Rockets have best transition defense in last 20 years

Wow, that gap to second place. The definition of allowing no easy buckets.

 

That's crazy. I love it.

I think Ime might be able to coach a little defense, and kudos to our young players for buying into it.

 

The roster is built with a bunch of high energy wings and Udoka is galvanizing their energy well. It's great. Still searching for a consistent scoring guard (or two) and backup C. But so far hustle has kept us in games.

It reminds me of the transition Rockets after Mac and Yao, with Dragic, Dalembert, Courtney Lee, Parsons, Scola, Lowry.

FVV is Lowry, Brooks is Lee, Eason is Parsons, Sengun is Scola, Green is Kevin Martin, Jabari is 2Pat. (Speaking of the current year only, not career trajectories. Hopefully.)

 

I give our coach so much credit for this! We needed him back when Harden got all lazy on defense. Right now we have 4 players in the top 23. That's awesome!

VanVleet #1
Eason #6
Brooks #22
Sengun#23

https://www.nba.com/stats/players/defense

 

You just compared our franchise players to role players. What is wrong with you?

 

Sorry, there is no team in NBA history with this many franchise players so I can't draw any parallels from normal teams

 

Wonder how much of this is just the insane 3 point opponent shooting luck we’ve had, should be interesting to see what happens when shooting comes back to earth

 

And now you see why Ime didn’t want Harden. No way we would have this strong of a defense in transition with Harden. That was literally the weakest part of the team defense with Harden

 

Talk about glass half-full guy. Ever think that maybe our defense has something to do with the 3-pt shooting as well?

 

Ime reset the culture in one year, that is impressive. Reminds one of what Kelvin Sampson did at UH.

if this team makes the playoffs, how has to be coach of the year!

 

Very little, there’s mostly no correlation for 3 pt shooting %, mostly just variance/luck

 

Championship confirmed! Defense wins championships!

 

I think it is the beauty of Rockets squad.

I hate "franchise player, cornerstone, generational talent,.." definition. There should be only one praise :"Team first player".

Rockets have a chance to build around "Team first" quintet: JGreen /Alp/Tari/Bari/'23 pick.

 

Amazing stat, considering how slow the NBA was 20 years ago. Wait, does this cover the "slow" era (pre-2004, I think)?

 

You're about to offend some "old" people.

Was Hakeem slow? Was Jordan? Was Magic?

 

Let's make a deep dive into what this stat means, since we are historically good at it.

It is looking at transition points per 100 plays. So it is a combination of how many transition offense chances you give to the opponent and how well you defend them. When you say best transition defense, I actually understand the second part: How well do you defend when the other team is on transition offense.

The rockets should be quite good at not letting the other teams have transition offense, since FVV is very low on turnovers and Sengun does a lot of playmaking as a center. Even if Sengun turns the ball over, typically turn over from the center results in a transition offense less than a guard turn over, because the ball is closer to the basket and guards are in a position to run back. It turns out that the rockets give the least transition offense to the opposing teams, 15.9 per game(unfortunately nba.com doesn't have per 100 possessions for this stat)

https://www.nba.com/stats/teams/transition?TypeGrouping=defensive&dir=A&sort=PPP

15.9 is good but not historically good.

The second part is how well you defend when you face a transition offense. Again the rockets lead the league at .92 points per defensive transition possession. This is historically good, looking at last 9 years I didn't see a number below 1.02.

So we are historically good at defending the transition offense, and also best in the league to keep opponent's transition offense attempts to a minimum.

Of course there is some typical twitter tricks. The first thing that catches attention is it is pts per 100 plays, rather than the usual per 100 possessions. A possession ends when the other team has control of the ball, during a possession you can have many plays, for example you can have 2 plays in one possession if you get an offensive rebound. Using possessions is more reasonable imo since a transition play can only occur when you lose possession, it doesn't really matter how many plays you have during that possession. But the more plays you have, the lower transition points you will concede per 100 plays, and this is not really related to how well your transition defense is. Rockets are second at transition points allowed per 100 possession.

and of course the second trick is to compare your performance in 22 games to performances over 82 games. So the conclusion from the tweet is correct but not for the right reasons

I will try to remember to track the two stats I mentioned, rather than the stat in the tweet, as the season goes on and see if we continue to do well.

 

Thank you Coach!

 

If they can only have the same energy and focus on their transition offense.

 

aww c'mon defense doesnt matter in today's NBA... its all about scoring... you gotta disregard defense and put all your assets and efforts into scoring points! That's the ONLY way to achieve any success in today's NBA!

what? that's not right?

but... but... thats what folks on CF told me when Hard-on was basically a turnstile...

hmmmm... idk i mean how are we gonna get enough possessions to score like GSW if we're playing defense? thats gonna slow the game down...


lol