I mean they were passing to Jabari in the middle to facilitate an advantage and while he is a good mid range shooter, he isn’t a great passer and he is one of the guys who should be stretching the defense. It’s a misuse of Jabari’s skill set but they did it because positionally he is the 4 and typically that’s the high post guy. Sengun seems like the perfect zone buster guy in the middle - can hit a little floater or mid range jumper and great court vision. Then you try to get guys like Jalen and KJ in the wings so they can also act as cutters in the dunkers spot depending on who comes out to defend Sengun in the high post. Jabari and KPJ are running back and forth between high 3pt to corner 3pt spots trying to overload when appropriate. Every spot has a read to make based on the defense - it’s a pretty simple system and Houston has the personnel in the starting lineup…probably screwed in our 2nd team units though - Nix has no place on a court trying to beat a zone. …but again we are like 10 games into this team seemingly having no plan at all when a zone is thrown at them. Clearly it’s not going away.
You can beat a zone with ball movement and this team sucks at that, not just KPJ but Green and Gordon too.
What's more likely - career NBA coach doesn't know how to do something you can look up on the internet and that's taught at all levels, or KPJ, Nix, Green and the rest of these guys don't have the resolve to listen or learn or apply these lessons in a game.
Of course it is, they've been doing it since around the time we first got Harden. Our rebuild is 2 years old compared to 10 years old for theirs...
I was at the game the other day with my kids and wife - had decent seats. None of them know much about basketball but 2 of the 3 commented that Eason doesn't appear to know where to go on the court because his teammates were always correcting him. This seems to jive with the recent revelation on one of the national podcasts that the reason Eason slipped in the draft was because scouts noted that he couldn't remember plays....I love Eason but that explains a lot about his style of play and why he always seems to be coming up with the ball in these broken play situations...because he probably broke them and has been doing it for so long that he is actually good at making something out of nothing. That could explain some of the second unit offensive woes.... Similarly I've seen a lot of finger pointing between KPJ/Green/Jabari on some of these dribble handoffs. Hard to tell who is in the wrong but it's fairly common. I thought Jabari and Green were more the game film types so I'm inclined to say it's KPJ who seems like he is really settling into not playing within a team concept, but I don't really know. Maybe it's Jabari still learning the playbook or maybe it's Green just trying to get touches. I'm leaning towards KPJ though - Green and Jabari both seem to be fairly demonstrative when it happens like they think they know the right answer - KPJ doesn't seem like he has a POV in those scenarios. Nix just doesn't belong on an NBA floor to be honest. Not a good shooter, not a good finisher, only average as an NBA passer for PG(which admittedly is a need we have at the moment). He has a heavier frame which he uses well when defending players defenders who want to bump him off, but otherwise he doesn't have lateral quickness or great end to end speed which is the skill utilized by most offensive players he would be defending.
You are overcomplicating this - When you can't shoot from outside the opponent has no reason to come out of that zone. When the defense is packed in a deep zone no amount of cutting is going to break it down, there's no space - you have to hit shots to extend the defense to create the space for the cutters. That's generally why zone defenses don't work in the NBA because NBA shooters are too good .... this team is just that bad. Tyty .167 Sengun .174 JC .214 Nix .308 Green .312 KJM .313 KPJ .322 Jabari .343 EG .354 Mathews .370 Tari .381 Team .330
Yeah I get you - what I’m saying is, you aren’t going to hit shots to extend the defense if you take a unfavorable situation that Houston is already going to struggle at by countering with one of your best 3pt shooters at the free throw line. FWIW, I think Houston has more than a few decent 3pt shooters…but few shooters on this team receive clean passes so as a result the defense is able to recover/players have disrupted motion making shots harder than they have to be, etc. The poor execution, poor fitting offensive system, and lack of true PGs on this team artificially handicaps their 3pt abilities.
Your eyeball test doesn't match the actual stats .... this offense generates a hell of a lot of open / wide open shots, particularly from beyond the arc and in the mid range to the tune of the 4th best shot profile in the entire NBA, the three teams ahead of them are veteran laden teams two of which currently have top two records in the league and the other won the Finals last year - Boston, Milwaukee & Golden State. Poor shooting & losing have really skewed the views of the majority of fans .... It's a results oriented business.
I’m most definitely not a majority of fans. Would love to know where you are seeing those stats. Not saying I don’t believe you, but with all stats, understanding how they are derived is an important context to make sure you aren’t drawing the wrong conclusions from the data they present. There are all kinds of biases and assumptions built into the methods of gathering data sets even if the statistical model is irrefutable within its own context. I will say that while I have been critical of the lack of anything more than a light system to get favorable matchups from Silas, I have seen the team make real strides in getting their own shots within that system. I think earlier they were struggling trying to get open and I think would have benefitted with more structured plays to get them easier offense but I do see how they could be better in the long term learning to exploit matchups…but I do have PTSD of these ball dominant Harden and Luka offenses that ultimately fail against sound defensive teams. I would like to see a balance but I guess if the goal is be bad this year, maybe it makes more sense long term to have the players struggling in the deep end as long as there is someone making sure they don’t drown or pull someone else down while they flail. It’s been risky though…
There are several sources of this particular statistic ranging from the NBA.com to multiple independent sources and even data collected here on CF where @DaDakota has a shot quality chart where shot quality was discussed in the game threads. I'm sure he can provide a link to the data thread. The one thing all these sources have in common is they show the Rockets at or near the top in terms of quality of shot taken. The teams that are ahead of the Rockets in terms of shot quality are the two best records in the NBA and last year's NBA Champs - Boston, Milwaukee & Golden State. Last year's team also ranked very high in this metric.
Yeah, I did check that thread out - admirable effort but tough to manually keep up. I really wish we could get access to that second spectrum data which would show that stuff updated from game to game. I got NBA league pass and Home Clippers games are sponsored by AWS who is showing second spectrum data OVER the gamecast and it’s fascinating because you see that data of shot quality in real-time while they dribble around the court and see the shots color coded from red to green as they take a shot. It’s incredible stuff to see in real time whether a shot was good(shades of green) vs bad(shades of orange or even red)…as I recall - Houston’s shot quality in THAT game was pretty bad - LOTS of reds.
I did poke around NBA.com to try to find some of these stats - didn't see anything specific to shot quality(please point me somewhere specific if you know) but if we are judging shot quality by distance from nearest defender, the stats are something like - the Rockets take the 7th/8th most shots in the league with a defender within 0-2ft(7th) and 2-4ft(8th) of them and rank 21st and 19th in shots between 4-6ft and 6ft+. To your point, they are a really bad shooting team across the board and underperform regardless of the context but to add a little context to what types of shots 3 different champion contending teams generate: Team - Relative Frequency of shots Guarded Very Tight(defender within 0-2'), Tight(2'-4'), Open(4'-6'), Wide Open(6'+) Hou - 8.1(rank 7th), 43(8th), 28.2(21st), and 20(19th) Mil - 6.9(tied 21st), 36.2(29th), 30.6(9th), 26.4(5th) GS - 6.9(tied 21st), 37.5(26th), 32.3(2nd), 23.3(11th) Bos - 7.4(rank 14th), 39(24th), 28.1(22nd), 25.4(7th) ...again these are just talking about what percentage of the team's shots fall within a defender some distance from the shooter but I think we can safely assume the more shots you take with a defender further away, the better your team will shoot even if Houston relative to some expected outcome of league average is probably worse than the average shooting team. This is kind of the point of building a team centric offense - if you work to take good shots, you raise the floor of your entire team. The only real exception to this rule I noticed was that Brooklyn for instance probably takes more contested shots than your average contender(it's debatable that they are a contender) but they actually have two of the players who can take tough shots and not have a huge drop off in shooting percentages. I think these stats kind of jive with what the eye test tells me - Houston generally takes more contested shots(51.1% of their shots) than good teams like MIL(43.1%), GS(44.4%), and BOS(46.4%) do and since they are a bad shooting team generally the combination makes them one of the worst offensive teams in the league. Appreciate @DaDakota 's charting efforts and I think he was definitely charting something slightly different but I wouldn't think Houston's numbers above from NBA.com would be such a contrast if Houston was generating decent shots like you suggest. Maybe it's a small sample size issue but Houston on the whole definitely takes more poor shots than most teams AND hits them at a lower rate compared to other teams.
