[ominous narrator voice] However, the pace had not gone up. [/ominous narrator voice] The Rockets have just gotten more efficient on offense and the defense has gone craptacular especially regarding rotations making it seem like the pace had gone up. My guess on the defense is that Amen is taking the primary attack resposnibility which causes rotations to be different for the starters. Hoping it is just a chemistry thing that takes time to fix. Worrying that Amen getting more tied to POA is weakening the defense because FVV and Green can't fill Jabari's off ball responsibilities (or Brooks's responsibilities if Brooks handles Jabari's duties especially as low man.)
Udoka and Stone. If Udoka is the master chef Stone got him all the superior ingredients. Stone got 6 good prospects in just 3 yrs, signed high impact vets and with PHX trade even set us up to get lotto picks in the near future.
Honestly, it could be as simple as opponents have learned how to punish us for crashing the offensive boards.
Pace is number of possessions per 48 minutes. It does not exactly measure how fast a team plays because how fast your opponents play also factors in how many possessions you have in a game. If you play good defense, it may take your opponents longer to get a shot, especially if you can limit your opponents' fastbreak. Also, offensive rebound does not give you a new possession for stats purposes. So if you get a lot of offensive rebounds, your possessions will look longer (fewer per game). The Rockets are one of the best defensive and offensive rebounding teams.
Ah there you go, thanks. It doesn't exactly measure how fast we execute our offense compared to how fast we used to execute the offense.
One would think that would show up in points scored early in the shot clock. There might be a slight increase of scoring due to crashing, but likely less than a point. For the most part, the defense is getting killed by threes after 9 seconds have elapsed (about 6 points more a game on average lately despite similar number of attempts). From watching games, it sure does seem like opponents are getting a ton of threes lately that are either wide open or with late closeouts in half court settings (especially with the starters in).
Thank you for your service explaining this. I think whoever name that stat "pace" in the first place really ****ed up, and its screwed with a lot of nba discourse. It is a really bad measure of "pace" based on the definition of the word and what most people mean when they talk about pace.
What else do you want stats guys to call the pace of possessions per 48 minutes? PP48? Pace fits. The game is played on both sides of the court and the Rockets typically dictate an average pace on average even if the rate of possessions flucuates a lot based on personel throughout a game.
Not really sure what to call it, your suggestion sounds good so I'd be fine with that. I just really don't think pace fits at all, its not a good measure of the pace that a team plays. 99% of the time people are discussing pace they're talking about how fast you execute your offense (a few posts up in this thread is a good example), and the current "pace" stat doesn't measure that at all.
The Rockets execute an average number of possessions. The pace stat 100% accurately measures how fast a team plays on average. What it doesn't do is measure how many fast plays a team runs on offense. Pace adjusted stats wouldn't work unless the stat pace measured pace. Frankly, offensive rebounds take time and I'm surprised the Rockets's pace isn't near the bottom of the league. People think the Rockets are running at a faster pace when they are just making shots instead of missing them.
for me plus/minus and net rating are more important than pace and pace usually slows down in the playoffs anyway
I think most people talk about pace when they mean speed of offensive possession because they want to know how the pace affects offensive efficiency. But "pace" actually includes defensive possessions. And offensive rebounding also has little to do with how fast a team does their offense. What they need is average time of one offensive possession and maybe count offensive rebounds as a new possession.
There is pace after a made basket, after an inbound pass, after an interruption. And the pace which is transitioning from Defense to Offense especially after a stop, block, steal or rebound........ The Rocket should be big in transitions......the speed picked up immensely.
Nailed it. I wish it was just the average running/walking speed of lineups to be honest. Pretty sure (could be wrong) in that stat, offensive rebounds are being shown as a high pace possession. That’s not an accurate depiction of our play. Ideally if I wanted to diagnose carefully, I wouldn’t even include transition. Would just go by halfcourt speed across teams, that’s what really tells me how the team feels on the court. Pretty much everyone is fast at everything else with negligible differentiation. Pace isn’t even discussed as a success metric, it seems that’s why it’s calculated that way today. Maybe they wanted a metric which says something about gaining possessions being a good thing so they added a layer. When you talk to anyone about pace though, we’re really talking about how fast and little the players and the ball moved before a shot was taken. It’s not always useful, if you have older players you’ll wear them out quickly and they may not get a lot out of it. Typically great for exceptional athletes but not always. Pace mostly has to do with ball movement though, that’s the fastest player on the court (the ball). So maybe the speed of the ball and number of passes should be tracked too. Another one of those stats which they will improve in the future imo.
I think transition should be part of pace. A team that can generate a lot of fastbreaks contributes to their offensive effectiveness. Offensive rebounding is tricky. Maybe they should just eliminate them and only count first possession after getting the ball back from the opponent. Anyway, most helpful would be to disaggregate different kinds of possessions. Also, more movement doesn't necessarily speed up "pace." I think what you really want to see is how soon the team starts executing the offense once they get the ball.
Totally agree. And personally, I don't think we should have any stat called "pace" just like I don't think we should have any stat called "efficiency". It's a concept not a stat. Like imagine how ridiculous it would be if they decided in 1950 to call it "efficiency" instead of field goal percentage. And then we had people in 2025 saying "player A is more efficient than player B" because they have a higher field goal percentage. When talking about efficiency you can look at FG%, eFG%, TS%, turnovers, assists, offensive rating, whatever. It's a holistic concept and you can factor in a bunch of stuff. I think pace is the same way, you can factor in PP48, offensive rebounding, average speed, average duration of offensive possession, average time remaining on shot clock when a field goal is attempted, transition scoring, or whatever. You should look at all of it. And I think calling a stat "pace" really takes away from this, because people can just say "you're wrong, just look at our pace, it went down!" And then the other person thinks oh damn, the pace stat did go down, I must be wrong when I said that it feels like we're playing faster. It sucks.
I like how we look mid season and I'm going to arbitrarily move the goalposts to getting to the second round.
For me the best thing halfway thru the season is we addressed the "star" problem of the core. Last year at this point of time only Sengun made the leap and he got injured afterwards so tbh the Rox had a lot of uncertainty if the rebuild was successful or not. However this year Jalen and Amen have joined him as Rockets with star potential. Rox have almost no way to mess up the rebuild now we just need to wait for these 3 to keep maturing, a couple of years later they are gonna make the Rox true contenders IMO esp if they helped by Jatari, Cam and Sheppard.
