In the houston era, a few smart fans kept saying take the mid-range. The kool-aid Morey cult kept saying that's a bad shot so he would settle for stepback 3s.
Game theory stuff--the three is the best shot, but not if opposing players can sell out to defend it. Midrange is an essential part of keeping defenders honest, you just have to be careful not to overuse it.
James burst onto the scene hitting those midrange shots for OKC. He was money from there. I remember back in the day on 2k, that's how I'd use Harden too, the midrange gawd. too bad he got away from that (with Morey's influence). hope he continues it next year when he's back in Htown
I wouldn't say it was Morey's influence, but rather the fact that NO ONE could guard his step-back from 3. If you recall correctly, his step-back started from midrange and just kept moving further and further back as he built up his strength. With the range evolution of his step-back, that in turn opened a whole new world of space for drive-by's where he leveraged both his strength to blow by guards and all-around skills to make bigs look like absolute fools when ISO'd out.
It was Morey's influence and philosophy. Harden came to Houston taking a ton of those and then started eliminating them from his game because if the analytics Morey preached about. You think it is a coincidence that Matt Bullard started saying "3 is greater than 2" at least once a broadcast around that time? It was an organizational shift. The sad thing is that it made it harder than it had to be for the playoffs because the first and second shots better teams want to take from a team are layups and threes. That leaves the midrange as being the most open look. It also takes much less leg energy to shoot them compared to shooting threes. A case study of using analytics with no context.
We did have context, RGV was one of our case studies for example as well as the rising increase in 3s as well as the sharp drop in long midranges throughout the entire league.
No context meaning Morey looks at percentages and PPP for midrange as evidence for it being an inefficient shot without taking into account the players taking the shots and the situations in the playoffs that change probability. You aren't going to get the same shots in the playoffs as you do in the regular season so you have to adjust accordingly. As much as the refs screwed us in game 7 in 2018, I guarantee if half of those 27 missed threes were some easy midrange looks then the Rockets win that series. The hardest shot to hit sometimes when you have dead legs from defending the Warriors around the moving screens is a 23+ foot shot. Analytics without context.
What you're not getting dude is the only reason we were in a Game 7 against the Warriors is because we were the only team doing what the entire rest of the NBA was about to start doing. It's the 3-pt philosophy that took us to 7 games. We did not have the roster to be in a 7 game series with the Warriors. MDA was outcoaching the f*ck out of Kerr to be able to be close in the series and even go up 3-2 at one point. No other team had been successful against the Warriors and all of them took more midrange shots than us. The best competitor they had was Lebron who they swept with Durant 4-1 and 4-0. They took more midrange shots than us too. It's not reasonable to go away from what worked for you 2 years, got you to the point you are and is the most successful strategy deployed against the Warriors to date other than Lebron's comeback Finals win against the Durant-less Warriors. Can't believe we're still discussing this when we shifted the entire league towards fewer mid range shots. I guarantee if we take those 27 missed threes again we'd make a couple, but replaying things in hindsight is not evidence of anything.
I always laugh about people saying how a coach made poor decisions against gsw. like bro it's top2 teams ever you not stopping them with ****ing tatum or daaron fox lmao. as lon as Curry plays like Curry and they have Kerr on the sidelines these mother****ers are unguardable and you can just count shots arent falling
i bet if Kawhi didn't go down Spurs would give them business too. Cavs did too. Both of these teams were playing different game and let's not act like Morey didn't copy LeBron ball against GSW and not the other way round
I don't know about all that woulda coulda stuff. What I know is that no one won a greater proportion or number of games against Durant's Warriors than us. Lebron's Cavs were 1-8 against Durant's Warriors while we were 5-8. No one took 3's as much as we did, and the rest of the NBA now takes roughly that many 3's per game on average. Our roster was nowhere near as talented as theirs, their second best player was one of the greatest players of all time (healthy) and our second best player was a part-time chubby Chris Paul. Their 3rd best player was a great defender who was one of the greatest shooters of ALL TIME or a perennial DPOY who runs the offense - take your pick. These are facts. It's hard not to give credit to our strategy and coaching and system, there's no reason we should have taken them to 7 and 6 games. Our defense was as good as it can possibly be (Moute/Ariza/Tucker/Capela/Paul was crazy good, made switching infamous in that season) and our offense was one of the best all time at that point taking WAY more 3's than everyone else and way fewer mid range shots. I really want to know who thinks they could have done it better than being one of the best teams to never win a title, and the only team that was competitive against Durant's Warriors. All the other GM's and coaches packed up and re-tooled those seasons, the Warriors murdered everyone else in 4-5 games. That's one thing I like about the Rockets, for a few decades now we're coming up with new **** that tries to get an early edge on everyone else.
we actually played them best with CP taking midrange shots in the most vital moments of the games. It was a mixture of volume three pointers + midrange maestry
Yes that helped when CP3 was playing and making his midrange shots better than the layups he was passing up, but that's not good enough to beat the most talented team in NBA history that already has championship experience and added a prime Kevin Durant to a 73-win team. The foundation of what we built was on 3pters I'm sure you know this. It was always ok for people to take mid range shots if they were making them at a % that justified it in their midrange efficiency numbers - it was always known even by Morey that this would be totally beneficial for the team. If we had Kevin Durant we would have let him take mid range shots too, trust me. The point is we won because of scoring and denying 3pters. Everyone does it now. Strategically speaking, it exceeded everyone's expectations. The reason we lost is because we didn't have good enough players to beat the team we were facing because they were amazing. In those 2 playoff runs they lost 5 games against us and lost just 4 games in their other 6 series combined. Give the strategy some credit. We nearly pulled off the impossible with it.
The strategy was to hunt for picks for a bad defender and go at them with best 1-on-1 player in the league. To make that we needed floor spacers plus a roller. We werent spamming threes just because and I guarantee you that in those missing sprees what we needed was just a sure bucket from wherever on the floor. GSW packed the paint against Harden and begged Ariza and Tucker to make those threes. On the other hand - when GSW needed a bucket they went with high post to Durant - for him to make midrange shots
That's not true at all. That Rockets team was a very good roster. Especially when Mbah Moute was healthy who was statistically better than Iguodala in pretty much every way before his shoulder injury. We were in that series because the team was designed from the ground up to face that team down to the switching lineups to counteract the moving screens of the Hamptons 5. The fact is that when you're defending at that level your legs aren't going to be as fresh in game 7 so threes are going to be harder. Learning what's not working and adjusting is apart of winning a playoff series. We didn't do that. That's not hindsight. That was an issue at the time or did you not remember some of the games in the regular season where the shots weren't falling?
