little bit of blog love. Spoiler http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/73116/is-barkley-right-about-rockets-defense
Some of the comments make me lose faith in humanity. People think analytics is like GMOs or something. They don't understand it, they fear it, and they don't know we have been using it for a lot longer than they think we have. Morey doesn't sit around and play hours upon hours of 2k, he scouts, he watches, and yes, he does some number crunching. Hell, even the glorious Warriors use a bit of analytics as well. Oh well...
Also in TrueHoop, David Thorpe makes the case for the Rockets against the Warriors: http://espn.go.com/blog/truehoop/post/_/id/73126/the-case-for-the-rockets
Let me summarize this clip so you don't waste your time. Husband to his wife: "I love love that dress on you honey, its really stylish and suave looking. It totally hides your wide hips and flat ass."
Rockets are Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to defense. When they truly clamp down on defense, they can smother opponents and make it difficult. We saw it in the first half of the season as well as game 7 against the Clippers and the 4th quarter of game 6. However, too often, we see the bad part of our defense. Poor transition defense and effort to contest, which was common in the latter half of the season and games 3-5 against Dallas and games 1-4 against the Clippers. Rockets can play great defense. They also play bad defense. In the playoffs, we need great defense to win.
Exactly, the Rockets often fail the eye-test of defense and give up stupidly easy baskets. Throughout the Clippers series, we saw made baskets lead to layups on the other end. Our effort on closeouts was lacking a lot as well, which is an obvious sign of bad defense to any spectator. Luckily for us, the Rockets are serious underdogs (unlike the Mavs series where they could get away with playing lackadaisical defense) and are just coming off of their best defensive performance in the playoffs.
And fortunately, we have a Coach who has the team completely locked in and fockass'd to continue their run of 5 straight quarters of smothering defense. As a friend of mine said, "I think these guys will run through a wall for him [Coach] now. Full buy-in and acceptance of responsibility from the players. Beautiful."
..and yet he still favors the Warriors in 7. Is there no "analyst" on planet earth who favors the Rockets to win the series?
That article is pretty terrible as it doesn't really refute Barkley's main point, which is the Rockets good defensive stats in the regular season were not indicative of their defensive abilities in the postseason. As pointed out in the article, the Rockets were ranked 12th out of 16 teams defensively in the playoffs. Even if one adjusted for opponent strength, the Rockets would still be in the bottom half of the playoff rankings in terms of def efficiency. Only by combining the playoff statistics with regular season numbers, does the Rockets come out 6th overall.
Oh I know that. I meant it in terms of it polarizes people into two groups pretty dramatically. Give me a little bit of credit here.
