Suprisingly he has been average with his ball handling and extremely timid with his offense.. Game 3 and 4 are going to be huge for him and his future in Houston because if he does not elevate his game and we lose this series this season will be a catastrophic failure and Paul’s future will be in Houston doubt. I think think we will see a aggressive CP3 In Utah .23 points 9 assists and 7 boards in game 3 and he will bounce back hard..
He's got to . Dante Exum , Neto , even Mitchell are inexperienced. Paul needs to ****ing ATTACK . He should be bullying those guys on both ends with his savvy and quickness and strength. I can live with it if his shot is off . But his decision making and tenacity should be unquestionable . This is why we got him . If he's not up to the task this year , he won't be when he's another year older . It almost feels like he's not going hard physically. He can't be saving it for GS . If we make it through and fall to GS , I can live with it ... but we've got to play like every game is our last ... we don't have the talent to think like GS .
Ultimately the rockets have the 2018 MVP and the jazz do not. That will be on display in these next few games.
Agree , but one man can only take you so far. James has played lights out this series . The jazz can force him to facilitate and it's up to the other 4 guys to make the right play and hit shots
Harden and Clint by themselves can’t win this series. The lack of bench production and Cp3 being only solid will ultimately be hurtful against this Utah team and Fatal against the Warriors
Is it me or does he look like he's not going as hard because he doesn't want to risk injuring his hamstring again?
Don't care what anyone says apart from Game 2 against the Timberwolves he's underperformed a lot. His timidness is a big reason why we struggle when Harden sits. CP3 + bench unit used to destroy teams in the Regular Season. MDA might have to increase James' minutes if this continues.
Not gonna lie, he’s been like this before. We saw this behavior in the clippers series when the rockets came back to beat cp3 and the clips. He was super timid and just didn’t look like regular season Chris Paul As a former athlete in a few different sports I will say the mind is very powerful. I would tend to freeze up in high pressure situations at times when the stakes were high. It’s a constant battle of positivity and negativity in your head. He’s by no means playing poorly though and I think he can bounce back. I think for harden and Paul it’s great that they have each other because they can pump each other up and rely on one another when the going gets tough.
I've said before this is a very T-Mac like situation where he's playing with a lot of pressure on himself with the whole conference finals virgin/2nd round choke talk. He's got to just get through it and once the monkey is off his back, he'll beast. We can still win this series in 5 or 6 with CP3 playing this way and once he relaxes, he'll go off on GS playing free with nothing to lose.
Those buttery smooth swishes from the mid range aren't falling. Hitting all over the rim. It's all in his head. You can give credit to Gobert, but if you watched, a lot of those shots are usually money with the distance he had. They just weren't falling. Harden will have his back. What we really can't have is the rest of the team shooting like garbage.
At this point he is a slightly above average PG. Nothing wrong with that especially considering his age. I just don't see a max money player anymore.
The Rockets are a better team than the Jazz. They have more too level talent, more depth and a more well rounded roster. Losing a game at home sucks. No doubt about it. But there is no need to panic at all. If we do what we did that led us to 65 wins this season, there is no way the Jazz can keep up
He is not defending well, and his units without Harden have been losing leads. That's got to change. The prospect of giving him a max contract at 32 years old is not terribly exciting to me
Cp3 is running with a stagnant offense. Nobody is cutting or moving and he's not an elite 1vs1 player that can beat his man off the dribble to dish it off.
