I would think Amen and Ant especially Amen are alot smarter in bball IQ/knows how to win better than those Westbrooks and Jalens
He plays very inconsistently, you can't build a team around him with his constant good and bad play. 2/11 with 6 to 31 points on 12/17 shooting
He’s 22. We have a decade to build around him. Be patient. Every 22 year old in the league is inconsistent. Same with Reed, Jabari, and Sengun. Man we are loaded.
The game before last when he was 12/17 he only took 3 shots outside the restricted area, two of those were jumpers inside the FT line, the other was a made 3. He really needs to stretch his shooting range ....
I don’t have the stats but apart from dunks his effectiveness on layups while driving seems very low. He needs to work (a lot) on that. Also when initiating offense he seems to dribble in the paint without a purpose which leads to 5-6 seconds lost on the clock. Finally he really really needs to work on his entry passes to Sengun and Durant. A few TOs there also.
If you gave Amen the keys to a team with a ton of shooters and perimeter defenders, he’d put up similar numbers to Johnson. Not to mention Johnson is a year older than Amen.
Yes, this is correct. He will in time. When we get our full contingent of players back (if they continue to shoot well from 3), he will be in the lane whenever he wants and will be drawing fouls like crazy. Remember when guys were saying his free throw shooting meant he would never learn to shoot? I said it before the season, he would struggle early this year. He is drinking from a fire hose, but he has the best work ethic I’ve seen since Larry Bird. Of bigger concern to me, is Durant’s fit on this team. We need his ability to get contested baskets and close out games. I really only watched Durant when he was facing the Rockets. I didn’t realize how much isolation ball he plays and how he doesn’t really create space. We really need to be running a lot of motion and back picks like the Warriors do. Does Ime have it in him? I really don’t know the solution. If you get rid of Ime, who do you bring in? I do think he is high on the list of coaches veterans want to play for. Is that something we really need or should we just continue to build from within and hire a more well rounded coach in the next couple of years? We really miss Tari’s energy and defense off the bench. His inability to stay on the court is of great concern to our aspirations this year. If we do trade him it should be for a defensive oriented perimeter player that can at least hit average from 3 point land. I don’t get the calls for a ball handler. We have too many players already that need the ball in their hands to be effective (Durant, Amen, Sengun).
lmaooo excuses - Amen has KD and Bari and Alpi and Reed with him … he can’t score if you don’t hand him the ball near rim - lol
I think the issue at this point for both Amen and Reed is that their roles just aren't well defined within the structure of this team. KD and Sengun are the definitive 1A/1B. Most of the rest of the guys are established in their supporting roles. But Amen and Reed are the wild cards. Both are learning on the go while the team is trying to compete. I don't mind them taking lumps. But for Amen particularly, if he's not fully figuring out the PG thing, he should be put back to his last year's role come playoff time.
Amen's numbers on all pull up FGA (i.e., all self created shots other than rim attempts, minimum 50 FGA) over his career 2023-24 - 28.0 EFG%, 226th out of 228 qualifying players 2024-25 - 35.8 EFG%, 214th out of 243 qualifying players 2025-26 - 25.0 EFG%, 110th out of 110 qualifying players He's also making only 48% of his non-dunk rim attempts this season, the dip weighted heavily towards self-created rim attempts in the half court. Guys, Amen will be a great player for a long time in a hybrid role utilizing the things he does extremely well (cutting, transition, rebounding, slashing, defense etc.), but the signs of him being an efficient perimeter initiator are not there. It's not in him. He's not going to out of the blue discover touch and manual dexterity he's never shown evidence of before. It's OK. He doesn't have to be a perimeter initiator to be an all time great Rocket. Getting information and making evaluations on your own players is a big part of teambuilding, maybe the biggest. Amen's place and role on the next championship Rockets team have never been more clear.
The whole FO disagrees. Steve Nash disagrees. Every coach and player I have heard speak disagrees, but yeah ok, I’ll go with you.
Amen's developmental priority should be his jump shot. Until then, he is not going to be a consistently effective perimeter player. Forcing him into that role is confusing his development.
Since he has been in the NBA, Amen is 178th out of 178 in EFG% on self-created FGA attempts that aren't layups or dunks. And it's not close. The gap between him and 177th place is more than 3 full points. He is outlier bad at it. Quite frankly, it's a compliment to how incredible Amen is at other phases of the game that he is still such a strongly positive net impact player while being so profoundly negative at on-ball creation from the perimeter. Like, that is incredibly hard to do and speaks to the extreme value of his actual skillset. He's an unbelievable player. Do you think the FO is going to have a press conference where they announce "Our evaluation is complete. Amen is not our primary initiator of the future "? Everyone with eyes who watches Rockets games knows Amen initiating offense from the perimeter simply does not work, Udoka and the FO included. It's not some secret.
It takes a long time for most guards to develop NBA guard skills. I'm fine with him working on his guard skills, but would rather Reed start with him to ease the on-ball burden on both of them. I think if you remove all the on-ball stuff from him, it will slow his development in that area. He needs to continue to have some on-ball work, but does need to make his jump shot improvement a priority.
Since you wanted to be smug in your reply. Here's a smug reply back - funny, that's the same garbage rhetoric people would say about Jalen Green.
