Morey: "Rockets #1 half court defense with Asik" and how it affects us going forward

Yeah I 2nd this - what stats is he using? Asik plays 30 mpg, Rockets #1 defense during that time?

 

No. Just the #1 defense in defending in the half-court, so they're not counting transition and early offense (secondary breaks).

He's citing their own stats as far as I can tell. I don't think there are public stats splitting team's defensive efficiency numbers into half-court, early offense and transition.

 

Morey is not going to reveal his methodology to the public. Anyways he said half-court, not general defense. Big difference on this team.

 

Me likes too.

 

You can play the same way we do now and still be better at transition D. It really all about the guards getting back and organized as soon as a shot goes up. Anyone that watched the JVG rockets would know this. We were the best in the league at transition defense and it had nothing to do with Yao Ming and Deke since they were generally the last down the court.

The trade off would be the offensive glass. The perimeters have to make a split second decision between going after the rebound and getting back. They have to be very aware.

 

It's simple. They want more possessions on offense and are willing to sacrifice transition defense for extra possessions. It may not be a good rule to follow 100% of the time, but I'm assuming that the FO has found this to be more beneficial for winning games, and I tend to trust the FO.

 

i would like to point out that our half court defense with asik is more or less jamming painted area defense. you often see guards playing help defense when bigs of other teams had the ball near the low block. we are willing to give up 3s.

another thing i am not quite sure is the correlation btw half court defense and half court offense. our good half court defense is due to asik. he patrols the painted area and blocks (changes) shots and rebound. we don't have another big who can do what he does or half of what he does (maybe i am exaggerating). i believe i know why you put them together. playing half court offense may limit other teams' transition offense but it doesn't stop other teams' playing half court offense. w/o asik, we all know our half court defense is also bad too. the key is to get another asik to solve 48 min playing time. so to say looking for gordon is to solve our defense issue sounds a little bit weird.

to limit other teams' transition offense, we have to have high % shots no matter half court offense or transition offense. one other thing we have to limit is TO, especially those TOs which lead to fast breaks as one of posters pointed out. TO is not avoidable but we definitely have to limit those back court lazy passes and take care of the ball better.

rep

ISO of this type is typically for bigs or wings. for a guard, he needs space to work with his man. absolutely we can try.

totally agree.

at least in one case, mchale disagrees with you. he thought beverley was over aggressive on OR. instead he wanted him to pay attention on defense end.

 

Well, yeah, there's obviously a difference between your bigs and your guards crashing the glass and you certainly don't want to send the whole team to the boards.

Still, I think even in Beverley's case McHale didn't really say that he wants Beverley to generally not go for offensive rebounds. He just said he needs to be careful when to do it and that other guys have to be aware when he does.
Beverley obviously has a knack for the ball and as long as he can avoid over-doing it, it would be unwise to take that strength away from him.

I believe Morey once commented on rebounds from guards as -- and I'm paraphrasing -- rebounds you aren't supposed to get, whereas (a high percentage of) the rebounds your bigs grab more or less are a given.

 

basically we are same on not over doing it.

the tradeoff of crashing OB is the possibility you get burned on transition defense. if playing half court defense, getting back to D is more important than ORding.

 

Not every team has synergy camera setup. Also DM would have to have all other team data to successfully compare all 30 team. Maybe he technology extrapolate advance states from each non-Rocket game.

Also what's your definition early offense vs half-court? That seem subjective.

Transition I would saying anytime when defense does not have 5 player back below half court line.

 

Regarding defense, one thing I hate to see but seeing again and again is this:
Harden brought the ball up to the key, Lin & Parsons are deep in the corner for 3ball; and if Harden failed on his driving layup, opposition team has huge advantage in transition attack.

Fastest threes on Rockets (Lin, Harden, Parsons) cannot rush back in time since they were at very end of the court.

 

You wouldn't necessarily need the SportsVU (I think that's what you was referring to) camera system to keep track of those stats. You could simply have people log every NBA game. That obviously would take some man-power to do so. Perhaps Synergy offers this as one of their services to NBA teams.

To me early offense is whenever the defense is still retreating and not quite set. In some cases, when the defense is just about to get set or just got set, it can indeed be very much judgmental, but the vast majority of the time it's pretty clear IMO.

 

Agreed but could be difficult due to language barrier.

 

Great points.

 

Good observations.

 

I agree. In addition, what they normally mean by this is that the defense is already set before the other team executes their play.

 

Could've used Asik's defense down the stretch.

 

What this means for Houston is that Asik will sit down in crunch time

 

Asik and Lin need to learn how to play better defense. They're total liabilities in crunch time when we need stops. That's why we've got rookies in their stead and the elite defensive specialists Chandler 'I always lose my man on screens and gamble' Parsons and Carlos 'sometimes I forget how I'm meant to be defending my assignment and that I'm meant to take open shots instead of cooking up turnovers' Delfino.

 

Yeah yeah Morey, but McHale says 'defense shmefense!' who needs defense in the 4th quarter of a close game when you're fighting to make the playoffs?

The Rockets don't, according to their coach.