Knee jerk fan analysis

You know because most of us are passionate Rocket fans we feel pretty strong about our own opinions.

Man I hate it when we play stupid or make bad personnel moves.

But a good analysis of our situation (imho) is-

1. Sura's injury will really hurt us and will require some more tricks out of JVG's bag to overcome the toughness, aggressiveness and especially the rebounding that Sura delivered. Those 5-7 rebounds a game were always big rebounds and you could see last night the effect they had on our defensive end. Sonics hammered us on 2nd chance rebounds. We were bad rebounding to start with, now we have to overcome the loss of our best rebounding guard.
2. TMac is not explosive and assertive as he was from Nov.- mid Jan. I think he has a nagging injury and is trying to tough it out. For whatever reason his ability to take over the game at key times was critical to our overall success. As much as Barry and Wesley have helped. TMac also really stepped it up after that game he and Dirk dueled it out.
3. Yao has stepped up his game gradually through out the season. Part of it is do to the changes JVG has made in the offense. Having Yao score in the flow of the offense has been a success. Getting away from trying to pound the ball into the post has allowed Yao to get more easy buckets. Yao is rebounding better and shooting well again. Yao is fighting a real problem and that is he is being very poorly officiated. If he has teh mental toughness to fight through this he may be the difference for this team to keep in a playoff spot.
4. Strickland is garbage. Teams are going to put more and more pressure on his ball handling. Expect him to make some key turnovers.
5. JVG is doing a good job with the team and under the circumstances if anyone can keep the team together and playing through the problems we are facing it is JVG. If we make the playoffs and Sura misses alot of time and TMac is injured. I will give alot of the credit to the coach.
6. Howard must not fade. He has had a very solid year. We will need him to keep rebounding better and to keep hitting that open look.
7. Wesley and Barry are consistent and solid players. As long as they hold up down the stretch and keep contributing we will have a good chance.
8. We played very well against Seattle. Didn't look any different than the last 8 wins except we missed Sura's rebounding. And TMac couldn't or wouldn't take the game into his hands in the 4th qtr. If we keep that kind of effort up we will make the playoffs.

Deke is Deke

TMac is our greatest concern right now.

If he is 100% I believe he can pick us up.

With our schedule it won't take long to find out. I look for him to admit to an injury if he has one. Because I don't think our record is going to stay real good if he is hurt. We need him 100% .

I don't want to be on the knee jerk roller coaster but it is apparant that Sura's loss, the possibility that TMac is injured and the difficulty of schedule are going to make for some trying times for us over the month of March.

Of course if we beat SA tonight this will all be a knee jerk reaction to a game the refs stole from us.

 

I agree about him skipping the all star game, if he is hurt.

Apparantly Duncan and Garnett are nursing injuries also.

I heard that if an all star didn't play for sake of injury it was like 5 game ir from the league. Not sure about that but maybe Tracy has been battling a nagging back or something for a few games and hopes to get it going.

But if he is not more assertive tonight I am going to really be puzzled.

Anyone can see he wasn't trying to take the game for us last night. He passed up some opportunities to go hard to the basket and he passed up 2 open 3's. He also does not have the elevation he had before on his shots.

 

One more thing on TMac- the biggest thing I see is not what he isn't doing, but he is laboring to do what he was doing with the greatest of ease.

He looks like he is being more careful. It suggests that he has some type of physical problem he is dealing with.