adelman had no adjustment from the pressure the bulls put on. when teams front yao (plus add another defender behind yao in case of an overhead lob pass), the weak side needs to penetrate because there's no big man to block. when teams double on yao, there's always a man open. rockets need to do a better seeing that. there were a few plays in which battier was wide open while they doubled yao. also, there were no pick and roll plays. yao/scola could have made more high picks and rolled to the basket for the pass. there also wasn't any motion plays either that adelman loves. just iso play for artest. horrible. if people would cut to the basket while the double are on yao, someone will be open. when teams stop the feed to yao, the rox are completely lost. adelman's offensive game plan needs to change....terrible.
I doubt there is any game plan. The fact that Yao was being fronted the whole 4th quarter (only 1 touch on the offense side at 9:25) and still played proved that. Either suggestions in your post or take Yao out play small and suffocating defense are counter-meansures. What we see is just Ron's heroic action in jacking up three. What is a coach for?
I just don't know why there wasn't any pick-and-rolls. That would have been better than Yao being completely rendered useless by fronting defense.
T-Mac was great at doing this, the two man game high P&R with Yao. You need somebody able to penetrate/attact the basket and be a good passer, Ron and Battier can't. The only two are player Lowry and Brooks. Brooks is a great penetrating and finishing but struggles to pass over bigger players, Lowry is much better passer and as good or better penetrating, to bad RA don't use him late this game. The other perfect player to play late P&R is Wafer but he passing is mediocre. They need to run P&R over and over again in practice. Other thing is to ignore Yao and run plays for the rest of the team and don't waste all the clock shoot try to pass to Yao. Run the regular Adelman offense with Scola or Artest on the high or low post and let Yao go for the offensive rebound becuase he will have inside position when being fronting.
There is NO gameplan for 4th quarters. We could see that several times this season. The thing yesterday was, that through 3 quarters we (especially Artest) were on fire. Guys were making 3s, Ron was making tough shots and that is how we build the lead. In the 4th they started fronting Yao and we were like, damn what are we gonna do now...? So the perimeter players were poasing the ball like 5-6 times every single position after the shot clock was down to 7 and we had to fire away long 3s... That was all. unfortunately they didn't go in.
One problem i've noticed is Artest handling the ball way to much in the 4th quarter rather than our point guards. He's just not a good ball handler. More of a pass and shoot guy. That's when his shots fall in. I always hated JVG's coaching style, however the Rockets had no problems getting Yao the ball in the any quarter even when fronted. I still believe fronting Yao to be one of the best defensive strategies against him, but it was never full proof to where he couldn't score at all like tonight at the end and other games. Maybe they just need more practice passing the ball in.
