Rockets Shot Selection: Amateur Study of the '3 & Paint pts' Strategy

Their offense strategy is definitely not typical since no other team relies on such a high volume and fraction of 3s&Paint shots. Our style works best against mediocre to worse defensive teams. We haven't been able to implement our style against better defensive teams. I think that is a clear defect to the offense. If the Rockets are so bent on a particular strategy, I would want it to work against the majority of teams, but particularly against teams we'll face in the playoffs (the ones that happen to play better defense).

We would definitely have a better record if we were better defensively. I guess it takes longer to learn to play high-level defense.

 

My point is not that they can't make enough off 3s &Paint. It's that the Rockets are not even able to take enough those shots!

My cutoff for games where the Rockets achieve their shot goal is that 85% of shots attempted must come as 3s&Paint shots. Against the best D Rating team, they're not even coming close to hitting that mark.

I don't care if other teams see the same effect against good defense. If the Rockets are choosing a particular strategy, but can't even implement the strategy, then there's something wrong...

 

Meh, it should be obvious that's not what I'm saying. There are a lot of offense strategies played by the different teams in the league. The Rockets have supposedly chosen a strategy that leads to more wins than other offense strategies. If we are losing to the same good defenses CONSISTENTLY that other offenses are too, then what's the point of using the 3s&Paint shots preference as heavily as we do? We may as well just copy any of the other good/more consistent offensive teams's strategy.

Shouldn't part of the Rockets' aim be to beat good defensive teams? If one strategy is proving to be unusable & unsuccessful, should they continue to use it and be happy with the losing results? We probably need more games to establish it as a valid phenomenon, but the preliminary results are certainly trending that way.

Edit: instead of typing I don't care, I should have written "I'm not concerned with"

 

Playing devil's advocate on myself: Here's a plot of games this season with %Shots as 3s&Paint vs Point differential, but the bubble size now shows the relative defensive rating of teams we played.

Spoiler

Good def teams against whom we've won:
>=85% as 3s&Paint: -
<85% as 3s&Paint: TOR, CHI, GSWx2, SASx2

Good def teams against whom we've lost:
>=85% as 3s&Paint: OKC
<85% as 3s & Paint: OKC, IND


relaxing cutoff to 80% as 3s&Paint

Good def teams against whom we've won:
>=80% as 3s&Paint: GSW, SAS, CHI, TOR
<80% as 3s & Paint: GSW, SAS

Good def teams against whom we've lost:
>=80% as 3s&Paint: OKC
<80% as 3s & Paint: OKC, IND

It's not as dire as I made it out 2/3 posts back.

 

Fair enough. I still want to see whether they will win a game against a good defensive team like Indiana, while keeping their style of play. They haven't shown that yet. As for the second part of Rockets running a different offense style, I don't know how to do that... I think it would take too much effort for the reward.

Thanks, I can do that - I'll try and reply with it tomorrow.

 

I think you're missing the point of the thread. No argument that you need a good defense too. The defense's contribution to winning is not being questioned nor is it being evaluated. I'm not saying our offense is more important than good D either.

The offense we play has been discussed as a remarkable and somewhat novel system, and I wanted to try and evaluate it. The point of this thread is to see how often we stuck to our style of offense and the situations when we do it. That's why the opposition defense is so important to me, and that's why I want to see the Rockets beat Indiana, OKC, CHI, GSW, SAS, while they play their style of basketball. I've defined their style of basketball to be games where they shoot more than 85% of their shots as 3s&Paint shots.

Sure, there are some games where the defense lets us down or wins it for us (rare from the eye test) but that's a study for another thread on another day. Mostly though, when we have played good defensive teams, we've not played with the 85% shots as 3s&Paint and I want to know if this is going to continue to be the case.

 

I can't say either way if the offense or defense is more important to winning because I'm not studying that. I'm only studying the effect of the offense. And it so happens that there are trends just looking at our offense and the D Rtgs of the opponent, as well as trends with our offense and the games we've won.

I think I finally understand what you're saying: that the game is too complicated to look at just the offense or just the defense and draw a conclusion about winning or losing. The following rough analogy may help: I have some function f(x,y) that is complicated but I want to see how it behaves with changes in x and y. Because it's complicated, I'm first looking at df/dx and some point later will look at df/dy. I can still draw conclusions about how f changes with x. If you think it has no meaning then I apologize, but I don't know how to convince you otherwise.... (In the analogy, your point is that x and y depend on each other as well; yes they do, but it's complicated and I have to start looking at it from somewhere.)

As for comparing with other teams, I can't do that because other teams don't have a similar play style to us. I'm trying to characterize only our play style and see when our offense works and when it doesn't, and if it doesn't I eventually want to figure out why it doesn't. It's a study on the Rockets shot selection. I'm doing it because I feel that the ORtg is falsely hyping our offensive prowess, and looking to see if I can come up with a better evaluation.