Asik quit on the team last year, so I'm not sure how keeping him helps chemistry in anyway.

 

We only need those baskets because we couldn't stop anyone. If we had held Portland to just 2 less points per game in that series, we'd have won comfortably and never "needed a basket."

 

Oh.....and then we would've gotten totally plowed by the San Antonio Spurs...a beautiful machine of offensive execution.

 

We lack the ability to create offense, in general. It's not just defense, and lack of ball movement that doomed us to failure. Even if we had gotten past Portland, we would have stumbled in the 2nd round.

 

They would improve our defense because they would let Howard and Harden to concentrate more on defense.

Honestly, the Rockets system is designed for 4-5 players on the floor that can pass and shoot and the Rockets did not have that last year.

 

Yes. The Spurs and their amazing execution had an offensive efficiency of 113 against the Blazers. The Rockets horrendous, worthless offense put up an efficiency of 115 against those same Blazers.

But yes, clearly the issue is our offense and not defense.

 

And there is a little thing called defense of which we played none.

By the way:

Game 1 - Rockets and Blazers both had 12 Turnovers
Game 2 - Rockets and Blazers both had 14 Turnovers
Game 3 - Rockets had 8 turnovers and Blazers 10 turnovers
Game 4 - Rockets had 16 turnovers and Blazers 11 Turnovers
Game 5 - Rockets had 12 Turnovers and Blazers 10 Turnovers
Game 6 - Rockets had 15 Turnovers and Blazers had 12 Turnovers

Turnovers were a huge issue in the regular season but The Rockets really good at protecting the ball in all but 2 of the 6 play-off games. In the 1st two games which were both losses, the Rockets and Blazers both had the same amount of turnovers. The Rockets only averaged 13 turnovers a game in that series, I'll take that any day of the week.

Unfortunately the defense only created 11.5 turnovers a game in the series and that is a real problem.

 

Not true. It did hurt our defense that Beverley was dinged. Torn meniscus and playing with a 103 degree temperature most of the time. So...our defense wasn't that bad considering those factors. Even throughout the season...if you take out points for turnovers and just look at half-court set defense..we weren't bad at all. Yeah we can all point to the obvious dearth of defensive intensity from Harden. Yack yack yack. But what is forgotten is we had 2 elite defensive bigs in the paint. You have Asik healthy and not b****ing and playing his role and we would have likely been way inside the top 10 defensively instead of "falling" to #11 in defense.

We need a good, good backup center to Howard that will come in, control the paint and the glass when Howard sits....and we need to spread the floor the rest of the time and get more efficient 3-point shots from dead eye shooters.

Like I said...analyze our turnovers. If we fix our turnover problem we will fix a lot of our defensive problems. We were in transition defense at a man or more disadvantage on way too many defensive possessions last year. You eliminate those defensive possessions where we are outmanned and you've got something. Add a 3&D off the bench after we've got the offense stroking it and you've really got something.

 

Game 1 - Rockets and Blazers both had 12 Turnovers
Game 2 - Rockets and Blazers both had 14 Turnovers
Game 3 - Rockets had 8 turnovers and Blazers 10 turnovers
Game 4 - Rockets had 16 turnovers and Blazers 11 Turnovers
Game 5 - Rockets had 12 Turnovers and Blazers 10 Turnovers
Game 6 - Rockets had 15 Turnovers and Blazers had 12 Turnovers

Turnovers were a huge issue in the regular season but The Rockets really good at protecting the ball in all but 2 of the 6 play-off games. In the 1st two games which were both losses, the Rockets and Blazers both had the same amount of turnovers. The Rockets only averaged 13 turnovers a game in that series, I'll take that any day of the week.

Unfortunately the defense only created 11.5 turnovers a game in the series and that is a real problem.

The Rockets defense was exceptionally bad in that series and there is zero excuse for it.

 

I won't lie and say our offense is a thing of beauty. Run-and-gun sticky ball got exposed. There's no structure and no real plan. It's like each of our players was foreign-born and McHale's instructions to each:

"Chandler. JACK THREES. OR GIVE BALL TO DWIGHT."

"James. FLAIL ARMS. JACK THREES. NO STICKY."

"Jeremy. BRING GATORADE."

"Omer. DON'T SHOOT."

But even Morey said it when asked, What's the main thing we need to fix on this team? Defense.

 

Not making excuses for it.

We are discussing making this team a championship contender. The path to take is to get a third superstar that will make our offense elite in the half-court. And then after we do that we can add value 3&D players to shore up the perimeter D and a backup C to control the paint and glass when Howard sits.



If you want to get into the anal minutia of the Portland series, here's some facts:

We outscored Portland by 2 points for the series. 672-670. That's a 1% difference.

We out-turnovered Portland 77-69 in that series. That's an 11% difference.


Now, that was against Portland. GUESS which team was the absolute worst team in the league at creating defensive turnovers last season. Go ahead. Take a wild guess.

.......It was ........... the Portland Trailblazers.


We were playing the most vanilla defense in the whole league in RD 1 of the playoffs, crash, in terms of creating turnovers. Portland doesn't create turnovers. They were EVEN WORSE THAN US at creating defensive turnovers. Do you understand that? Our defense created more turnovers (and I'm talking about more turnovers per 100 possessions) than their defense created.

So, simple logic states that Portland should have had more turnovers than us if it was about defense creating turnovers. But that's not what it's about.

Portland's defense is designed to contest shots. They play tight on the perimeter and then they've got length in the paint. They're #6 in defensive .eFg%. And that's what they did to us the whole series. And we still out-turnovered them.

Why?

Because we lacked floor spacing. Our half-court offense played right into their strength. forcing us to come off the 3-point line and drive right into their size in the paint.


Spacing....the #1 need on this team. It will make the offense elite. It will increase our shooting percentages at the rim as Howard and Harden will get way more room to operate. And obviously our shooting percentages at the 3-point line will increase. And our turnovers will go down drastically since we don't have to try to force the drive all the time. And....and......and......and the defense will improve as we won't have Beverley and Parsons trying to get back and defend 3 on 2's so much.

 

You need to go outside and get some fresh air.

 

You cared enough to reply.

Dreadful? In the one game in which we won by 10 points, who was the second highest scorer?

 

I am outside. It's lunchtime. I'm sitting on a patio with my asus pad.

 

I feel like there is structure. It's just that we didn't have the right pieces around Harden, Howard, and Parsons this year.

I pounded on all season that the lack of shooting at the 4 spot was eventually going to kill us down the road. All you have to do is extract all the data from playoff teams and analyze it and you will find that we are basically a middle of the road playoff team.

You have to realize that looking at regular season data you might as well eliminate the data generated from games against lottery teams. Those games simply don't matter when it comes to determining if we are a contender. What matters is how we play against the other playoff championship contenders. If you watched those games, the holes were obvious.

And then you have to remember that championship level teams don't show all their cards in the regular season...especially against other teams that are perceived to be championship level teams. But guys like Pops probe the opponent with all sorts of matchups, looking for what works, then tucking that away in a lot of cases for the playoffs. He knows his team is good enough to win 55-60 games anyways and it's best not to let the opponent know how you are going to dissect them come playoff time. But the data is still there and if you watch the games and analyze the home team properly and refuse to simply gawk at a stat sheet and see that _ones had 18 and 11 and think all is well then you could see very easily what was going to happen to us in playoff time.

No spacing. Giving guys the jump shot that don't want to take it or letting them drive right into the heart of the paint where there are 3 or 4 defenders waiting for them. This team's Achilles heal was exposed over and over before we got to the Portland series. And that series became basically a toss-up until Bev got dinged and sick.


So...keep saying we need more defense, more defense, more defense. Because that is right. But the solution to more defense is not go pay Kyle Lowry and Thabo Sefalosha a combined $16-18 million per season and close up our cap room. The solution is to pay a $15-20 million to a 3rd elite offensive weapon that can flat hammer the 3-ball and can get 20-40 efficiently on any given night...and then to pay the Sefalosha's and Chris Andersen's of the world $2-$5 million to bring the heavy D.

That is....unless a player of Chris Bosh's stature comes along that can bring the heavy D and can also knock down 20-40 for you on any given night starting with an elite outside shooting game. And folks...that is why I have said from the get-go that Chris Bosh was the best fit at the 4 for us. But he's probably not going to come.