Why are the Clippers such a bad matchup for the Rockets?

It's not really a "bad matchup" when the other team has a significant edge in talent. The Clippers are simply a better team.

 

There is only one reason for the results in this series, and it's not the 'bad matchup with the Clippers'.

Shooting. Period. End of story.

For whatever reason, the entire team has gotten it into their heads that they are all going to miss free throws, and they are going to miss their 3's.

That's it.

If we were hitting those shots at a reasonable rate, instead of majorly sucking in ways that this team has never done all year, then we would be ahead in this series.

Their shot has abandoned them, taking their confidence along with it, which just snowballs as the game goes along, until we end up losing by 20.

Will they get their shots back tonight, and make this a competitive series again? I see no evidence of that at all, but stranger things have happened.

Griffin, as great as he is athletically, is still fundamentally a bone-head, Paul is only playing half-speed, and River and Redick at SOME point are going to remember that they are not actually Isiah Thomas and Jerry West.. so... maybe..?

 

Jordan. He maks sure harden cannot get into the paint.

 

Elite PG, Athletic Bigs, balanced offense, balanced defense.

 

This!!

 

A couple of things:
1. Their athletes at critical positions dominate us. (PG-CP3 and PF-Griffin) and Jordan cancels D12 because D12 refuses to use what Dream has taught him about getting Jordan off his feet.
2. They have better shooters (Reddick and Crawford, now Doc's son are cancelling out Harden, Ariza, Terry, and Brewer)
3. Doc is not going to let James go one on one. Plus if Doc was our coach we would be up 3-1 instead of down

 

Also, we can stop paint from drying on defense!

 

The Clippers are a top 3 team. We are a top 10 team.

/thread

 

This about sums it up.

 

Between the above, and not having Bev and D-Mo, its going like we might have imagined, really. I expected better out of our shooting and our bench, though. That could turn around, but so far no evidence of it. Clips do match up well, but not so well those things should have fallen off as drastically as they have.

 

Only thing that stops Dwight is Dwight, he gets in to foul trouble way too easily

 

I'm not saying Dwight is stopped by Jordan, it's that Jordan is capable of doing many of the same things that Dwight does and there's no "Dwight on Amare/Dirk" level of mismatch going on like there was last month.

So I misspoke a bit, he's not so much a Dwight Neutralizer as a Dwight Offsetter or Dwight Canceler-outer.

Either way his impact is huge against the Rockets and their style of play and he's one of the few players in the league who can disrupt the Rockets in that sense.

 

up until the last game dwight was doing just fine with his fouls and much of the last game could probably be attributed to the overall play of houston.

 

They are very strong where we are most weak defensively - PG, PF, shooters at the guards position.

They have very strong defense against our greatest strength - interior defense against Harden inside game.

 

Yeah, agreed. I remember saying two things before this series.

1) I wanted the Spurs, because Deandre Jordan was going to neutralize our best player against the Mavs.
2) It would all come down to free throws, and there was no question in my mind that Doc would hack us all over the place. People thought we were safe from that playing the Clippers. They have one guy who can't shoot free throws, who they can take out and replace with an even bigger guy. ALL our bigs are hack-bait. Every team is going to exploit this situation as long as it exists.

Both those came true. I still didn't expect to just see the total collapse we've seen. When I heard the commentators talking in Game 1, though, talking about how the Clippers were running the point through Griffin until Paul came back, I knew I had serious doubts about our chances in this series. We don't have an offensive plan when we're at 100%. The Clippers have a BACKUP plan and a guy to implement it should their one listed point guard go down. This series has demonstrated our complete lack of any plan to win it.

 

Quit putting the Clips talent on a pedestal. I refuse to believe they're more talented than us.

We have better players than them overall.

 

Nope. Both teams are talented. The difference is they had a gamelan to take away our strengths, and have executed it perfectly. We on the other hand have absolutely no gameplan and are doing the same things with no counter moves. Moreyball is a gimmick offense & McHale's more of a game manager then he is a competent coach

 

We have too many holes.

• PFs who can't shoot and can't defend.
• PGs who can't defend and can't penetrate.
• Non-existent team defense.
• Weak mental make up. More than half of the rotation have no fight in them when things go bad.

These weaknesses would lose most of playoffs series. We were lucky to have drawn the Mavs who had more holes than we did, and some here thought we were a contender. Contenders don't have that many major holes. True, extremely few teams are perfect. Hence match up issues. A perfectly constructed team would have no hole and would not have to worry about match up.

The Clippers have an almost hole-less starting lineup when Paul is healthy. Their bench is shallow. But their main guys are just too good in their roles.

 

Thank you.

Chris Paul | James Harden
Blake Griffin | Dwight Howard
DeAndre Jordan | Trevor Ariza
J.J. Redick | Donatas Motiejunas
Jamal Crawford | Patrick Beverley
Matt Barnes | Terrence Jones
Glen Davis | Josh Smith
Austin Rivers | Corey Brewer
Spencer Hawes | Jason Terry
Hedo Turkoglu | Pablo Prigioni
Lester Hudson | Clint Capela
Dahntay Jones | Kostas Papanikolaou
Jordan Hamilton | Nick Johnson
Ekpe Udoh | Joey Dorsey
C.J. Wilcox | K.J. McDaniels

 

I don't think they have neutralized Dwight by being able to play both Griffin and Jordan on him. If one of our pf's don't step up we're done.