After tonight there is most definitely cause for concern. But there too much basketball left to be played to harp on this. This team is capable of putting big runs together. We could very easily win the next 10 just as easy as we could lose them. I'm not worried at the end of the year we will be up near the top of the West.
You can start a new thread tomorrow called "There are 78 games left" and repeat your great advice "so calm down and stop tripping".
the point is the rockets have to get things together ASAP, if they dont want to forfeit the season. otherwise, it doesnt matter how many games are left. if you keep doing the wrong things and expect the results to be different, you're getting nowhere. (no first said by me, btw)
79 bottles of beer on the wall, 79 bottles of beer. Take one down and pass it around, 78 bottles of beer on the wall.
its 78 games left, wtf u talking about man??? We going lose to the OKC tomorrow. so u need to stop tripping!
Exactly.. But the only upside is that they seem to be getting parts of their act together. Just not sustaining it The problem with offense only players is that when they are shut down or their shot is off, they have nothing to fall back on..
it's not the 0-3 start. of course 3 losses in an 82 game season won't make or break our season. but you need to understand what's happened in these 3 games. our roster as-is has slightly been exposed and causes a great amount of concern whether we're really a "contender" as previously believed. 1. our movement and execution on offense still sucks. this won't change even once we start shooting better (which we will). we'll forget about this because harden will generate superstar level offense which will carry us to wins...and a few hot stretches to wins that make us believe in something greater. BUT, it'll come up again when we face a team like the warriors. our lack of movement and execution is easier to gameplan for...and we see the result in games 3/5 v. the warriors or even games 1/3/4 v. the clippers (and frankly the third Q of g6 too). we have too many of these lapses, we aren't consistent and that's going to hurt us... 2. over reliant on 3 pt shots with mediocre three point shooters look, idc about mid range shots as much as next guy and i'm not even advocating we do that more (though i think we should definitely be utilizing screens better, similar to the way it fuels the warriors offensive execution). but we don't have GOOD enough shooters to justify this. lawson refuses to take open shots and is proving to be useless off the ball. tjones is laughable as a floor spacer, ariza and harden are hot/cold, but let's say our best ones. brewer is a bad shooter, period. beverley isn't a very great shooter, though he can be adequate at times. thornton could be a nice asset. 3. our energy levels/"cmon guys, play harder" this is another thing we've seen so common with this team. sometimes it looks like this team is just lazy on defense and offense. lot of ball watching, missing rotations, missing cutters, not getting back in transition. i thought last year after we lost the way we did to the blazers, our defensive intensity was terrific. this year, after making it to the WCF, we're too "cool" and think it comes easy forgetting what exactly got us to be in a position to be there. and tbh, harden's heroics covered up a lot of our deficiencies and mchale's. our point differential among the other legit west teams wasn't very good. we won a ton of close games, which is slightly unrealistic. and lowe also mentioned how our 3pt% defense is bound to regress this season as well. hell, i hate to bring it up, but iff spurs don't lose the last game of the season, and josh smith doesn't have a once-in-a-lifetime sort comeback, then we potentially woulda been out in the first round. or even if the latter doesn't happen, we lose in the second round. now i know "if this...if that" can be applied to every team, and we deserve all the credit for getting to the WCF, but there are reasons to believe that we weren't a "dominant" team last season, and a lot of our holes were covered by different circumstances that got us to be in that situation. in another year situation, these "circumstances" that helped us get to the WCF might not repeat anymore...and i think that's what we're realizing. we have big flaws, and i don't even know if shooting better will solve it in the grand scheme of the big picture of winning a championship. worry on people, worry on.
I am so glad the first couple of weeks of the season have no bearing whatsoever on the Western Conference Playoff picture!!! Could you imagine if it did? Phew. We are so lucky that one game didn't separate the #2 seed and home court, and the #6 seed and playing away.
