The Rockets are 'playing like crap' and not just because James Harden is hurt
En route to a No. 1 seed in the Western Conference last season, the Houston Rockets didn’t lose their fifth game until Dec. 20. They’ve managed to reach that loss total through six games before Halloween. Through the first two weeks of the NBA season, the Rockets have arguably been the league’s biggest disappointment. They rank 24th in defensive rating after clawing their way into the top 10 last season, and the offense is even worse, ranking bottom five this year following an historically great campaign.
Rockets forward P.J. Tucker had one word to describe their dreadful performance in a 104-85 home loss to the Portland Trail Blazers that dropped their record to 1-5 in the early going: “Embarrassing.”
Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni had a few more, via the Houston Chronicle’s Jonathan Feigen:
“Last year, we played well. Right now, we’re playing like crap.”
The good
There is reason to be hopeful that the Rockets can again be the contender that challenged the Golden State Warriors just five months ago. They finished the 2017-18 regular season with a 43-3 record when James Harden, Chris Paul and Clint Capela all shared the court, and that success translated to the postseason, where it took an injury to Paul in the conference finals for their title dream to be dashed.
It may well carry over this season, as Houston general manager Daryl Morey had hoped in a recent appearance on Adrian Wojnarowski’s podcast, but a suspension for Paul and an injury to Harden have contributed to four of the team’s five losses. Harden will reportedly test his strained left hamstring on Thursday in hopes of being cleared for one or both games of a back-to-back against the Brooklyn Nets and Chicago Bulls this weekend (two more reasons this ship could be righted in the short-term).
The offense should come, even if over the summer the Rockets essentially turned Trevor Ariza, Luc Mbah a Moute and Ryan Anderson into James Ennis, Michael Carter-Williams and Carmelo Anthony — three guys who combined for more than 100 fewer 3-pointers at a lower percentage clip than their predecessors last season and now offer opposing offenses the opportunity to sag into the spacing.
Harden, Paul and Eric Gordon have too good a track record to continue shooting a combined 40 percent on their 50 field-goal attempts per game. Anthony’s 3-point scoring (37.3 percent on 12.5 shots per game) should theoretically improve once Harden and Paul are both on the floor to help facilitate his attempts. And Clint Capela continues to be an effective roll man, averaging around 15 points on 60 percent shooting. A progression toward their collective mean should translate into elite offense again.
The bad
But there are also reasons to seriously doubt whether the Rockets can come close to challenging the Warriors again, reasons we covered in-depth when suggesting they may have already reached their peak as a group, reasons that have revealed themselves to be of far greater concern a fortnight into this season. Namely, the defense, and, more specifically, the effort. Both have been an abomination.
As Anthony said, via Feigen, “The games we’re losing, once it goes bad, it goes bad. We have to change that. We have to have some sustainability out there. We have to have some force and some fight.”
Over a span of 6 minutes, 15 seconds sandwiched around halftime on Tuesday night, the Blazers scored on 12 straight possessions, including seven makes at the rim, transforming a nine-point advantage into a 22-point lead that ballooned to 28 midway through the third quarter. It was a clinic on how not to play defense.
Portland’s backcourt felt comfortable forcing Capela into switches and attacking the long-armed 24-year-old. Opponents are shooting 61.1 percent against Capela inside of six feet early this season, essentially league average, whereas he was a rim-protecting beast a year ago, challenging more shots in that range than anyone else last season and holding foes well below their season averages. Capela stuck with Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum on the perimeter, but the Blazers had successfully lured Houston’s most formidable defender 20 feet from the basket and forced mismatches everywhere else.
And once the ball is moving, the Rockets look completely lost. Seriously, check out these rotations:
Anthony, Gerald Green and Marquese Chriss are the worst offenders. It’s unclear whether any of them knew who they were supposed to be guarding in any situation. They left shooters wide open on the wings in transition. They wandered from their men on the perimeter to hedge in the paint, only to offer no resistance when their teammates needed help most, lacking both discipline and effort. Unfortunately, these are the problems teams have come to expect when they incorporate Anthony.
This was all after D’Antoni said the Rockets needed to make some defensive adjustments after a blowout loss to the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday in which “our defense was awful” and former Rockets guard Patrick Beverley could be seen laughing at Houston’s ineffectiveness on the end of the L.A. bench.
The Rockets are allowing 112.5 points per 100 possessions when Chriss is on the court and 116.5 with Anthony on the floor. They have wisely only played the two of them together for six minutes. The hope for the Rockets is that the return of Ennis from a hamstring injury eats into their floor time, and all the newcomers improve as they grow more comfortable with Houston’s switching defensive scheme.
The ugly
The concern is that the retirement of defensive architect Jeff Bzdelik was Houston’s biggest loss of the offseason. Not only did the Rockets replace Ariza and Mbah a Moute with players who aren’t as capable of executing their defensive game plan, they don’t have the coach who installed the plan in the first place. When you combine that with poor effort and communication, it’s a recipe for disaster.
“I hate to talk about last year anymore because it’s gone, it’s not the same team, so we have to figure it out, just like we figured it out last year,” P.J. Tucker, one of few Rockets whose defensive effort you can never question, told The Athletic last week. “It wasn’t pretty starting out last year either.”
Except, through six games last season, the Rockets were 5-1 and ranked top 10 (or a tenth of a point per 100 possessions away from it) in both offense and defense, showing the foundation of a team that would win 65 games. They lost six games by more than 10 points all of last season, and this year that number is already at four. Granted, the reigning MVP’s return to the lineup will mitigate some of that.
Still, Tucker is right in this regard: This isn’t the same team, and they do have to figure it out, because if they don’t, Houston didn’t just peak last season. They’ve fallen off a cliff. If Morey knows he’s holding a losing hand again, his offer of four first-round picks for Jimmy Butler may have been the tell.
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Ben Rohrbach is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach
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