Man, suck balls to suffer through the non-stop whining in the Arena. The tactics they employ is to intimidate by noise. Their DJ does a pretty good job to ask for noise whenever they are up by a margin. That's when they sense an opportunity to throw a hay-maker. Curry then feeds off that to jack up a three. But I thought Rockets showed a lot of resilience today. They were down in late second by 9 and the building was Rome coliseum like, you can sense the Mob gone nuts to aid an even bigger margin. But we promptly forced two TOs on KD and got 9 points in less than 75 seconds. That was great. Also we were down by 8 at the end of third. That crowd came back bloody again, and we duely silenced them with some awesome plays, especially by Eric. Then there was the step back 3 and 3 point play by Harden at the end of game to keep us in striking distance. In the end, we fell a little short. We got the worse end on the officiating. Suck balls. However, that said, based on my observations, I don't think they outmatched us and it is actually encouraging knowing that we actually have a steady recipe that can beat them more than just a "puncher's chance". Let's go get'em G2.
That six point swing when tuck missed a 3 and they came down and got an and one on tuck was big. Went from potentially up 7 to only up one. My house was ready to explode if tucker wouldve hit it. He either air balled it or it was blocked.
By the way, they limited us to less than 100 points, but the poor 3 point shooting is more of a series opener jitter than defense to me. I watched entire shoot around. Harden appeared to be really fine with his wrist and hit a lot of threes then. Guys like House and Iman really needs to make sure they will hit those wide open threes and not end up looking like the Jazz.
Yeah, but that wasn't entirely his fault. IIRC, CP delivered it to him with someone (Klay?) quickly closing on him. He had about 1 second open space to make that shot. Not even sure he had a good sight at the rim then. He is not a dead-eye shooter for sure. We gotta make sure to put our people at their best positions to make those shots. In one time out, Coach was talking to Harden separately, apparently instructing him to get rid of the ball earlier in the shot clock.
I also feel CC not being his usual self really impacted our stuff. They played Harden straight up, and as soon as he catches the ball, one-two-three help defense are all eyeing on the lane and to stop his drive, and as soon as he kicks out, they fly to whichever the direction the ball is swung to. Now, CC is just too easily being pushed around in the block and not able to make himself available. Nene did a better job to play big to give Harden that third option but I thought why not try Faried? Harden needs that running lob target to open it up for him.
2 foul calls and harden has 40, we win and take homecourt. I am still hopeful we can take this series.
Very doable. We have the personnel defensively. I felt our chance is even better than last year. It used to be we could only hope they will miss, but today I actually saw and thought no shiat we can actually stop/disrupt/rattle them.
