According to Windy, the Jalen contract was designed to be traded: https://basketball.realgm.com/wiretap/277802/Jalen-Greens-New-Contract-Designed-To-Be-Traded
Yeah...I kept telling my wife this at the game but it reminds me of the Kubiak/Schaub days of the Texans where it was bootleg Schaub every ****ing play and ultimately teams learned to defend it when we no longer had Arian Foster around as another dimension to the offense (which led to Schaub's infamous pick 6-fest). It's the same damn play over and over and over again. I refuse to believe that Jalen can't be put into better situations. Same thing with Jabari who came in and drilled b2b 3's in the 3rd. Dillon and FVV just feel like training wheels on a Tour de France bicycle right now. They're starting to limit progress. There were a few things Jalen did last night that I didn't like (rebounds, assists, inefficient chucky 3rd quarter) but even that 3rd quarter I attribute to coaching and just lack of offensive creativity overall. Last night was on coaching and FVV. We had no business losing that game.
I thought the pnr they ran was actually pretty good, even the DHO. I dunno, it's fine. My biggest issue, and this goes back to last year, is they seem to have no plan for Sengun getting doubled or even tripled in the post. Sengun is one of the best passing big men in the league, he's smart, he has great vision, and can make difficult passes. This should be easy to take advantage of. Similarly, when Sengun went down and Green was going nuts last year, we also had no answer for Green getting doubled either. This drives me so crazy when the whole team just stands still. Why doesn't Ime have them prepared for this? Can we please practice and formulate a plan for when our best players get double teamed? It should be a good thing! It means someone is open...and it should be fairly easy to exploit. I just hate how effective these double and triple teams are against our guys.
Ime is a great defensive coach with almost on ability to design offense. In Boston he had two elite one on one guys that could consistently get offense on their own and create for others. He doesn't have that here and it shows. Jalen Green is a inefficient chucker and has no other impact on the game.
You think that PNR is good? Seriously? They never create separation for either the ballhandler OR the rollman at all. They either dump it back WAY too early to Sengun, or they stay too close to the screener. It never causes the defense to chase, nobody ever needs to help and that's why there's never even an option for an outlet pass to the corner/wing. They do not even get the basic PnR right, never mind adding in some pick n pop actions to mix it up. We have the most uninspired, predictable and easiest to defend offense I've ever seen. We're lucky we have some talented players or we'd be easy as **** to shut down completely.
Don't be silly, the narrative is always more right than reality. Jabroni Smith Jr has potential, Jalen's a mega bust. #notmySG #jatersareretards
Player options severely impacts return due to how much extra risk they carry from the team's perspective. If Stone is planning on trading Green, it won't be for much unless he plays so well the Rockets aren't trading him in the first place.
this is an interesting one. In the absence of Sengun it looks like they don’t know who should get the board. Everyone is boxing out, Jabari not even doing that and no one goes for the ball.
Since we're playing the blame game with Jalen I'll pile on a little by saying you cant have Tre Mann out there cooking you on offense. With that said I present Exhibit B:
I agreed with the other poster that we got good separation. They played a deep drop to take away Sengun and dared Freddy and Jalen to shoot pull up 3s. They shot them. They missed them. We lost.
And Brooks. Both guys ball watching and ignoring their guy. Jalen had no realistic shot at the rebound and he stays directly between his guy and the basket and even handchecks back to ensure his man isn't cutting. It is the shooter cutting - past Jabari and Dillon. Either of them should have been crashing the boards or at least boxing out If you watch the Rockets now and don't realize Jalen is playing pretty good defense, you just are using confirmation bias.
Jalen probably couldn't have gotten that rebound but i dont think Jabari nor Dillon did anything egregious. You dont expect to need to box a guy out who is shooting from the logo. Lamelo just made a big time play since he could track the ball better than anyone else on the court. And he showed why he is an elite level talent. Amen went down and that didnt help. Thats not something that is going to happen much. Not worth debating.
I just went back and watched a bunch of the pick and roll possessions and I'll start by saying they definitely weren't productive. But a lot of it was just missing good looks. If the ball handler gets a ton of space off the screen, and takes a wide open 3, sometimes you just have to make those shots. And we weren't doing that, Fred moreso than Jalen, but neither of them shot well on their numerous open looks. I also think Sengun needs to work on passing out of the PNR, he draws a lot of attention and likes to just flail into 2 defenders and hope for a call or make a circus shot. So obviously there are improvements to be made, but overall, I didn't think it was terrible. PNR can also be hard to navigate (especially when defended well) so I'm willing to cut our guys and coach some slack if they weren't executed perfectly. But I don't think it was a disaster. Compare that to the teams reaction to double teams...that I think is a disaster. And it has been a disaster for years. There appears to be no plan, and it doesn't seem like it's a situation that the team practices. Nobody has any clue what to do. I think the biggest thing we can do right now to improve the offense is get good at punishing teams for double teaming Green up top or Sengun in the post. I'm no x's and o's wizard, so I don't have the answer on how to execute this, but that's what the coaches get paid for. In my experience as a basketball watcher, double teaming extremely talented passers doesn't usually work very well, and ends up with a lot of easy buckets and open shots. For some reason the rockets are never able to do that. That's what I would really like to see as a top priority.
I think Jalen hurt his hand going for that monster second dunk attempt. He was on fire until that then went ice cold.
I agree with all of this. Still I think it is a problem that this team has no second plan when the main plan is not working. And doing same thing without results just wears everyone down. Sometimes you need to throw something different to change the mood.
Like this never happens when his hand is healthy . just messing around, it could really be the hand but I couldn’t miss the opportunity.
I do genuinely think a lot of that comes from the coach not teaching the basic reads that most people learn in those situations though, right? Sengun getting the ball back too early (the majority of his roll man possessions) with a defender in front of him or a help defender coming across should almost always pass to the corner if his fundamentals are right. The same goes for Jalen driving to the basket if he's not passing the ball back to Sengun immediately (and he's probably the worst at rushing that pass tbh.) When's the last time you saw us pass to the wing/corner in a PnR action? Have we ever in the Silas/Udoka era? We rush the action, and we don't make the correct read when we've not moved the defense. Compare a Harden/Zubac PnR to a Fred/Alpi or Jalen/Alpi PnR action. James comes wider off the screen and either makes the defender chase him leaving a wide open lane for the roll man or he's in tons of space for his open shot or to drive himself. Jalen and Fred get a little bit of space for the 3 ball but the defender is RIGHT on them closing out, there's space to shoot, not true separation though, compare it to Beard and see the difference, it's actually very big. Similarly look at the open lane a roll man gets playing with Harden and compare it to the early pass actions that Alpi gets from Fred or Jalen, it's night and day, Sengun's almost always driving into traffic on our PnR actions, and the defense isn't really chasing anybody, they're already there. We may look somewhat effective if you just look at our actions in a vacuum and say "well, did we create a little bit of space or not?" Compare it to an action that's being run to perfection and you'll see the stark difference in the way the defense behaves in reaction to it. We never make a team scramble to defend us in our half court offense, more so in our high tempo transition stuff because we're probably the most athletic squad in the league. If we're set in the half court though, we're a cakewalk to defend, they barely have to even move most of the time.
