"The question is how do we do so without stifling the overall offense*." *Meant to say offense there, not defense. "How" is one of the questions, but not the only one. I am not believer in you have to get a certain player the ball regardless of what the defense is doing.
You had me until here. I was saying yeah you tellem noob and then and start talking all stupid. DO you not get if any team wants to take Yao out of the game they will be able too. He is not uunstoppable like Hakeem. He is very good but he can be stopped. ANd if some team stops him it is up to the rest of the team to step up and exploit there weaknesses. The Rockets failed on Tuesday.
normally, i am not either. but you have to consider we have a 21mils hole on the roster right now. like i said, we are the only team in the west among playoff teams that doesn't have a reliable 2nd option. and i didn't mean give yao the ball "no matter what". like adelman said, there's a fine line here. but game 2 the effort to try to get yao the ball was not acceptable imo, especially in the last 5 minutes or so when all their bigs could foul foul out any second. you know what i'm saying...
Not for every possession, but it has to be a top priority in a game. Game 2 is a very good proof. Rockets shot 50% but still lost. The fronting and doubling of Yao opened up a lot for other players, and AB/Wafer/Scola did take some advantage of that. But exactly that is a very alarming sign. Why? Because Rockets couldn't make Blazers pay enough to win, by doubling Yao. 50% in playoff, how much better do you expect Rockets as a team to shoot? It's a solid proof, that if we give up our most lethal offensive option in Yao, and expect everyone else to beat opponents, is not a winning formula. You can't say others played bad in game 2, they didn't play great. If your role players don't all play great at the same time you can't win a game, your game plan is questionable. Look at it this way, in the Dallas series or the first Utah series, if our role players contributed even just remotely close to current role players did in game 2, we would have passed the first round long time ago. If we got Yao 20 shots without turnovers, we did a great job going through him. If we get Yao 12 shots with 2 or 3 turnovers, we did a good job involving him. But if we get Yao 6 shots, WITHOUT SINGLE turnover, we failed miserably involving him, because we never tried.
in general, it is the true you can draw a connection btw # of shots yao attempted and # of wins rox got but no ppl really dig deep into game stats and figured out why. take a close look at those losses. noramlly, other rox players shot low %. they jacked up bricks in those losses. on the surface, those losses give you an impression the connection you mentioned. however, there are two cases in those losses when yao didn't have enough shots. in the first case, they did ignore yao even yao's defender played a traditional way on yao (defending yao behind him). they just took tough shots and shot a low % fg. In the other case, other team determined to deny yao the ball and didn't care whether other rox players beat them or not. well, our players didn't know how to explore the weakness and still took tough shots as you can expect the %fg was low too. the last game is a total different story. rox players shot high % fg. the loss is mainly coz we allowed other team to scored more. if you keep saying lack of shots yao tries is the key to the last loss, we can imagine what it would happen if yao had taken more shots. we can assume yao shot at around 50% (don't use the first game to justify yao can make 80 or 90%). since yao took a certain # of more shots. it means someone else took a certain # of less shots. however, the total pts should be similar no matter whether yao took or other players took based on % in the last game. how could you expect rox would win when rox scored around 100 pts while jailblazers scored almost 110 pts? (in reality, we should not count brooks last a couple 3s. those were desperated shots. in normal case, you won't do it). it demonstrates we would have lost either way whether yao had taken more or not.
i can see where you come from. it's not necessarily the number of shots yao gets, it's the touches and involvement in offense. i think i've addressed the shooting % in my other posts.
50% is great in the playoff. it should be able to win for you if you play defense. if you don't play defense, it doesn't matter whether yao shots millions of times, we are still going to lose games. just like the last game, you can give other players attempts to yao, does it make difference on rox total pts? it won't coz they were making shots at around same %. you don't see TOs coz rox players know forcing the ball to yao could very well lead to TOs. instead forcing the issue, why just spend time to explore the weakness of their defense and punish them. we did pretty good based on fg %. however, we allowed them to shoot at over 50%. it was terrible in playoff if you try to advance to next round.
It's a good analysis, but I beg to differ. I think last game was a very good indication of why we have to get Yao involved more offensively. Like you said, we shot 50% we still lost, by moving away from Yao freely or forced to. Although Yao is only going to shoot at around 55%, his offensive involvement brings more intangibles to the game. We don't expect the rest of the Rockets to shoot much better than 50%, but that doesn't mean we cannot win games any more. Blazers' bigs were in deep foul trouble, Yao's involvement in offense will further push that, and take advantage of that even more. Meanwhile, when Yao shoots there is less probability of long rebounds than long 3s, which leads to less fast break chances for opposing teams. If we drive more, there would also be more chance to dish to Yao or anyone else for better shots, also more chance for offensive rebounds. But long jumpers take Yao away completely. There is also another aspect of the game - Yao's offensive fouls. Remember that flop got Yao's fourth foul? If Yao has the ball in his hands, it would be less likely to be called foul offensively and more likely to put pressure on defensive players to foul. I don't have quantitative analysis to prove this, but those intangibles are pretty obvious to me. I would dare to say, that if Yao got 10 shots in game 2, and we still shot at the 50% clip, and Blazers were on fire with Roy, we might still have pulled that win out.
I think the Rockets, at this stage and with the type of personnel they have, would benefit more from an unimaginative, back-to-the-basics defense-first type coach, who is overbearing and yet understands that the best system is one that fits the team's players. I am not saying fire Adelman, I am just saying we can do better (and worse) than RA.
Exactly! They got two guys hugging on Yao all night, and those fouls just are not called. You still need to get the ball into Yao; when he gets position and to force the double teams. You just need to realize he probably won’t get his average and we need more productivity from the rest of the guys. Alot of the time he was getting open the rockets were not in position to get him the ball. Gene Hackman just needs to leave the aggressive guys in there with orders to take the ball inside, draw the fouls and make things that much harder on the Blazers. Hackman is a great coach, look what he did for the Hoosiers!
I addressed that 50% issue in another post. As for the turnover, I couldn't disagree more. It's not like Rockets never turn ball over if they don't pass to Yao. There is risk doing anything, but until you try hard, you won't find out, especially when all the risk/reward analysis is in your favor. One thing you are right, Rockets didn't force, but did they try? As Rick, AB, Shane admitted, they didn't look, or at least didn't look enough. The thought of punishing them is noble, but even at 50% clip, we couldn't punish them enough without Yao's DIRECT involvement in offense. We sacrificed defense for offense, even at 50% we couldn't win. If we have played Hayes more, and put Shane or Roy more, Blazers might not have scored that many points. But we couldn't play Hayes more due to his offensive inferiority. But if we tried with Yao more, even force a little bit in occasions, we could afford more Hayes time for better defense. It's all interrelated. There is an obvious reason that Yao is the most efficient offensive weapon for the Rockets, and he's the anchor at the defensive end. Clearly he's no where near Dream's level at both ends, or a healthy Deke's level at defense. But, he's the BEST we got. There is no reason opponents don't want to take him away while giving your other "opportunities". There is absolutely NO reason for us to give him up without a fight, aka "forcing". Like I said, 6 shots on no turnovers, we didn't even try.
i haven't re-watched game 2, but this is my problem with our offense in that game. we basically lost the game in the last 4-5 minutes, since until then it's basically a tied game. and up until then, we had attacked from the other side opposite to where yao was fairly well. we hit enough shots, drew enough fouls. but then, all their 3 bigs had 5 fouls when there were about 5 minutes left. this was a perfect time to feed yao the ball. yes, even force-feed and risking a turnover. if we did that, the reward would be enormous. there's a huge probability that we could foul all their bigs out in a matter of couple possessions and completely open the game up. instead, what did we do? ron missed a bad 3, ab and wafer shot 2 bad 3's in a row. (and ab should've known this better since he got oden out in a play attacking the rim oin a give-and-go with scola.) that's how they got the separation. ab's desperate 3's were just drama. many games, especially in the playoffs, are decided in the last stretch of the game. we did not do well for the final stretch of game 2. goes back to the same old "execution" issue.
we need yao to involve in our offense. it is undisputable. the purpose of involvement is he can draw defenders. if he just stood on one end of the court and still drew two defenders, i bet ra would have him stay over there since on the other end, you would have 4 players to attack 3 man defense. of coz, i exaggerated. it is my purpose to let ppl know involvement doesn't mean you have to touch the ball. in the last game, before yao even got the ball or potentially look for the ball, jailblazers already put one in front of him and sneaked one behind him. i call this is the involvement w/o touching the ball.
Sure, in theory, you don't need to. But in reality, if Yao Ming is not taking more shots, you end up with Ron taking more than 20 shots, or Brooks pass to Chuck for a clank. Not pretty.
no. in the late of game, we did have a TO when passing the ball to yao. yao was moving to the middle of the lane with oden behind him. i forgot who passed but yao didn't do a good job to hold oden so he poked the ball away before yao could firmly hold the ball. you have to admit oden has very long arms. it is his advantage when he defend yao in traditional ways.
if you're talking about that specific possession, the pass from artest, the timing, space, height of the pass were all terrible. i remember that play clearly.
i believe we are talking about the same possession cause this was the only failed pass. i just couldn't remember who threw the ball.
It's like RA telling players score the 2pts. The question is how? This one is on the coach. RA needs to figure out a way to have patient people on the court and be effective. This is what coach is paid to do.
