Wayne Winston: Rockets won't be among most improved teams

I have pretty much dismissed any issues with defense of all of our players. Harden had the excuse of expending too much energy on offense. Lin was not fully healthy. Parsons was expanding his offensive game and ran the court. Everyone's new to each other and had no chemistry, etc. etc. etc.

But I am definitely watching everyone's defense this year. There's no excuse for any player. Howard and Asik have each other so neither should be taking plays off. Our perimeter players have the best interior defense behind them to take off pressure. Lin's healthy. Harden no longer has to be the man. DMo/Jones have a year to get better. This year the Rockets defense need to be excellent. Top 10 at least, if not top 5. If someone's sucking on defense, then it's their own damn fault.

 

Absolutely.

 

Good post. Just a few comments. Parsons and Lin were talked about as defensive players when they first started gaining their reputations. But once given other roles, their D took a slight dip. I think this may very well be a common trend. Still, I believe both their D and especially their potential on D is really good. Individually, all our boys have the potential to be excellent defensively. I truly believe that. In fact, last year, I thought our defense looked really good at times and each player looked above average in terms of defense. It's just that our pace was crazy and it's hard to pay attention to detail when things are going so fast. If we slow down and focus, especially with the addition of Howard, look out NBA, you're officially on notice.

 

Sure but generally speaking, the more question marks you have the tougher,and some are weighted more than others. My point is that it's legit to say we aren't elite. I mean, nothing wrong with that. Who cares if we aren't?

We'll find out what we are regardless anyway.

 

I am a huge supporter of stats, but I am not impressed by winston. He published a book a couple years ago and it had a lot of models that were not realistic. His basic approach was based on regression models which tend to consider average stats. Morey's approaches are more strategic, based on specific plays. Regression approaches like PER were fine in the early days but are now out of date. Winston may be able to adapt but game theory, rather than statistics (Winston's specialty) is more relevant now.

 

I agree with you 100% meh.

 

Point taking pimpn and I agree.

Ole buddy IMO was way off. Reason being he prompt those teams up and tried to use the if such n such stays healthy then they will do this and that..

Well that can be said about the Rockets as well. If Howard stays healthy along with others of course. We could win 7-10 extra games putting us around 51-54 wins this season.


But hey like you stated it doesnt matter.

Time will tell in, what 20 days.

 

Yeah, we will. Hey, if all these pundits were right all the time, then the season would be very boring anyway.

Frankly, for me, the biggest question mark is whether or not we get sound play at the 4 and if we can play defense as a team. Those are two big massive question marks. If we deal with them, we'll be fine.

 

How does one give props/rec to a post? This one definitely deserves some points. Defense was so atrocious last year without Omer on the court. Defense might not be the first thing fans want to watch, but when it is completely missing, boy do you really do miss it then.