Coaches need to do a better job holding players accountable. When Harden is sitting there making no effort to stay in front of people and going for that reach around steal as they blow by is doing no one any favors. The coaches need to hold him accountable when he does that so he realizes that it is not okay.
While I do agree that in the immediate Everyone is to blame, as this progresses through the season, the Responsibility has to fall to the Coaches. A player may be responsible for their own bad habits, but it is incumbent on the coach to Change those bad habits. For example, we can blame Harden for not building good defensive habits, but we knew he had them when we got him. We were signing him for his *existing* skills and flaws. However, once he arrived the blame for those continuing bad habits falls on McHale and Co unless you believe that Harden is not coachable. This applies to team defense as well. Players thrown to together as a team have no substantive defensive habits. It is incumbent on the coaches to develop those habits. In other words, I put it on the Coaches since Harden, Lin, and Beverley are well into their 2nd year on the Roster with Parsons on his 3rd year on the roster. That is MORE than enough time for the Coaches to be well on the way to developing solid defensive habits.
Both. With this same roster, JVG would have a good defensive team. At the same time, JVG sacrificed too much of his offense to get his good defensive teams. If the players were more intrinsically committed, coaches wouldn't have to make as many trade-offs between the offense and the defense.
it is mainly the coaching and poor defensive principles and not holding your negative D players like Haren accountable. It has got to be the coaching. Adelman had a better defense with Luis Scola and 6'6" Chuck Hayes up top and KMart and Bud on the wings LOL
Statistically, we have the third best defense in the league. Dwight's impact has been incredibly underrated.
Look.. in the end, its the players that play, but like you said, from the beginning its on the coaches to develop those habits with their players. This isn't something that is new. We saw it all year last year, and that's reason why that team won only 45 games when really they had the opportunity to win closer to 50. The telling sign is the lack of progression defensively. If you have the best defensive big man in the game... there are no more excuses. If it was just one game then I think it would be easy to say that its a young team, and they had mental lapses, but this is the 4th game this year already where their poor team defense has blown an easy win. At the end of the day, its a problem with preparation & execution.... and I do agree with everything you are saying here about the coaching... but its not like its JUST their fault. However we know how this goes in professional sports.... coaches always... ALWAYS get the blame. Owners and GM's aren't going to fire themselves, and they can't just trade their star players once a year for new ones. Coaches however.... are very replaceable. I DO NOT think its a good idea for the front office to fire McHale during the season, but its not like Les and Morey are dumb enough to think that the Lakers game, the Toronto game, the Clippers game, and now the Mavs game are acceptable for an organization that wants to maintain any pride in being a top notch franchise. The pressure will be on the players in the meantime, but dont think for a minute that if this continues McHale wont be in the hot seat come June. Its just that fans are going to think its better to fire him yesterday... which I dont agree with.
rockets give up the 2nd most points in the league..they shouldn't even be close to being considered having one of the best defenses in the league.
I'm not sure I totally agree on this part. I do agree that it's too early to fire McHale considering we've already started the season. However, I've never been opposed to changing coaches mid-season if they under perform. The problem here of course is that we suffer a bit of the "Clippers" problem. We're loaded with talent, and the problem with lots of talent is that it can obscure deficiencies in management a la Vinne DelNegro. So, given the talent of this roster, it's quite possible that McHale could sneak in under the radar and continue being the Head Coach for multiple seasons even if he turns out to be a sub-par coach, simply due to our having one of the more talented teams in the NBA. I'm hoping that Alexander and Morey are smarter than Sterling and will spot this and act appropriately once we reach the mid season or at least the end of this season. However, I do think that it's not an illegitimate fear that because of how talented this roster is, we may have a good record in spite of the Coaching and trapping us with McHale and Co even if they end up being sub-par coaches.
link? currently the rockets are 29th of 30 in opponents points per game and 20th of 30 in defensive rating
McHale needs to go. We will win many games and make the playoffs in spite of McHale's coaching or lack thereof and not because of it which is always a bad sign This is a super talented roster being held back by a clueless incompetent head coach
No, we are not. Rockets ranked 19th in defensive efficiency, allowing 1.021 PPP. Even Lakers are a better defensive team than us.
Points per game is really misleading since we run one of the fastest paces in the NBA. Also, even points per possession is an incomplete picture since it's an overall statistic versus a granular statistic. For a more complete picture it's better to look at a variety of team statistics. Houston Rockets Opponent Floor %age - 15th Opponent Fastbreak Efficiency - 3rd Opponent Shooting %age - 3rd Opponent 3pt %age - 20th Opponent 2pt %age - 3rd Opponent FTA/100 possessions - 14th Opponent Non-blocked 2p% - 4th Defensive Efficiency 19th Opponent Percent of Points from 2 pointers - 5th Opponent Percent of Points from 3 pointers - 26th Opponent Percent of Points from FT's - 12th http://www.teamrankings.com/nba/team-stats/ So, what I gather from this is our Paint defense and Fast break defense is actually Elite. Our ability to avoid fouling is mediocre. And our 3 point defense is terrible. We're guarding the paint and inside and getting killed from the arc. That's going to take some work...
I feel like if you had a coach who was more defensive minded and actually challenged the players to play some defense that this team would be in a much better defense. I remember a few years ago when Doc Rivers was coaching the Celtics and they had just gotten KG and Allen, Doc called them and Pierce into his office and told them straight up, If you guys don't play defense and buy into the defensive mindset, y'all cannot win a championship. We need a coach who tells the guys something like that. The problem is I'm not sure who is out there that we can get that preaches like that. JVG? We need a defensive minded coach though that is for sure. These guys know how to get their points already so an offensive coach won't do much.
Coaching. Harden doesn't even try on D. So what does the coaching staff do? They put Harden on a spot up shooter and still give him 40s. That's like giving you son a PS4 for burning down your house.
Alot of people asking for JVG back forget how much people complained about how boring his teams are to watch where defense is the #1 key. Always keeping the opponents scoring to the 80-90 range but limited offensively.
Because we were so great when he was gone, what with Anderson going for only 35, not the 81 he usually drops.
Rockets Jekyll and Hyde of syndrome continues. For the first few games we were an outstanding second half team and terrible at first halves. The trend completely reversed itself. For the last 3 games, we were +48 first halves. Second halves, -16. The difference for the two halves in 3 games? 64 points!
