Before Jabari's injury I've always thought most fans understand the basic concept of how replacing injured players work in the NBA. Jabari gets injured. Amen takes his spot. Amen has to play like 10 more minutes a game. Brooks is playing about 5 extra minutes. Players like Tate and Uncle Jeff has to enter the rotation. Whatever you may think of Jabari as a player, at the very least he's a low-end starter/high-end backup. You replace his minutes with Tate, Jeff Green, and the most tired minutes of Amen and Brooks, of course the team is going to suffer. And of course it starts on defense, the place where energy matters more. The idea that well Jabari doesn't matter cause Amen is a better was always stupid and surprised so many people believed that's how NBA games work.
The thing is, Brooks is the PF when only Bari is out. He's guarded by PF/C's mostly. He guards the slower/bigger of the two best scorers (i.e. PF's) while Amen guards the quicker assignments. He's in Jabari's spot. Amen outplayed him for SF and he's now filling in for the injured Bari. It all happened very awkwardly but ultimately, we seem to need Jabari's better rebounding, wingspan, shooting reputation. We're too small without him. Our defense has been suffering. Might not be this season but that spot is Jabari's. I hope Jabari is trying to hit the ground running because we REALLY need a 6'10 guy with a 7'1 wingspan who's a good 3&D player. Jabari shot nearly 40% for the latter half of the season so far. The timing of the injury is unfortunate, I really think he was taking off for good but now we'll have to be patient because Udoka is probably more about politics than meritocracy.
I feel his injury just put extra pressure on the other players. At first it seemed they made up for it by playing hard. But eventually you run out of steam. I have heard fans talk about how deep this team is, but that depth is more about any of the core 7 players can go off at any time. But after that, Cam, Reed, Tate, any of our centers, not much there except for when Cam has one of his big games.
Was at the Mavs game in lower bowl (flex) and it was very noticeable how much bigger the Mavs were. Jabari just gives us more size, even if he doesn’t play like a traditional PF or C
I been saying it all year -we are so small when we face teams like OKC MINN ATL DAL MEM it stands out we smaller at PG we smaller at SF in most cases , Smaller at PF and smaller at C so we are very prone to mismatches and then our C’s aren’t the most mobile or athletic to protect the rim - it’s more by body positioning We needed a bigger backup PG and athletic PF/C to balance the roster
"Belatedly figuring out Jabari was the most important piece" by going 0-4 without Fred Vanvleet. Rockets were largely fine without Smith - with Fred gone they're much worse, the numbers reflect it too.
Fred, Bari and Sengun are all valuable pieces to our success. Need all of them back and in the starting lineup ASAP.
I preached about Jabari’s contributions from the start of the season. He was always more critical to the defense than Dillon. Don’t even talk about rebounding. Amen should’ve been starting at sf from day one this season, but the politics as you put it wouldn’t allow it. Hopefully these injuries and the losing streak has opened Ime’s eyes, but I doubt it. He is one stubborn SOB.
It will open his eyes. It's happening the same as last season, we went 6-16 and Ime miraculously rediscovered the importance of playing with pace and having some shooting at the 5 when you have non-shooters on the floor. It was very forced, but it's also getting forced now as we speak. I really do wonder if Ime would can resist keeping Bari's rebounding and stocks off the floor compared to Brooks.
Starting 5, given health should be Fred-Jalen-Amen-Jabari-Alpe. No disrespect to Dillon, he’s done exactly what anyone could’ve hoped for, and that last piece of the puzzle is to gracefully let the younger, better player take over. If he doesn’t like it, oblige with a trade this offseason.
I feel like Ime will end up sliding Amen back to his high-energy, disruptive player role as a 6th man once Bari returns. Hopefully Tari can be off his injury management restrictions so that he and Amen can continue to wreck havoc with that second unit.
The Rockets point differential following Jabari's injury dropped. They just happened to have won a lot of close games. And FVV went out just turned those close wins into close losses. FVV's injury was the tipping point. Doesn't mean Jabari's injury didn't matter.
That lineup is actually pretty bad. It's when you remove Jalen that the lineup gets better. Frank did a piece on this a few weeks ago.
Kind of a domino effect too--we basically have four players who space the floor to any real degree: VanVleet, Green, Brooks, Smith Jr. You lose one of those four and you can deal with it to a certain degree. You lose two and suddenly teams can pack the paint like we've been seeing and it's hard to get anything going. I do think FVV is more important to this team's success than Jabari, but both of them clearly matter, and having at least one of those guys on the court is really important because we have so little shooting on this team.
Not sure who Frank is, but I will say Green's effort on defense has gone way down since he's been giving more effort on offense. Except when Green is hot, the effect on the defense has been more pronounced than the improvement on offense.
Agree that Green's defense has been poor in this stretch. It doesn't all fall on him - but he has to be better. I think guys like Jabari and Fred vocally quarterbacking the defense have a BIG impact on the less sophisticated defenders on our team who aren't as good at seeing the big picture. Half of the battle in half court defense is setting up the right matchup assignments before the offense gets into their sets so that you don't get caught in bad matchups where Jalen is the low man now being asked to be the weak side rim defender - and that is what guys like Jabari and Fred can help prevent with smart defensive schemes. It's ultimately a gap in the defensive capabilities on our roster that we can somewhat mitigate by just being smart about peel switching off ball - good teams do it, but we lost our two best defensive signal callers there so here we are. This just shows the value of Jabari and Fred and that we still have relatively immature situational defenders on this team.
It's already been 5 1/2 weeks since he broke his hand. If he misses another 4 weeks, that would be way over the 4-8 weeks window we were given.
