nine games left this month 9th Atl W 11th Por W 13th Sac W 19th @Cle W 21 Mia W 22 @NO L 24 Chi W 26 Was W 29 Mem W Should go 8-1, no worse than a 7-2. Which will give Rockets a record of 37-21 or 36-22 Heading into March. My guess is some where around the 4th or 5th seed for Rockets at the end of the month. The 2008 record by the end of the month should be 22 out of 26 or 21 out of 26! Let the wins continue!
That game AT Clevland is worrisome, and IMHO, the Atlanta game is too. 2nd home game after a big win with a team that has good young athletic players. The Atlanta game is a trap game... DD
for us to claim the 4th or 5th seed would involve more than just the rockets winning. it would assume that the other teams start losing, something the jazz, spurs, and lakers probably won't be doing a whole lot of. now if we go 9-0 or 8-1 it would be difficult for those teams to maintain a winning pace that matched our own, but 7-2 probably won't get us higher than the 7th seed.
7-2 needs to be the worst case scenario for the Rockets. I can live with losses in Cleveland and New Orleans. But every home game the rest of this month is against an inferior opponent. And frankly Cleveland is not the toughest place to play. The Rockets have a shot at that one. I won't be pissed over a loss in New Orleans. Although it is worth noting that they're not exactly the best home team, so there's a decent chance at running the table for the entire month.
If you haven't noticed over the past couple seasons, the Hornets have our number. I think they've won like 7 out of the last 9 contests with us.
The Rockets are better than every team they play through the rest of this month. Only New Orleans is even debatable, but I think we are due for that one. We damn well should win every game we have in February.
i agree. david west + cp3 = own us. Let's not forget that peja is shooting lights out, and rasual butler likes to hassle us on the 3 too. They have great play from their point guard and PF, where we're good with yao and a streaky mcgrady. It's just a big matchup problem. I think its important that landry + scola just give d.west a hard time, and rafer just needs to hold cp3 down. let him have his points but stop him from distributing and we should be ok... Hornets are very strong. a few posters here have always said "hornets are dangerous" every year and we always discounted it because of their injuries. Because of their 1 good healthy season, its put them over the top of the west. Yikes. Other than that, I hope we win out the rest of the games. The rockets are starting to get a high level of confidence which is awesome. they can close out games and its something we've desperately needed. With RA stating there's no more excuses, the rockets really have to prove him right by winning out this next month.
Last time Tmac-less rockets almost win vs NO, it is the refs own us. We may have 2-3 loses, cannot predicate which team, it is NBA.
exactly. i'm aware of how tight the west is. we're also only 5 games back of the 1 seed. but 2.5 games back from 5th doesn't mean we just need to win 3 more games to get the 5th seed. it means we need to win 3 games more than the teams ahead of us in the same time span, which requires them to lose. i.e. if we go 8-1 we'll be 37 and 21. SA (5th) and LA (6th) only have to go 6-3 in the same number of games to have better records. And Utah, who is in 4th, and just happens to be on a 10 game win streak, only needs to win 5 out of 8 to be 37 and 21. like i said, 2.5 games is only close if the teams in front of us start losing.
we should shoot for a perfect feb. as mar. and apr. are much tougher. with the west being unprecedentedly tough, we need a cushion as big as possible heading into the last 20 or so games of the regular season.
Not to be too greedy but I don't think we should settle for anything less than running the table the rest of February. New Orleans, Cleveland and Portland are the only teams we're facing with winning records and there's plenty of people that would argue that those teams are overrated/overachieving. Win the games you're supposed to win. Get revenge against New Orleans. Use me again as your annual good luck charm to win in Cleveland. Crush Portland's spirits with another loss to a team in the same boat as them.
I think that all of the games this month are winnable or we should win them all with the exception of cleveland (which I think we should win anyway) and new orleans (see previous side note). with that said, I want to believe we're a good enough team that we could go undefeated this month, but I don't believe we'll do it. I think we'll most likely lose to either new orleans or cleveland again, + one game we shouldn't lose. it's unfortunate but, it's prolly what will happen. I'd be extremely happy if we'd win out going into the allstar break.
realistically we should win all of those games except at new orleans, however, knowing the rockets we're probably going to lose a game to the hawks or wizards. i predict 7-2.
