I was about to post almost exactly this. There has been both a coaching and player change in outlook. The coaches are emphasizing and coaching defense, helping the players have the knowledge on court, while Ariza and Terry joined to bring veteran knowledge (generally replacing Parsons and Lin), and perhaps biggest of all, Harden has truly taken seriously his job on the defensive end, which sets an example for the whole team to work. It all adds up to a total transformation in team defense that we have seen through 20 games.
It's really funny the length people go to on this forum to trash Mchale every time they can and never concede improvement on his part for anything. :/
At some point McHale needs to be held accountable. Last year it was McHale's fault whenever the Rockets failed to execute. This year, when there is better execution, McHale doesn't deserve credit? After the season ended McHale made it very clear that he was taking over the defense, he took on the challenge. A defense coordinator was not added until a week before camp. Harden has discussed McHale's impact and Morey said that McHale stressed defense so much in camp and the off season that he was really worried about the offensive execution. I have posted glowingly about Bickerstaff in the past. He is well spoken, has an exceptional pedigree at an early age, and like his old man, is very sharp. I do not doubt that Bickerstaff has had huge input but McHale deserves credit as well.
The Rockets also got rid of the headless chicken brothers. Getting rid of Lin and Parsons made a huge difference defensively. Neither one of them knew when to properly switch or fight adequately through pics. It had to be very frustrating to play with them, as they had no consistency on switches... through the entire defense out of whack.
So J.B. is in the huddle to explain McHale to the players? hehe IIRC in that timeout, the instructions were no switching. But the players got confused because we always handled endgame defense by switching. We still are. So J.B. makes sure everyone understands how to decode McHale.
dude, McHale himself in Red Nation Roundtable 1 deflected the recognition to J.B. This article reinforces it. McHale said he wanted the defense to sit back a little while J.B. convinced him to take a more aggressive approach. So far, the aggressive approach is working. McHale talked about J.B. figuring out (probably from consulting other coaches and watching tape) there are certain areas on the court where refs allow more aggressiveness, and other areas when you can't even touch the guy on offense.
Instead of bickering about who gets credit, can't we just say this was a "team effort?" I think MANY Rockets players and coaches did some soul searching after last season's disaster. Harden, McHale, the assistants. Then they got together and figured things out. Morey went out and got a top perimeter defender in Ariza and then Papa. McHale, instead of delegating, finally took it upon himself to emphasize defense to his team. Harden saw enough gifs of himself and decided he'd stop taking time off on that side of the ball. Bickerstaff drew up the new defensive blueprints. TR Dunn helped implement it and helped the returning players how to play the new style. DMo improved his game. It's a team effort. Everyone contributed. And the result is mind-boggling good. Let's just celebrate the 3rd best defense in the NBA. ... and forget about our 11th worse defense in the NBA.
JB taking credit is a smoke screen. That's why TR is in the background. We can't have another Sampson disaster like last year. We came prepared.
Is JB Bickerstaff's defense fool's gold? It was good in the regular season, but hasn't been effective at all vs. the Clippers in 2.5 out of the 3 games played so far.
Even in the so great Regular season the Defense was not fail proof. Harden won us many games with offense. So there is that.
Yes Houston's defense was masked in the regular season. They do not have as good of a defense as people think. Hopefully they can reevaluate some of this for the rest of the series. They cannot continue sending players to Dwight and expect him to bail them out every single time.
Don't blame JB for this one. You can clearly hear him from the bench about NOT going under the pick. We got burned by the three ball so many times.
