This offense is straight offensive

We don't have a guy who's elite at facilitating/setting up guys and our two leading scorers frequently iso and dribble a lot before shot attempts.

I'd be open to bringing in someone on the staff to try and incorporate better offensive schemes.

 

Bro just be 100% honest with me and answer it. Should we be worse at making shots than the Wizards? If we don't agree or can't come clean on this, then we're not really going to be able to exchange information about it.

As far as my philosophy:

I view everything as offense and defense because that's how progress towards a title is measured. Our long term goal is top 10 defense and top 10 offense. That's almost all NBA titles. It's never been hard in the NBA for a team to be excellent on one side of the ball, it doesn't require a rebuild, doesn't require high picks. Ime has done amazing with the defense. In fact, he reached the defensive expectations last season and had we not improved defensively he would still get an A+ for finishing top 10 while starting two previously shaky defenders he coached up. We broght him here to be top 10 offense and top 10 defense. What else is there for him to do now but focus on offense?

The defense is set now bro. It's just maintenance and tweaks. Ime has been working on the offense for almost 1.5 years now and there's no improvement other than the guys started grabbing more of the misses his offense is generating. As far as shot making, we're worse than last season although we have a more experienced young roster.

I'm glad we are where we are defensively and all the future improvement should be on offense. So what should we do other than look for ways to optimize what we have since they've said they're not trading?

And if someone feels like they have no idea how to do that with the same players, who cares? There are plenty of NBA coaches who know how to do it.
That's what we're discussing. That's the only relevant team conversation for me at this point. I'm not going to be out here criticizing the rebounding or effort or defense or Jalen's nails or Brooks advanced stats or FVV's height or worst of all... Clapping or saying "just shoot better" to someone who's limits we know as a shooter.

There's no other way forward till they consider trades and Ime is objectively behind on offense. I don't think that's crazy to focus on.

 

"Should we".....? Of course not. But basketball isn't played in vacuum. When we are 2nd in the western conference on 1/6/24, I'm not going to overreact to how our offense ranks compared to wizards when we are on opposite sides of the standings.

Right LONG TERM GOAL, we were never going to solve our issues this season. Why overreact to it?

Sengun is kinda terrible at shooting and finishing at the rim this season.

We have many players who are shooting worse from 3pt. There are no major levers to pull this season outside of a trade.

I also disagree we are done on the defensive end, especially since a trade may very well cost us some of the defensive identity.

Of course there.... this deadline isn't some make or break it date.......

Weird to say.... but just enjoy this season and how we are playing. We simply aren't going to make major offensive changes unless in the unlikely event of a major trade.

 

I think sometimes its a question of toughness/attitude/motivation vs actual basketball strategy.

Because quite honestly Ime from an X's and O's standpoint.... not impressive. Just look at the gameplan last night which was executed well by the players but still was the only reason why that game was competitive. Offensively also it's a complete train wreck from an X's and O's standpoint.

That being said, the players will run through a brick wall for Ime and so far have been playing their butts off, and because this team is as versatile, tough, and athletic as they are, we are able to win games by just out hustling the other team.

So would we be better off with a D'Antoni/Adelman X's and O's type of coach, or are we better off with a pretty lousy strategist of a coach that gets the team to play with toughness, and grit??

In the NBA I say it's usually the latter coach that ends up having the most success. You just gotta hope that at some point the team develops a star alpha dog where the offense ends up finding a way to have an identity through sheer pecking order.

 

this ugly offense is somehow 12th in efficiency

half the time the best offense for us is just grabbing the offensive rebound off the brick

 

That is absolutely true. But it is not JUST because we are poor at shooting - it is also a conscious choice to pack the paint and go for offensive rebounds instead of playing 5 out. That is one of my frustrations with people who keep quoting TS% to say we have one of the worst offenses in the league - that 'logic' misses the fact that the choices are interrelated.

I would LOVE to have better shooters who also can crash quickly from the 3-point line to grab a rebound, but there aren't a lot of those types and we don't have any except maybe Jabari. And given we don't have good inherent shooters, having more people grabbing boards is a viable strategy that at least gets us to the middle of the pack offensively in total.

The question of whether it can sustain in the playoffs when everyone is fighting for boards is fair, though our habit of playing this way will still help.

But the simplistic "the offense sucks because the shooting sucks, so shoot better and we'll be a top offense" mantra is silly. If we structure around shooting and spacing, we will lose rebounding. The net may be positive ... but it also may not.

 

For the most part, people's minds have been conditioned to think of good offense as high TS% even if one doesn't know jack about the calculations for offensive efficiency and TS%. There is just a really high correlation between the two. For the most part, high TS% equals good offense and low TS% equals bad offense. The Rockets are just playing differently than the normal team and it is just difficult to process extreme outliers.


I find it hilarious that the Rockets having an average offense with horrible shooting is seen as bad coaching. The Rockets being coached differently and that coaching is finding a way to score points despite not having shooting. I'd be happy if the Rockets were shooting better, but as you allude to, it will likely take different personel to shoot better without risking the possession battle.

 

I honestly don't even recognize this thing people have where they can't enjoy the record and talk about how things that can get better. I keep hearing it. I don't get it. I want to say it's something the mind makes up, but I don't know enough about it. All I can tell you is today in real life I laughed and jumped and cheered at our record in the standings AND recommended that there are changes we can make. At no point did I stop enjoying the record, so for all intents and purposes you honestly don't have to worry about this with me. Is that fair?

Now on the points:

- Thank you for acknowledging we should be better than the Wizards on TS%. There's no logical reason it should cost us defense to do that. They're letting Alex Sarr act like he's Kevin Durant.

- I'm a person who likes to make progress towards the long term goal. I'm also 100% aware of instances where teams have brought in lead assistants or made tactical changes that led to improvements even if it's not the full long term improvement. Last season, it took us from 10 games below .500 to nearly the playins. That's plenty improvement for me. If you don't believe me I'm happy to plug my thread last season right before we went 6-16 and in that thread you will see all the interviews of Ime - after waiting way too long - saying we will now play fast and take some more 3's. And we did. And it was not world changing, but it was good enough for us to go 11-0 against easy teams instead of 8-3 or something. That's good enough for me. It's also the reason I don't agree with you that we won't make changes to how we run the offense. Ime Udoka has never not made a change to the offense mid-season in his life.

- I'm not advocating for trading any of our rotation right now (nor is the team). The defense is done for this season imo. Even if we end 4th, it will be an A+ for me. The idea of being obsessive about something we're 2nd at and have almost no chance of finishing first. The Chet-less Thunder are as far ahead of us as we are ahead of #10 Milwaukee. We just have to keep running the defense. Paranoia about dropping is not necessary. Only concentration. These players work hard and are coachable. I don't have any concerns here.

- I'm not sure why we would shoot better if nothing changes. Do you mean just a streak here or there? At the end of the day the average is the average, we've taken 1000+ 3PA this season and we know what we are as a team. A player or two may have a better second half, but the team will not unless - at minimum - something minor changes and has a domino effect.

- Even if you gave Udoka 15 G League players and they were horriffic at offense, after 1.3 years of Ime and his whole development staff going hard you would expect they could improve 1% or at least not regress. So you can say it's about our roster but we can't explain why we're not only not improving at it but we've regressed from last season. You would not expect 4 out of 5 starters to regress in 3PT shooting when nothing has changed. I believe Ime's ceiling is higher than this on offense.

This may surprise you but I don't think we're saying different things. If you agree we should be better than the Wizards with this roster while just playing the defense we're playing, we're saying the same thing. The only difference in what we're saying is you believe we should start thinking about it in the summer, but I think there's nothing more important the coaching staff should be thinking about than an offense they haven't been able to improve in TS% for 2 seasons. Just my 2 cents.

 

I just think there aren't a lot of things to be in-season to change how we do offense with the roster we have. Not saying you in particular, but it does there is a bit of scapegoating FVV and Ime over the offense.

I think @Joe Joe had a good response to TS%.

Also, despite the Wizard's higher TS% they are last in Offensive Rating and we are 12th as defined by NBA stats. We average 112ppg and they average 109ppg.

We still have to keep up the defensive intensity and execution so I'm not sure what you mean by done? We are objectively playing harder and executing more on defense this year which I am sure is very physically and mentally taxing. Probably factors in on the offensive side a bit.

I just don't see the Rockets having some major offensive change in season, minor changes sure there's always cat and mouse game throughout the season.

I mean shooting is variable. It's been less than 40 games so I'm not ready to say someone like FVV is washed and can't shoot anymore or Sengun will continue to shoot worse from 0-10 feet.

As far as your math.... that's just a very narrow way of looking at things especially with not even half a season in the books. I'm not sure what you are watching, but we are missing a bunch of open looks around the court. I think the coaching staff is doing a good job of generating open looks in the most efficient spots on the court.

Using the same NBA stats our offensive rating is better this year than last, despite the lower TS% and lower PPG. I feel you are narrowly looking at offense (too much emphasis on TS%), although the Rockets are a bit unconventional in being an average offense.

 

So, I can't change how you perceive it. In your mind you can call it scapegoating, you can call it excuses, or you can call it constructive criticism because the guy is also obviously appreciating the positives and not just dumping on people but offering tactical recommendations. It's up to you. If you want to say I'm randomly holding two people accountable rather than seeing it as I'm placing a specific proportionate portion of the blame on the two people who are most responsible for designing and executing the offense - you can do that too. That's the HC and the offensive captain I'm not sure why that's out of place to you. However, you choose to see it, the content of what I'm saying won't really change.

On offensive rating, it's been discussed. I don't have a problem with our offensive rating. I have an issue without our TS%. The rebounds we're grabbing to raise our offensive rating don't depend much on the system. Rebounds are the least system-dependent thing. The least coach-driven thing. These players are going to play hard and rebound hard in any system, nothing will change what Tari/Amen/Adams/Bari/Sengun can do in rebounding. So that rebounding that's climbing us ten spots in offensive rating, it can take us from 22nd to 12th rather than 25th to 15th or whatever.

A player or two can get hot or cold. A team cannot swing its % that heavily after half the games have been played. You can verify that by looking for any instance where a team doesn't change anything and the rotation as a whole just gets materially hotter for half a season. I couldn't find any example, happy to know different.

We are missing wide open looks, I'm not sure how that's making your point rather than mine. We're the worst EFG% in wide open looks in the NBA (52%). We're not getting SO MANY as people like to say, we get the 19th most in the NBA. We were way more efficient last season (56%). We've regressed at that too.

Again, I feel like you're upset about when I'm saying it rather than why. You'll want this to be addressed. When it's addressed you'll be happy. I'm not sure why be against talking about it early when it's routine for Ime to make such a change mid season. We're on the same team, you just want to take your time and maybe you weren't expecting our guys to be this good defensively but as you know I've been saying our core is exactly this good since we fired Silas and everyone was down on them. So I'm just happy we're meeting our potential defensively and now we only have the offense to make major improvement in.

 

Offensive rebounding rate is having the players, the coach leaning into playing those players together, and how the coach let's those players go for rebounds. Also, offensive rebounding is only part of why the Rockets get so many more shots per possessions. Playing FVV a lot at PG is a coaching decision that many on this board are against. FVV's slow pace can hinder getting good shots early (i.e., TS%), but it drastically improves the number of shots taken (low turnovers with FVV) and ensures rebounders are down the court.

Outside New York prior to this year, there hasn't been a team go for offensive rebounds in a long time. Most coaches would stagger the Terror Twins. Ime plays them together mostly when FVV is off the court. The Rockets offense is generally slightly worse when the Rockets are going all out for offensive rebounds (i.e., terror twins), but the offensive rebounding helps it from going completely bad. The defense also makes it worth it to play Tari and Amen together.

Ime is definitely making coaching decisions that hurt TS%, but help offensive rebounding rate. He's also leaned into playing FVV a lot on ball even if FVV's shooting has changed this a little lately which keeps turnovers down.

 

Yes I genuinely understand, this is an old trick. You'll find coaches like JBB and JVG using it. Thibs the only one who grew up.

Missing the 5th highest volume of shots in the NBA is a bigger contributor to rebounding than Ime. Players the biggest. Rebounding is the most effort thing of all. The coach has some portion of input on everything, none less than rebounding. There's no pioneering going on here. Ime is begging them to grab their own misses while he figures it out. He does it with a tough face but let's be real, they are saving his ass. If they "only" rebounded like last season, that's still an excellent rebounding effort but we'd be f*cked on offense right now.

I don't understand what you're comparing it to. I compare it to this same team running a different offense - and that's not a huge sample so I can't be 1000% sure. The only sample we have is March last year when a weakened Rockets team steamrolled an easy MONTH in which everyone thought they would have a losing record without Sengun. Not the most convincing sample, but it's a conversation starter.

For all we know, if Ime went a different direction, the offense could improve more than the defense. So our options for example something like

#2 defense and #15 offense (1st rebounding); or,
#4 defense and #11 offense (2nd rebounding) > this would be a better record

To argue that if we risk some more turnovers then the defense will decline exactly inversely and proportionately is a flat out fallacy. That would only happen if the offense and defense are both 100% optimized - a laughable notion for our offense to be honest.

Good job Ime stopping the bleeding. I'm not saying that dismissively, I swear I mean it. But a band aid is a band aid.

And I'll say it one more time before I take a long break from this topic: he's going to do it mid season and we're both going to cheer and you'll forget we ever had this conversation.

 

..and for all we know, the Rockets have the 12th best offense, 3rd best defense, are 23-12, 41 in the last 65, and probably have improved by the most since he was coach. The Rockets have greatly exceeded my expectations. Every statistical model I've seen basically expects regression (i.e., it is very unlikely a different direction would have helped). Ime stopped the bleeding, got the Rockets to get up, and has started gotten the Rockets into causing the bleeding of other teams. On 11th best offense, the Rockets play the Wizards tonight and the Lakers play the Mavericks.

I expect the Rockets TS% will improve as the Rockets have had some bad luck in that department like they've had good luck elsewhere. I don't think think Ime is going to bench FVV or stop going for rebounds. With the Rockets personel, I do not expect the Rockets to have an above average TS%. I have my doubts on how the Rockets will look in the playoffs, but I think the personel and the coaching look very good regarding winning in the regular season. On the playoffs, I think the Rockets need either Jalen Green to show up or to have a better on ball guy (i.e., FVV can still help to keep the turnovers down, but they Rockets have someone that can get the TS% up).

Ime's coaching is not why the Rockets don't have a Top Tier playmaker to get the TS% up.

 

Yes luck can appear any time, but personally I don't wait for it. As I discussed in the post you quoted, there's no validity to the claim that we should be as bad at the Wizards at TS% because we don't have a "top tier playmaker". IMO this is an excuse. We're getting a top tier player when we can, maybe this summer or next deadline or the following summer who knows. I'm not accepting regression or 0% improvement in TS% except in the first year.

 

If anything, pur average offense efficiency is excellent coaching. A more offensive minded coach would just be playing lineups with more scorers/shooters at the expense of the defense.

Ime has this team 2nd in the west because he's getting them to crash the glass and add possessions so he doesn't have to sacrifice defense.

I've asked this question before, but...what do people think the offensive rating should be for this team of brick layers? If you had your favorite offensive minded coach what rating/ranking could he get THIS team to?

 

I just don't feel the offensive is the issue you think it is, especially when the team is objectively better.

We are all fans, doesn't mean the Rockets having another gear is realistic.

I disagree rebounds are the least dependent system thing. Rebounding on the Rockets is part of the ethos the coaching staff instilled. This current iteration of the Rockets is going to play defense at a high level and prioritize possessions.

And I don't think it's something the coaching staff is doing intentionally so I lean towards the worst EFG on wide open looks as "bad luck" rather than structural.

No. Your argument and reasoning just doesn't really move me when I see this team overachieving on a defense first mindset. Of course I want them to get better offensively, but I also don't see major levers we can pull change things offensively that don't involve a trade or injury.

 

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I think it's pretty clear from your post that your basing it on feelings and so I understand why you believe these things. Genuinely.

 

I mean I do have the luxury of pointing at the record.

But your insistence on TS% and the Wizards just falls flat and that isn't feelings.

 

So basically, not having the the most player driven thing that drives an offense, having one of the best offensive players, can be held against Ime, but hey his offense is only working because he has great rebounders.

 

Yep, pure stats show the offense is not bad and not close to the Wizards. Expectations by most (statistical models and people) for the season are that the Rockets offense would be bad.

Dunks and Threes had the Rockets as the 16th best offense entering the season, and that is the most optimistic preseason view on the Rockets offense that I saw.