Let's be realistic for a second...What are people actually expecting from the Rockets roster?

Jones weights 10 lbs more than Love

 

Are you sure? Love looks much bigger. Maybe he is just more agile and a better shooter. Obviously more effective than Jones.

 

On offense, whatever issues that the team may have would seem to be relatively minor. They can fix a few things and get even better, all teams can, but the team was one of the top offensive teams in the league despite whatever issues that they had. They even scored efficiently against Portland.

The bigger issue was defense. The team was inconsistent at best defensively all season and was flat out bad on D against a good offensive Portland team in the playoffs. Of particular concern are 1) defensive rebounds-- the team was good enough at contesting first shots, but allowed way too many 2nd chance points, and 2) James Harden, whose level of lack of attention and effort on D is just unacceptable from a leading star player.

I don't think an objective person would be totally surprised at HOU losing a closely contested 4th-5th seed series. It's kind of how those mid-seed matchups work, teams are at about the same level. There are things that we knew needed fixing going in.

The one thing that did disturb me was James Harden not cranking up the defensive effort-- before this I had not been that worried on the theory that Harden was pacing himself in the regular season and would flip a switch in the playoffs. When this didn't happen it's a significant piece of into to assess as to what you can and cannot expect from Harden in the future.

His low FG% was comparatively a minor issue. Anyone can have a bad shooting stretch of 6 games.