Food for Thought: A Courtside Perspective of the Rockets-Mavs Game

Thanks for the comforting post. A lot of good stuff in there.

I just want this team to be able to prove itself against the Western Conference elite. Last year, we struggled against them, and I was hoping this time it would be different.

But here we are, less than a month into the season, and we're 1-5 against the Spurs, Mavs, and Suns. And these losses are significant, because those teams are our competition for getting one of the top 3 seeds. Any time we lose to them, it's one in their win column and one in our loss column. If you're in the West and you're stuck with the 4th or 5th seed, again its the same story last year -- there's a good chance you get knocked off in the first round.

That's my frustration right now. And, yeah, while there's no shame in losing any one of these games, the fact that we lost 5 straight is something to be concerned about.

 

great post. no wonder tmac passed up a ton of layups that he should have taken for 3pt shots by our shooters.

yao is not soft, no shape or form. he's just not a power player. duncan gets dunked on, does layups... he's a finesse player. that doesn't stop him from being the greatest PF of all time.

we lost b/c everytime tmac sat down, we lose the leads. in the 4th, a 14 pt lead got cut to a 6 pt lead in just 3 minutes. that just can't happen. he can't play 48 minutes.

we've got a lot of work to do. it's hard to judge this team right now. in a few months, we'll get a better picture.

 

Tmac was soft, any "superstar" would have taken it to the basket continuosly to finish that game......

 

WTF? I posted a "Food For Thought" thread 8 minutes before this.



http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=138221

 

What about Alston?

 

Excellent post! I was saying some of the same things last night.

The schedule has not been easy on the Rockets to this point. This team needs time. If, at the end of the year, they are still a .500 team, then by all means go off on them. But give the coaches and team some time together.

Unfortunately, this post won't get nearly enough attention due to its lack of negativity, so......

THE SKY IS FALLING!!! THE SKY IS FALLING!!!!

Mick

 

great points, i agree with almost all of them. we have to play chuck more. if shane is mr intangible, 'not-on-the-stat-sheet' then hayes is so intangible he's abstract. +18 cannot be ignored and he is one of our best one on one defenders, has to be on the court in the fourth. not for the shot obviously but his rebounding, hustle and defense add so much.

i was at the game as well, and it was painfully obvious to me that tmac was in a ton of pain. last night showed me that he is the anti-soft, simply because of the way he persevered through the injury for this important game. he also might be a bit of a ball hog, a man who loves taking his shot. this is not a surprise or a new characteristic of tmac, but last night was one of the few times i did not think tracy should have the last shot. he settled for the jumper all night without testing the defense much with motion (including that important miss at the end). i wish on nights that he is under the weather, or just not shooting well, tracy would take a page from kobe, wade and press the issue to the basket. without confidence, tmac's jumper is benign. being one of the best finishers, best absorbers of contact, best foul drawers in the league... i am surprised and disappointed that he didn't recognize the easiest way to score would not be through the contested jumpshot.

the losses hurt. bad. 5 in a row never feels good when you think your team is a contender. they must not be played down as merely regular season hiccups, because we have to learn from the painful defeat that we are not an elite team unless we play like an elite team. though it is early and it would be a mistake to focus on these losses at the expense of the post-season or rest of the regular season, realizing the gravity of these losses could shake some much needed awareness into this unit. we have to capitalize on turnovers by turning them into points, an area which the mavericks owned us in. we have to hold teams, even the elite scoring teams in their best quarter, to under 30 points. 38 in the fourth to dallas and 37 in the first to phoenix is positively unacceptable to a team that has a strong defensive foundation.

although, i was unaware, after reading the bbs last night following this loss, that the season DID NOT end today!?? i completely forgot there were 70 more games in which we could arise victorious. exciting!

point being: tmac is not soft but he is not healthy. chuck gives the team too much to sit out when he is playing well. luther should never ever never ever do anything except look for his shot. period.

 

How do you stumble on courtside seats? I stumble on a quarter... What luck..LOL

 

When the regular season is over, this 5 game losing streak will almost be forgotten. The only thing that matters is how prepped the team is for the playoffs. Right now as fans, we are going through a painful adjustment of our expectations. The 6-1 start raised hopes too high for the regular season and now reality is crashing in, and it hurts.

Hopefully we will look back on this as the low point and it's all uphill from here.

 

The team is still trying to find it's identity. they were 6-1, but looked lost at times. i rather they lose now early in season against the elite teams so they can make adjustments. If they keep winning but not playing the way they are supposed to, it will hurt them later on. Almost like fool's gold. This team is too good on paper to be a bottomn dweller. They will bounce back and be rolling by all-star break. Just suck to see them lose 5 in a row.

 

I had an experience in a game earlier this year (Bucks) when our season ticket rep showed up at our seats in the upper bowl and asked us to follow him out, then gave us 2 tix on the floor, at center court, directly behind Les.

Rudy T. was by at halftime - expect he was there scouting us for the Lakers. Shame, no camera though.

 

Yep, that's why DWAYNE WADE took that jump shot with the score 90-91 in Boston.
Kobe will even take jump shots to seal the game.

It was Tmac's favorite shot. He felt good about it so he shot it ok? learn to live and die with it. What kind of shot did he make in the 2005 play offs game 2?

 

that's the MISCONCEPTION people on this board have with players like kobe or even a penetrator like wade or michael jordan.

usually those players resort to their jumper as the last shot b/c why? well, RARELY do u get calls at the end of games b/c refs have been known to pull the whistle. sure u get whistles throughout a game but RARELY do refs want to be the ones deciding a game.

most of jordan's game winners have been jumpers. probably 95% of kobe's clutch plays have been jumpers. wade's game winners have been jumpers (the knicks, the bobcats last yr w/ the fadeaway, the boston attempt this yr).

even kobe admitted after he shot a game winner over jon barry when he was with the nuggets the night he came back from his rape trial. a reporter asked him why didn't he drive or something like that and he said, the refs usually swallow their whistle.

it's fine if people want tmac to drive more during a game, but please, RARELY does anyone drive constantly for game winners.

 

So Adelman screamed at him. No wonder he was quite nervous and uncomfortable during the post game interview.

 

year after year, the same starting lineup came up the same results. would you like to pile the data to see how many this type of games we lost and won? especially, those games were on the line. we lost most of them. we always lost. we always said if we had done a little bit more or the ball bounced to our side or we hit a couple of more shots we would had won. brilliant!

are you tired of it?

 

need more fans like you on this board, the amount of "fans" here who spazz out after every loss is crazy, i have never seen so many so called "fans" lose faith 12 games into the season.