This post was duly noted. McHale going for small ball again with Patterson, Delfino, Harden, Douglas, Lin.
I was getting frustrated in the 1st half with Asik out for so long, but he stuck to his guns and the bench rewarded him for it. Great job by Mchale tonight.
He went with a similar small-ball line-up with Douglas/Harden in the 2nd quarter and we went 24-37 for the quarter with no interior presence and getting beaten on the boards.
And an almost endless variety of lineups for the coaches to investigate. The coaches seem to be getting much more adept at figuring out which lineup will be most successful. Toast them. We are far above expectations.
And he went small ball again to end the game, up 4 at the time, and we were up 18 before the scrubs came in. For a +14 during that stretch. It's unfortunate you stopped watching in the 2nd quarter though. Missed out on some fun basketball. And I love Asik too. But Patterson and Delfino were on fire. No reason to take them out when the Bucks stopped shooting like the Spurs.
I think he hit the wall tbh. I think he'll play better once he makes it through this season and has another off-season for more conditioning.
even though we won vs the Bucks tonight, i don't agree with his really small ball lineup to start the 3rd quarter where we went down double digits. i understand he wants a lineup that can run, but when our biggest guy is Morris, you get zero rebounds thus zero chance of running. you don't need all 5 guys to be fast to be able to run. you 2 guys to grab the rebounds who can also outlet the pass right away, and you need 3 very fast young guys to race down the court. seriously, i don't understand Mchale's thinking at all. seems like he's just trying out everything without really putting any thoughts into it. but i guess at least it's a good thing he's willing to try out things whereas most coaches are too stubborn and would stick to their strategy even though it obviously doesn't work.
Machale is doing his thing this year. No need to talk bad about him he's been and excellent coach the whole time here even last yr. he knows what he's doing. I'm pretty sure we would not be this good with the beloved adleman who everyone seems to live even though he hasn't amounted to anything the last 10 yrs as a coach. Adleman took over a Yao who jvg made a monster not him anyone on this board could have done what adleman did with those Yao/Mac lead teams it's not hard to win 50 plus games when u got a top 2 wing and the best center. Really what I'm trying to say is Machale is a good coach and prob the best coach for this team.
I love that McHale is experimenting with different lineups. Some Clutchfans may be confused about rotations, but McHale is just experimenting to find out what works and what doesn't. I never would have thought this team would be playing this well so early in the season. The players obviously have bought into what McHale is trying to do, and a great deal of credit goes to the coaches and the players. The Rockets aren't an elite team yet, but major strides have been made this year, and we still have a lot of games left.
Maybe it's got something to do with organized basketball knowledge? Most of these posts are not very specific as to why they think he is bad but resort to generalities like substitution patterns or "just iso plays"
I think our coaching staff has been quite good this year. I like the pace we play at. I like most of our early offense. Most of our half-court stuff is really solid and I think McHale has been fairly good with his rotations as well. Keep in mind that McHale, though a basketball-lifer, is still is fairly new to being a head coach. He's coached less than 200 games. This coaching staff hasn't been long together either. It takes a while to get on the same track, figure your team/players out, figure out what's going to work and what won't x's & o's wise. Coaches, like players, (can) improve, too. Perhaps even more so even. Out of the three guys that the Rockets considered for the job McHale had arguably the highest upside, in fact. On another note, just to make my point re: coaches calling for isolation - against the Bucks the Rockets again went to loop action to set up an iso for Harden after a timeout. (That was the play Harden hit Parsons cutting through, with the ball going out of bounds of Parsons' knee/leg.) Again though I very much agree with HadToDoItCF that this offense is anything but iso-centric and that most isolations are a result of our early offense or half-court offense breaking down or Harden simply waiving guys off. Not counting end of quarter isolations -- unless I missed any -- the few isolations I did highlight are all the isos that actually were called for these last few games and most of them come of loop action which helps setting up other loop wrinkles as well. Thanks. I won't open a new thread myself, however if Clutch or the mods feel like this stuff should go in a separate thread, then that would be fine by me, too, obviously. There's some more of this stuff in the Chris Finch thread, starting on page 3: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=229019&page=3&p=7381599&postcount=54 I'll probably upload a few clips highlighting a few things either later today on or some time in the next games.
That last sentence was meant to read: "I'll probably upload a few clips highlighting a few things either later on today or some time in the next few days."
Hey man, great job on the videos. I'm glad you took the time and found examples of our isolation ball so that people can understand how we run our version of "iso". From the videos you have up, it should be readily apparent that we don't have a typical, Lebron James in Cleveland isolation set. We get our "iso" off of action. Mainly, we try to get Harden on the elbow or on the block and get some weak side movement so that the defense can't overload on him. We don't have traditional stagnant isolation set calls from the bench like people who hate the coaches -- for some reason -- want to believe. I like the fact that you pointed out the out-of-timeout isolation plays, because it's clear that the coaches said "run this action until you get a post up for James." It's still not an isolation set (we don't run loop action to exclusively post up James), it's a set that turns in to an isolation situation. I understand that may be nuanced for some of you, but it is significant to the way I see the game being called by our coaching staff. I personally don't consider those sets to be true "iso" plays just because I always go back to the days before defensive 3 seconds, when we still had the illegal defense call. There were quite a few actual isolation sets that teams used to run just due to the fact that you could not double the weak side ball handler. Getting the ball to a guy in the post or on the high elbow (off of action) and saying go to work just doesn't look anything like the old, back 'em down, take your time isolation. We now have no hand checking and a 5 second back to the basket call as well though, so the game has changed. But Kobe's iso plays look a Hell of a lot different than the ones HMMM just put up. I'm actually surprised you found that many examples (although you said there weren't that many to be found). Good work my friend. And you should make that thread, for serious.
You should make a new thread. Trust me. I've been here for 10+ years and that thread would be hugely appreciated. Besides video analysis often justifies its own thread - it won't get merged. Just title it, Rockets Playbook Analysis
Alright, fair enough. I'll create a separate Rockets Playbook thread some time next week. Yup. Opened up some stuff for us on offense, as well. Just a few example of "5-out" opening up the lane for us: <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/kEnAfAPxb-8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/LiTBZiNn78I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> With Lin being able to beat his man of the dribble without a screen the Bucks couldn't hedge (on the screen that wasn't) and middle penetration with four shooters spread across is a high percentage play every single time. Granted, those are just two plays and our offense probably would have been fine with Patterson playing the 4, however Patterson and pretty much all our bigs suck at closing out to spread-4s, so I liked McHale staying with Patterson at the 5 and playing Parsons at the 4 to guard Ilyasova. Thank you. You're certainly right that setting up an iso off of (loop) action -- even if we just intend to isolate Harden -- is still very much different from just dumping it down to a guy. I very much prefer posting or isolation guys off of action myself. I think generally it's the way to go. Too often do teams waste time and motion just to set up a post-up or iso in my opinion. Even worse when there are no secondary options off of it. Yesterday against the Cavs, the Rockets actually did went to a typical iso setting out of a timeout, which kinda stunned me seeing it unfold. As you can see in the video below however, we obviously were just using Harden as a decoy to set up Delfino with a flare screen. Love the idea. The execution/design just wasn't great. Still a pretty decent look, though. I've said this before -- I think this coaching staff is doing an excellent job of putting players in position to take advantage when the defense is overloading. You can see that's clearly something they are emphasizing. Our bigs are constantly screening for guys on the weak side. <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/go-GzXhQ3Kw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
