Jabari Smith Jr. is the Rockets' franchise player

Harden literally fries every single big in the league. It's kind of his thing, most of Harden's offense is swapping onto a big and the cooking them. Every single big. I've never seen a big actually stop Harden, even defensive bigs get cooked by him. Jabari never had a single hope of stopping him, it was easy points for Harden. The way to stop this is to make sure he never swaps on to Harden in the first place.

Jabari is always the scapegoat around here though. Kawhi had 40 points, that was not any where near all on Jabari. Kawhi had Amen and Tari on him for most of the night and he cooked. Rockets gave him easy paint points and he got confident and then turned into prime Kawhi for the night.

For the others, Bringing up his 1 rebound as if he averages anything near that is just disingenuous. The whole team played terribly, I don't get the point in singling out Jabari every time the team loses a game. Literally every time.

We act like Amen, Reed, Sengun, also weren't booty cheeks tonight.

 

Got burned by Keegan Murray too who’s also a better player than Jabari.

 

Lol right, Bari had nothing to do with Kawhi going off but casuals need their scapegoat.

It's funny, the Bari haters say he's nothing but a role player but if so, why even blame him? Your role player isn't the reason you're winning or losing games.

Either yall think he's a role player or not, if so, then stop acting like if Jabari isn't playing everything gets better.

Did this same stuff last year, blamed everything on Bari than cried when he got hurt and begged for him to come back.

 

He is a role player that got pumped up by KD / FVV’s songs of praise and started to do s*** that he’s not supposed to do.

He is a role player that thinks he’s beyond the role player stamp and stopped doing what he’s supposed to do. Boxing out. Making reliable defensive rotations. Lack of physical energy. Rebound aggressively. You name it. The little things that make role players impactful and great. He is what he is and he does not buy into who he truly is at this stage.

He’s the tall Trevor Ariza that should never have the ball in his hands past 2 seconds and dribble more than 2 times.

And yet here we are.

When your players start to play out of their natural boundaries, your team is not using resources (touches, spacing, possessions) efficiently. (We also have issues utilizing Amen, Reed and even Alpi, but Jabari’s problem is so obvious it hurts so bad)

 

Harden hunted him repeatedly snd scored every time.

 

Every time we had a bad game, people come out and point finger at the player/coach they don't like. It doesn't matter if that guy was really the reason we lost.

 

Bari gives you 2 minutes of hot shooting once every 7 games with fake defense. The same people that cook Reed, cook him too.

 

Leonard played the best I have seen him played in years. He cooked everybody. He was hitting shots that were extremely well defended. Our team defense has been one of the worst in the league in December. Durant is too old and not having Tari and having Reed and Holiday playing such a huge role in our defense has led to our demise, not to mention the zone and the fact that Adams can’t guard anyone outside of 5 feet from the basket. Instead of Okogie playing fewer minutes to develop Reed, it should be Durant, but with all the talk of how tough Ime is, he doesn’t have the balls to do the right thing just like with FVV and Jalen last year.

 

I agree that Durant's minutes should be reduced. Now that the Fred-crutch is broken, Ime is shifting his weight to the KD-crutch. There's no reason to play the 37-year-old Durant more minutes than the 23-year-old Sengun.

 

I don't mind Ime being on the hot seat, he was way overrated before, yeah, he did a great job setting the culture but that is in the past.

Houston is not Boston or San Antonio where he is surrounded by equal assistant coaches that might one day outrank him.

It is a place where he can comfortably savour his 11-12 million dollars playing the herky jerky mad coach barking at the refs.

A JVG Wannabe.

 

meh, we’ll find out. Results are everything. The results have been good his first two seasons. If he stops winning his leash will shorten. He’ll either have to change his approach or he’ll be gone. I’m still a believer but he needs to adapt to the current roster. Right now it feels like everyone is playing out of position and player strengths are not being maximized. We’ll see how he approaches the rest of the season. .

 

I do not disagree.....he has like 4 years experience as a HC.....and that is like nothing in this league.

Sure, his forte is insane Defense and I am with you on that he did a great job but he seems to lose his mojo on that recently......really have no data on him with the Celtics when they were slipping/skidding.

 

Jabari isn’t to blame for any loss by himself. This loss aside, he just doesn’t have it as a starter. I’m watching the Lakers v Rockets right now it it’s pretty clear he doesn’t have the ball handling skills or shooting as Tari. Not only that, he isn’t the same defender. This begs the question of why the Rockets signed him to a big contract but can’t come to an agreement with Tari. Would much rather have Tari than Bari if one had to go.

 

His defense is so overrated. He’s a terrible defender