Can you imagine Mills fouling Isiah Thomas of the '89 Pistons like that? Australia would have been receiving their favorite son in a body bag. I do wish the Rockets had a true enforcer, even though they are banned in today's NBA.
1) The Spurs mentally own us in close games 2) Iso-ball 3) D'Antoni doesn't understand the value of a timeout
The most I'm po'd is MVP Spurs sat the whole OT and still lost. I'm most po'd is that MVP Spurs may not play game 6, will likely play game 7 if needed. If we won this game, he would be playing game 6 not as healthy. Yeah, I'm pissed we let MVP Rockets let MVP Spurs a few days off.
I think everyone here would've put a signing to have these refs before the game seeing how they turned out, i was the first to be a bit scared by Zarba but in the end, all things considered they weren't that bad. In game 2 and 3 they were much worse, they probably dictated the pace too in both of those games, not tonight. The reality is that we had the W and we just throw it away.
This. The awful no-calls on every Spur reach-in has given them motivation to try it even more. Harden's wrists must be really sore from all the wrap-around slaps that get all skin and result in official TO's.
It's bothersome that all his MVP swag was given to Simmons and Simmons could hack and foul without getting any calls Even got a ridiculous Offensive foul call on Harden by flopping Rocket River
Besides hero ball, we should have pulled the game away in the 3rd quarter had we put little more effort on defense and rebounding.
The energy from our guys went down way before OT . Harden looked dead the entire second half ( not that playing more men would've helped THAT ) But we had a chance to pull away both in the 3rd and in the fourth and neither time could we stay aggressive with the pace or with effort on the glass.
Lots of sketch fouls/calls against Houston but the MDA needs to let Lou and EGo (or even Ryno) run the offense when Harden is gassed. We dusted a ton of important possessions due to observable sloppiness. Lou should have been in there quickly during the OT, even for Harden if he was that gassed.
7 man rotation is fine. Throw in Dekker or Harrell for 2 min if you have to here and there and see what shakes. Bottom line is we lost a game we were supposed to lose most of the time in a depressing fashion, but this team has been playing quite well. Just can't play exhausted players if that's the case.
Flopping by Simmons is painful obvious, it is also painful obvious Harden was played by Simmons. Simmons forced Harden to chuck all those 3s towards the end, so MVP Rockets got played. Pop behind his eyes is laughing because, he controlled Harden by playing a player who will bend the rules.
That's been my argument--complete flop. I hope the Rockets pursue this with the league. To make a call like that with 30 seconds to go in a tie game? He threw himself across the floor, it was insane
Can't point to just one thing. As bad as officiating was through the game, they missed calls that would have favored the Spurs too. 7-man rotation had the team fatigued. Especially having to play in OT. Harden was clearly fatigued, then settled for ISO ball. Rest of the team just stood around watching. Harden TO's off the PnR were inexcusable. However, Rockets defense was absolutely lock down for most of the night. If they would have made a couple more buckets off Spurs misses, we'd be speaking a different tune this morning.
Officiating was ridiculous, but we got to overtime and that problem was basically gone. (Think there was on bad call in overtime?) The reason we lost is easy. Harden threw the game away at the end of the 4th and overtime. You had people in the game thread wondering if he was throwing the game on purpose. Obviously a ridiculous question, but that is how egregious some of the turnovers were and the dribbling out the shot clock 3 point attempts. It was truly pathetic.
I pick all of the above with a dash of "Gordon and Anderson missing 4 straight early FTs".... just sayin'
