Sengun/FVV-centric offense won't survive long term

I'm really happy with the FVV and Sengun offense. It's everything else that needs to be fixed. Take a look at the stats here - we are a great offensive team with those two on the court together.

 

Fred VV was always going to be a big, fat band aid.........we all knew in the beginning.....until they can develop or trade for that young PG.....

 

Fred is the only one who can handle the ball well enough and also make sure Alpi is still the hub. Gotta keep at it for now. Once we go into 'winning now' instead of 'developing and trying to win' we'll have more clear answers with Jalen Green and the guard group. Fingers crossed Cam and Amen can become those 'win now' players on the team as role players in the starting lineup. Then use Jalen Green and who knows what else to get the bench upgraded. All fingers crossed, but hey I like watching this style of play and we're seeing players improve in skill rapidly.

 

I want to see Cam with Sengun, Cam is such a better cutter .... those DHO and hard curl actions could lead to dudes ending up on a poster.

 

What is MDA up to these days? I’d love to bring him in as the lead assistant

 

I remember when we were winning, playing piss-poor offense (due to our amazing defense), with the thought that improving the offense is simply the key to launching the Rockets to the stratosphere.

More recently, the offense has picked up, but then we lost a bunch of games on the road and at home despite having a better offense. This started before Brooks got injured. I think we lost most of the recent games not due to our offense but to poor defense.

Our defense is not a given. It still needs to get back to where it was and to improve beyond that.

A Sengun-centric offense can work. He has shown very good consistency and even pure dominance for short periods of time (the third quarter of the last two games is a good example). If he can improve on those, he can be the lasting main piece. But BB is a team support. There is no such thing as a one or two-player-centric offense where everything else is a don't care. Sengun needs to continue to be consistent and get better at being a dominant player. However, the major missing pieces on offense right now and longer-term are not him. It's everyone else around him. Bari being more consistent, Jalen being a real NBA 2-guard , FVV being more consistent on offense, and so on.

 

You act like the Rockets aren't trying to get other shots, that things aren't inter-related, and that shot value isn't time dependent. FVV's 2point percentage is great early in the shot clock (slightly better than 50%, but FTs bring up value a lot with more than 15 seconds), and is horrible with less than 7 seconds left (barely over 30%). A lot of FVV's "bad" shots from inside the arc are because he couldn't get the ball to Sengun late in the clock.

Should FVV not try to get the ball to Sengun late in the clock for a incredibly high percentage shot? If you want to eliminate FVV's low percentage 2 point attempts, having him swing it to Jalen for hero ball late in the clock instead of him trying to get Sengun the ball is how to do it.

 

//THREAD

 

I don't know if anyone has brought this up yet (this thread blew up in a hurry), but over the last 10, Sengun has averaged an absurd 26/9/5/2/1, shooting 59% from the floor and 82% from the foul line. And all Fred has done in that stretch is average 20/9/3/1/1 on 48/47/89 shooting splits.

In those 10 games, the Rockets are only 4-6, but I wouldn't blame the offense. In those games, they've averaged 120.9 points per game. That number would rank 5th highest among all teams leaguewide so far this season. When Fred and Alpi play well offensively, the Rockets are a very good offensive basketball team, period.

 

Excellent point.

 

After the way Tilman treated him last time, I think our odds of getting Kobe on our team are slightly better.

 

You can’t lean on any one thing too heavily. See James Harden. You’ve got to be able to mix it up when it’s not working or opponent is focusing on stopping that one thing you excel at. You can’t just suddenly turn that on, so you’ve got to spend the entire season developing other parts of your offense. Ie, don’t get mad when we deliberately don’t focus on Alpi-centered offense for stretches at a time. It’ll be better long term for the team, especially should we make playoffs this year.

 

Yep. The more ways we have to win, the better.

Doing it one way all the time will doom you in the playoffs.

 

100% agree. It feels like Cam is close to getting a real spot in the rotation. Seems hard to justify keeping him off the floor, doesn't it?

 

I want to see Cam's offense with Sengun. Those 1st 10-20 games may be rough on defense as Cam tries to learn where to be with the starters (edit: they might not be. I just worry about chemistry from rookies who are having to learn the NBA without putting them with a whole new group of guys and have to learn to play with them as well).

 

Age is going to limit the capability of this team so I don't think you are going to get leaps and bounds better as an offense with a drastically different system - that being said, I would like to see a few more plays with Spain Action mixed into our playbook and I think figuring out ways to get at least a little bit more off ball moving and re-setting..but I also think there is likely some simplification happening here because our guys are so young. Its kind of a "lets walk before we learn to run" thing - as good as Sengun is, I don't entirely trust him to make the right defensive reads if the other 4 players are making off ball cuts and I CERTAINLY don't trust most of the guys who would be making those off ball cuts - at least not yet....but I would welcome starting to throw in a few more structured sets into the mix to give the team some of that experience...but I know it's hard to introduce those concepts in mid season because teams generally don't get a lot of practice time during the year.

Spain action in particular would be very interesting with FVV(and occasionally Jalen), Jabari, and Sengun and is consistent with Udoka's desire to have our players operate from the middle of the floor to better see where the doubles are coming from.

One thing they CAN do immediately and are capable of is getting into their sets much sooner. It's no secret that we get poorer and poorer quality of shots the deeper into the shot clock and while we aren't terrible at shooting those late clock things relative to other teams, the percentages for making shots with 7 seconds or less remaining on the shot clock are generally lower for all NBA teams and that makes up roughly 1/4 of all our shots this season and as a team we shoot a higher percentage of shots late in the shot clock than most teams. I think part of it is about getting into the sets sooner/pushing the ball a bit more but it's also about taking shots when you are open and stop trying to pump fake yourself into a better shot because generally the opposite is the case.