I'm glad I am not the only one who sees this. It amazes me how so many people are in love with Scola. Chuck Hayes plays All Star level defense, shutting down MVP and All Star caliber players, yet all anyone ever talks about is how he never scores. Then you see Scola out there running away from his man on defense. To say he is a terrible defender would be an understatement. Yet every sports analyst or broadcaster plays him up like he is an All Star. The guy averages 11.8 ppg for crying out loud. He'll flop and draw a charge and Bill Worrell acts like he made the play of the year, then he refuses to call him out when he gets eaten alive on defense.
Scola plays good D when his man has the ball but he has a tendency to peek at the ball and it costs him from time to time. DD
Honestly I can't remember as far back as 90-91, but I can touch on The Kings and last years Rockets. Last years Rockets had Chuck Hayes/Battier starting for the first half of the season. The second half had Mutombo/Battier. Yao is a tree on defense. If you want to say he bothers a few shots, fine, but he should not even be considered in talk of being even a good defender. At best he is below average considering his size. Van Gundy for this very reason always had Chuck Hayes in there as his bodyguard. Last year, Adelman got away with having Luis Scola and his horrible defense in the starting lineup, because Mutombo was so good. This year, the entire front line is a joke. Now for The Kings. That was before the rule change. You couldn't play zone back then and Adelman had some serious offensive threats. You can't even compare that team to the current Rockets team. That team scored so quick, their opponents had to sub in mostly defensive players to try and slow them down OR they blew the other team out and so the white flag went up. So the defensive numbers are inflated. Those teams were notorious for letting their opponents get back into the game, just like the Suns and Mavericks teams that followed them. In the blowout games, their opponent wasn't sending out their top players. It's easy to skew stats that way when they were padding them against mid-level and sub .500 teams. And how many NBA Finals did those Kings teams make it to?
i thought it was hilarious when we came out with a zone against the pistons. it was working okay at first but i think they scored every time we played zone. mostly since rafer alston ended up trying to block rasheed's shot.
You act as if there is some NBA shot blocker orchard out there where teams can just pluck an athletic, shot blocking center as needed. With all of the roster upgrades in the last few seasons, who is out there that is available and affordable?
I'd like to blame Adelman, but he's not THAT bad of a defensive coach... but at the same time, before last night, our defense hasn't been all THAT bad, either. Still... when we have Artest, Battier, and Hayes on the floor, you expect to be able to get stops.
we ran a zone because of the matchup issues. can't have mcgrady guarding wallace. no point. no interior defense. our interior defense hasn't been fabulous at all this season. all we have is yao. no power forward that plays great d. landry can occasionally. chuck does, but doesn't get enough minz....hell. the best defense is a good offense sometimes. we didn't have yao last night, so the pistons should shoot a high percentage...what's the pistons' excuse??? ben wallace was injured??? NO. wait, they traded him. point is, we are better off than a lot, and we are slowly (it seems) getting our full team back together. people, in order to have a good defensive team, u must have a solid inside and outside effort. with artest, mcgrady and battier back, and hopefully yao soon, we should have a solid interior and exterior defense. watch and enjoy.
lol...u just named 3 players under 6 foot 8, 2 under 6 foot 6, lol. stops? hell, u can't always stop a player from shooting the jumper AND blowing by you. something will give. just the way it is....and when you don't have shot blocking, you gotta give them the jumpshot. hence the fact we went to zone. if the pistons were gonna beat us, they were gonna have to shoot the lights out, which is what they did, and they still lost.....point is, doesn't make sense to play man without a shotblocker.
Team-By-Team Comparison - NBA POINTS FG PCT 3PT PCT REBOUNDING % TURNOVERS RK TEAM OWN OPP DIF OWN OPP OWN OPP FT% OFF DEF TOT OWN OPP 1 Cleveland 100.8 90.1 +10.7 47.70 42.37 .37 .34 75.10 .277 .736 .519 13.2 15.4 2 Boston 101.1 91.3 +9.9 48.16 42.23 .39 .34 76.85 .283 .763 .533 15.9 15.7 3 New Orleans 96.3 93.1 +3.1 45.96 45.24 .39 .38 81.08 .244 .747 .497 12.6 13.6 4 Charlotte 91.6 93.4 -1.7 44.64 45.10 .35 .36 74.63 .268 .723 .495 15.4 15.0 5 Detroit 93.5 93.5 -0.0 45.53 44.78 .34 .34 74.26 .257 .739 .495 12.1 12.9 6 San Antonio 96.6 93.7 +2.9 46.19 45.47 .39 .37 76.29 .217 .777 .499 12.1 12.2 7 Orlando 101.7 93.9 +7.8 46.02 42.79 .40 .33 72.04 .240 .743 .499 14.1 13.5 8 Houston 97.8 94.9 +2.8 44.66 45.14 .37 .34 80.62 .261 .749 .515 14.2 12.4 The rox are 8th and 11th in the 2 most important areas ppg and opp fg%. JVG and every defensive coach will tell you the most important defensive stats are opp fg%,ppg. and defensive rebounding. So i dont know where you got this magical number from. By all indications, there rox are allowing 45% shooting which is way too high. People say they are playing at a faster pace, but theyre avg the same amount of point as when jvg was here -1ppg with better offensive players.
According to John Hollinger's stats, Houston is the 6th best defensive team - percentage points behind LA & San Antonio based on defensive efficiency(points allowed per 100 possessions). I would take his stats over any raw stats for a comparison analysis because it takes into account a lot of factors to make them worthy of comparing teams. To access those, go to ESPN's website, find the Hollinger Power Rankings then click "Hollinger stats" next to any team and it will pull up a comparison of all the teams in the league. In a nutshell, according to his formulas Houston is a top tier defense, but are a middle of the road offensive team(ranking around 13-15 in the offensive categories). ....as for the last few games, it's tough to watch us struggle defensively but in the long term I'm not worried about it. Houston has had a particularly brutal schedule in terms of number of games and traveling the first half of the season combined with injuries and new faces in the rotation(Artest, Barry, Wafer. more Brooks). I seem to recall one analyst recently saying that Adelman hasn't had the benefit of a full practice since the season started because of the travel schedule and the fact that he hasn't had a full 5 on 5 lineup to scrimmage with when he actually had the time to practice. Defense is one of those things that requires a lot of reps at full speed to learn to make the right reads - you can't really walk through it and talk it out with half you team bandaged up. I think(and maybe I'm the lone optimist here), that Houston will have more time to heal and run through practices in the 2nd half of the season and hopefully integrate some of the newer faces into the old defensive schemes because it just takes one player out of position to break the whole defense. I think/hope Adelman spends more time focusing on that in the 2nd half of the season and the team hits their defensive stride going into the playoffs. BTW, to those who think the lack of a shot blocker makes us a worse defensive team, I want to note that Houston has never(for at least the last several years) been a good shot blocking team anyway despite being a good defensive team overall. Yao, for all his height is still a relatively slow defender. Houston's strength as a defensive team is in help defense and doing a great job a recovering/rotating - that requires everyone to be in position and make the right reads. If shot blocking is so essential to a great defensive team, then why has Marcus Camby never been on a good defensive team the last decade?
I dont think JVG and all the other defensive minded coaches care anything Hollingers or any guy. When u listen to jvg,fratello and all those guys alway state opp fg%,ppg, and defensive rebounding. I've heard the guys bring up Hollingers effeciency per possession stuff. Call me old school, but in the 3 most important cat's the rox are 8th in ppg and 11th in opp fg%.
Here's what I'm hoping... Due to the lack of a consistent lineup the Rockets are STILL trying to figure out what version of an Adelman offense they will be best at... then if/when they figure it out it has to become second nature for it to be as effective as it appeared for other Adelman teams, like the Kings. THEN, the JVG defensive memories of those who learned it from him can start to resurface. But I think it will be the players who got that D instilled in them from JVG to pass it on to players who weren't here at the time. Don't forget that Adelman pretty much said the Rockets had a good defensive identity when he got here. He's spent his time trying to get his offense (or some version of it) instilled in them as their offensive identity. So... I'm hoping the players figure out the offense, have it become more or less second nature and then realize that defense does win championships and take it upon themselves to be responsible for bringing back all they learned under JVG on that score (or is that nonscore?). THAT will be on them more than the coach.
He got it from looking at points allowed, which as I mentioned earlier can easily be skewed if you have a great offensive team. Great offensive teams like Adelman had with The Kings, often blew teams out and they threw the white flag up by the 4th quarter. The current Rockets team with Van Gundy would easily be #1. Case in point, The Van Gundy/Tom Thibodeau Rockets were #1 with a starting lineup of Yao/Hayes/Battier/McGrady/Alston. That in itself proves that Rick Adelman is full of crap.
...I agree with you - the JVG & Fratellos probably don't care much for the stats guys...of course maybe that's why JVG left shortly after Morey took control. As much as I respect JVG(I truly like the guy and think he was an amazing coach) the thing is neither himor Fratello are coaching. The game is changing and the old school way of looking at stats just isn't as effective anymore. Opp FG% doesn't differentiate between 2 and 3pt buckets, so a team can be a worse defensive team if they allow teams to shoot higher 3pt percentages against them even though they may be good at stopping people in the lane. Opp FG% won't tell you that though. PPG and defensive rebounding are both dependent upon pace. Taken all together, they are a quick way to tell how a team plays compared to some kind of league average baseline, but even at their most effective they only approximate what things like Defensive Efficiency show for certain and certainly they don't allow one to compare their team's stats directly to another. I think the rating of pts allowed per 100 possessions is a straight forward enough stat that even the old school guys could agree upon. It doesn't wash the numbers in any way - it just says if teams are given the same amount of tries to stop another, this is how many pts they allow - plain and simple....it doesn't care how you fast or slow you are, or how many 3s - just a "put up or shut up" stat of how many pts someone scores on you given 100 tries....and Houston is 6th best in the league presently. While that's not bad, its certainly not as high as it has been in the past(1st/2nd) when we were "elite" defensively so the point is we both agree that their defense has slipped, but I think the numbers you are looking at are fooling you into thinking it has slipped more than it actually has. Plus it seems like the league scheduling has been all out of whack this year with teams like LA and San Antonio getting soft early season schedules. I think we will probably finish ahead of SA & LA when the season has run it's course which presently would put us in 4th place defensively if all else holds true.
Pretty much all championship winners play "old school" basketball. Defense 1st. Hell the latest champions employ JVG defense guy. JVG's offense wasn't bad because of his coaching, it was bad because our 4th best offense players was Luther Head. We went into playoff series with guys like Clarence Weatherspoon starting.
I wasn't implying that defense doesn't win championships. My point is just that you have to be smarter about how you look at defensive stats. I don't don't doubt JVG knows a good defensive team when he sees one and is probably one of the best at evaluating defenses and he while he may cite opp fg%, def reb, and ppg frequently, I'm sure he doesn't let that alone guide his reasoning - rather he uses it as a general guideline to supplement what he knows to be true from evaluating. For us to take those same stats and compare teams by them is dangerous and I think JVG would tell us the same thing. ...I probably misspoke - JVG and Fratello aren't out of the league because they are dinosaurs, they are probably out of the league because they want to be for now....but guys like Morey are in the league now because they do look at stats more intelligently and I imagine other successful teams will move in that direction as well. A stat's based approach alone doesn't do anything but to help evaluate and compare based on what you already suspect/know from evaluating, I think that makes it's a very effective tool. ....please don't remind me.
I don't think that's true at all. Morey has said before in interviews that JVG was very interested in the stats side of things. He's the type of coach who is willing to research anything to gain an edge. As for the original question, the problem with our defense right now is familiarity. The line up fluctuation has caused a focus on offense, once it's solidified into a solid rotation the defense will improve.
