Our defensive effort to start the 4th was on par w/ the worst garbage D of last year. No effort, so many open threes, and total mismatches all over the place. Putting Dekker on either Hayward or Joe Johnson, two great iso players, was a disaster from moment one. I like Dekker but his feet are way too slow to guard any isolated player. That's why he's a 4 not a 3
Holly mother of god, How many open looks do we give other teams perimeter shooters night in night out?. I am afraid if we continue this trend against the Warriors we will get smoked by 30 plus!. Good luck giving Curry, Thompson, Durant, Iggy and even Green those looks. It will get ugly.
Season series is tied 1-1, but Utah has a distinct advantage. They defend our 3 well, and kill us from 3. Utah's injuries really helped us win in Houston.
Last time we played them without George Hill, last night Hill was back and he's the one that makes that thing go. We have got to play better defense, way too many wide open shots
Can't win if you don't play defense as a team, if you play soft and give up wide open shots time after time. Gordon the sole bright spot.
I don't know if we were looking ahead of The Jazz but we just wasn't ready to play basketball. Our defense was atrocious at best. On offense we couldn't score the basketball. Hopefully we play much better against the Warriors
Rockets defense is just terrible. It's pretty clear we are a middle of the pack team. We can beat up the lesser teams just with our offense but we hit a wall when we play better teams that can play defense. I think this whole season is fool's gold.
Didn't really watch much of this game tbh, but did D'Antoni even try and go small ball against Gobert? Need to pull that dude outside the paint.
GSW will likely go for the NBA record in 3's against us with our **** 3 point defense. Oh how the tables have turned.
at least everyone in the division (beside the pels) lost... clips lost too...hopefully we put up a decent fight against gsw
The Rockets are 1st in 3PM and 3PA and 4th in 3p%. They are also: 4th worst in OPP FG% 2nd worst in OPP 3P% behind only Dallas 3rd worst in OPP FT% (they take [bad] fouls because they can't get stops) 5th worst in getting the ball stolen 3rd worst in drawing fouls from the opponent and putting them in the penalty so they can't play aggressive defense (surprising since we have Harden)
Annoying for the Rockets to no-show right before an automatic loss and another game that we typically lose (DEN) on a back to back. Gotta win that one now to keep 4th/5th seed pace. This is why I always whine about how trash our defense is. If we actually had a respectable defense, we'd have chances to win games like this.
I dont see what all the fuss is about. You guys KNOW this team is not built to win a title this year or even be a top 4 team. Harden and Gordon are the only guys capable of breaking down the defense off the dribble. You wont win a lot of games with only 2 players on your team capable of doing that. Capela is young, Dekker is young, we still have Brewer (haha).. so you gotta temper your expectations with this team. Unless a trade happens where we can get another talented player at the wing or F/C positions we wont be a contender. We will be a team that can get hot and score a bunch of points and get the occassional stop, but other than that, we will have a lot of games like last night. Harden is off and we get blown out. So don't be mad, thats who we are right now.
We no-showed, not necessarily about wins and losses, just how we looked. With Harden putting up the numbers he's putting up, and the weapons we have offensively, we should be around 5th seed. Especially seeing how mediocre most of the West looks this year.
I swear to god i saw us many times in the past (under McHale/JB) putting the opponent in the penalty early and suddenly stop attacing the basket to start chucking up threes, i think it was almost automatic in a lot of games...i remember myself thinking "why we stopped attacking the basket now that they're in the penalty?" like, a lot of times.
I am not blaming our guys for this L. Jazz were just unbelievably hot from 3. And these were not even open 3pt looks most of the time if I recall well. They just hit a lot of tough long range shots.
I guess that was the point i was trying to get at. This team is built where it all relies on Harden being 'On' to work. Last night you could clearly see he was not "on" at all. He has to set up everything for everyone. I'm just saying I will be glad when we can bring in more talent to carry some of the load. For example, switch out Ariza for someone like Hayward and we prob win that game. Harden is off, Hayward can take over and keep it going. Gordon came off the bench and hit some shots and kept us in it at times, but then he misses and nobody else does anything so we go back down 15. I get your point about deffense and showing up, some of that is a problem also, but I think with more talent that will fix itself. Right now this is a strickly offensive, 3 point shooting team.
