At the 9:00 minute mark in the 3rd, Shaq picks up his 4th foul. If my lowly, but conventional basketball wisdom serves me correctly, I think we should have capitalized on this 4th foul and pounded the ball inside to draw Shaq into a 5th foul. Now, this is of course assuming that the refs would continue to make the calls previously made on Shaq. Still, attacking the inside would have yielded another foul at some point. From this 9:00 point in the third until about 3:00 minutes left, we had about 12-14 shot attemps of which 2 or 3 were inside the paint. This was an 18-8 run by the Lakers too. We had Cato taking 2 or 3 failed 18 footers included in this stretch (that is another story and another topic). No adjustment was made and no attacking took place. Instead, we started running Ming at the top of the key, attempting 15-20 foot jump shots and content on challenging the Lakers from the perimeter. Am I missing something here or do we need to adjust this when given the opportunity in the next game?
After Shaq picked up his 4th foul, the Lakers had Malone guarding Yao. They tired to take advantage of the mismatch that created but Yao was not having any success against Malone. I think he went 0-4 against him, with a couple of turnovers. He looked disinterested, beat, unconfident, meek, whatever you want to call it.
Actually after his 4th he stayed in the game and they did switch out occassionally with malone only after Shaq took a breather, but overall the shots over that stretch were all jumpers from Yao. I watched the game on Tivo and counted shots.....we only shot from the paint 2 or 4 times
The turning point in this game was the moronic Cuttino Mobley foul on Kobe to end the 3rd quarter. After that foul, the Rockets lost their composure and let L.A. cruise to a victory. The Rockets simply do not deserve to win this series. I hope they do, but they do not deserve to. Between stupid fouls, stupid turnovers, and lack of composure, the Rockets have shown us why they barely made the playoffs.
it actually began with the circus shot from Kobe at the 9 or 8 minute mark, then with the lack of adjustment, then ended with that moronic foul...what the heXX was he doing anyway....why even foul him when he was not in the act, it still would lead to 2 points because we were in the bonus.... I like Cat and Stevie, but man they are just not the " head in the game" players sometimes and it kills us...
