I am glad rockets are chillin and saving the best for the playoffs. i would rather be 8th seed and beverley, anderson, gordon and others be healthy and well rested than 1st seed and beverley being injured coming playoffs time I have seen enough, we have offense no 1 in the league, great coach, great leader(s), vets, great shooters . We even proved in december and even later on we can play top 5-10 defense. All we need is health and bring me the playoffs. I am fearing no one. Warriors are depleted lacking bogut, barbosa , speights , ezeli barnes durant. We are better than the spurs(we almost beat them 3 times) and they proved they are vulnerable in playoffs 2 years in row now. In finals vs lebron, what happens happens.
If we start resting Harden more, Westbrook will break his TO record -- only 25 behind now. That would be interesting, if for nothing else just to see if ESPN sends out a tweet announcing it.
Seeding is important since you want to wait until the WCF finals to face Golden State. Assuming GS gets the 1 seed, Houston is done after two rounds, at best, if they get the 4 or 5 seed. Houston cannot beat Golden State in a 7 game series... sorry.
perhaps it will be easier to beat gsw in the first round before durant come back or is fully healed and integrated..in case he returns for po
D'antoni doesn't believe in resting his players (said so in recent interview). If they are good to go, he'll play them a lot of minutes, even in blowouts (like we've seen before). It seems every time we have to play a lot of lock-down defense, our injury prone players break down. This will be a problem in a 7 game series against Memphis/Spurs in the play-offs.
Yeah, what's important is that we get our groove back. If we're playing in April and May like we did in December, we can make some noise in the playoffs.
The Warriors look like a very pedestrian team without Durant. I'm not scared of Golden State (without KD). The Rockets can beat them if our shots are falling. In fact, the Rockets can beat anybody when our shots are falling.
So let's just hope we have "shots falling games" 57.14285714285714% of the time so we can take a 7 game series 4-3.
We're honestly very close to that mark on the season. At least if you use the 15+ 3's-in-a-game stat as a barometer.
What's your definition of shots falling? We won @GS shooting <32 3PT% and @SA <36%. A high % isn't necessary... they just can't shoot terribly.
It has to be coupled with a certain energy / intensity level. None of this lazy passing, lack of box outs, and lack of ball movement that happens for long stretches.