I think it's easy to find guys who shoot above average who don't really play D and I think that's my point. Why get guys who are athletic but below average shooters and below average defensively why not get cheap guys like Terry who are OK defensively but above average three point shooters that would fit our style more. Morey had guys like this but likes to let them go. Patterson, Canaan, Covington, Daniels, Scola etc all those guys would be perfect with Harden and we would have near top offense in the league so our defense wouldnt matter as much and those guys are cheap. This would be an easy solution until Morey found others all stars or two way players to put with Harden and we would win until we improved. We were headed in the right Direction I think Morey messed up after getting Dwight.
Focusing on outscoring our way to the Championship is as good of an idea as a fat dude planning to lose weight by eating as much as they want but working out enough to make up for it. Our offense is good enough to not be the concern - our defense sucks terribly. No more posts about bringing in Steve Novak's to solve our problems. Terrible idea.
Huh? Terry is OK defensively? Ariza is below average defensively? I'm pretty sure Morey would not agree with this. How so? And be as detailed as possible...
Do you have any clue how good the Rockets have been on offensive despite "not having the personnel to match the style"? We aren't the Warriors.... but no team has been this good except one regular season team... We have been good, not great, offensively.
Yeah Im well aware of how they are and it's mostly Harden what you are missing is that you put better shooters in the roles that poor shooters are in and we will win most games even without the D. You probably won't win a chip but it would be fun to watch and not a total disaster like this season has been.
Out of all of the people we have you pick one of the very few defensive guys to make your point, lol. Yes Ariza is fine he does get lazy now and then but overall he's fine. As I said the BELOW AVERAGE guys.
Not the same thing at all. If you read what Kerr says then you'd noticed he stated he put a foundation in place, a system, a style, a vision. This means certain key plays and some basic rules of how you want the guys to play. Once you've established that and have a group of high IQ guys who truly understand, they can improvise off of that. They have guys who are skilled enough and understand the team concept. Even with Curry as the highest scorer and crazy nights, he's far from selfish. Our foundation is shaky at best and our players lack serious IQ and skills so we improvise and run some plays, but not off of a good foundation so that even if you improvise, guys will notice it and work with you. We've seen this team try to go beyond our simplistic style and it goes horrible wrong every time. We cannot even throw a simple pass into Dwight, let alone come up with something on the move that the others will get. Also, we do not have the team concept down. Harden for all his unselfishness is forced to be selfish and Dwight wants his touches. It's not just running plays, but with a lack of a good foundation even if we run a play it's not very successful and some great plays that we could run, we don't because Howard and others are not committed enough or just might not believe it's the best for the team and himself. That is a coaching problem and not J.B.'s but McHale's. In particular this off-season he said he didn't know what to do with this group with all the injuries. It was then no surprise that he 'lost' the guys. He didn't establish a foundation they trusted in or players refused to believe in it for whatever reasons.
Being able to play read react requires even more drilling than learning to run plays, and requires players being together for a while. The Rockets just practice how to get the ball across mid court, give it to Harden, and react off him. If you think it's the same with Curry, you don't know basketball.
Read and react is an offensive system. It's not really about running plays but about running a scheme. That said, the OP's overall point is right. It takes a group of smart players to run that kind of offense. Intelligence is the most underrated talent in the NBA. (See my sig.) And it takes time to get it right. Adelman's offense took a whole season to gel. Actually the Rockets run a kind of scheme too. It's a Harden-heavy offense, which is kind of predictable. Harden is good enough an offensive player to carry that. We actually don't have a lot of trouble scoring. It's the defense that sucks. And defensive cohesion also takes intelligence, BTW.
Warriors have the right mix of players and coaching staff that allows them to play that way and be very very successful at that. In fact Coach Kerr has evaluated the strength of his players and enabled the Warriors to play that way. Rockets have a system of play dictated by the fat geek Mauri who has never seen a gym or played one minute of competitive basketball who goes ahead and assembles a roster full of mediocre 3 point shooters while asking them to take jack up 3 after 3
The Warriors simply have better players, and hat is why Steph looks so fantastic. Find the right guys to surround Harden with and he will be the same.
In other words blow it up! We do not have the personnel for the R&R offense. Seems we have guys who would benefit more from a motion offense.( opinion) time for a new scheme in 2016/17.
Then b*ch about coaches not running practices right, not "the lack of plays". Dang, same old cr*p gets recycled on here all the time. "We need Adelman and all of his set plays." What were Rudy T's plays? Dump the ball into Hakeem and have everyone else provide spacing. Sound familiar? Now, we dump the ball into Harden and let everyone else create spacing. During the later Adelman years, posters here were whining cuz we didn't have a player who could iso late in games. Let's just hold off on offense talk until we are in the upper half of the league on defense.
The Rockets need structure. Plays don't railroad you into one or two options; they are sets that can allow players to run through multiple options and pick the highest one at each juncture while giving direction to the other players off the ball. We have so little movement off the ball because apparently read and react only involves half the offense at any given time. While smarter players might make read and react better, there is an element of playground amateurishness to our offense because we have few structured plays.
A few games back Harden was doing more off the ball and was pretty efficient. He's been giving up the ball more, but he usually just gives it up and post up at top of the key to get it back. In that game (I believe it was against TOR) he was much more active and efficient. He should definitely do more off ball action it would make things easier for him offensively and not allow teams to focus on him as easily.
He looked good off the ball. He needs to have that dimension to his game because teams can slack off him and crowd the paint when poor passers like Dwight get the ball, since they know Harden is often just standing around.
Like Kerr says in the article, they borrow from several systems. Definitely some read and react, and that Bogut high post he mentions is one of my favorites (ala Ramsey and Walton). Green will run it, too. That said, the vast majority of their "plays" and "improvisation" is early offense in transition. I like to go to nba.com after games and watch all Curry's field goal attempts. Nearly all his 3pt attempts are early offense, if not straight from a fastbreak. They run a lot of early picks for Curry, just like we do for Harden. The read and reacts sets seem to occur mostly when the game has been slowed down, not improvised out of early offense. I find the word improvisation and "no plays" (as in the OP title) weird word choices for read and react offenses. It's really the improvisation in the early offense that sets them apart. If you don't slow that down, you are toast...like 20 to 30 pt deficit toast.
