Instead, Hayes got to exhibit the full arsenal Wednesday: the ballet-like footwork, the lower body strength of a man that a bull couldn’t cow, the instinct to be in the right spot (at all times). The most perturbing thing about Hayes’ classic night is that it will only be immortalized by those who watched, who saw an agitated Stoudemire try to push his way around the court because he couldn’t glide as he normally does; otherwise, to the box score crowd, Stoudemire did his thing and put in his work with his 25 points (on 21 shots) and 5 rebounds (in a game with almost 100 possessions for each team). Everyone else, though, saw it. Saw Stoudemire get called for a few charges for which he didn’t expect a man to be in place. Saw Amar’e padding his stats with a couple of easy buckets long after Houston had this game comfortably in hand. Saw the Knicks keep feeding their superstar and his continual inability to deliver, instead coughing up the ball to the aggressive, deft hands of Hayes. Saw Chuck Hayes win, decisively and visibly, if only for a night.

While Stoudemire’s numbers for the bout might not actually look as bad as his game did, there are plenty of Knickerbockers whose performance in last night’s game can be adequately summed up by their abysmal numbers in the 15-point-loss. Wilson Chandler and Danilo Gallinari combined for an absolutely brutal 8-24 line (the exact same line as the team’s horrid three-point shooting for a team that places second in the league in made threes), ably contained by active feet from Luis Scola, Shane Battier and Courtney Lee all night. The Knicks’ wispy front court plays directly into the hands of a tricky Rockets team looking to abuse teams whose interior is similarly crafted around players strong on intuition and skill and low on brute strength and raw size; because of this, the Rockets ate the Knicks’ lunch inside the paint, carving New York up for 54 points in the lane (compared to the Knicks’ 36 on a quite small Rockets front court). Ronny Turiaf, the Knicks’ primary rim protector, played 20 inconsequential minutes that saw him aimlessly wondering how Jordan Hill had stolen his swag so quickly, as the big Frenchman watched Rocket after Rocket bully their way past him for a layup. Turiaf and Stoudemire combined for 11 boards, one less than Hayes’ total himself, and could not keep Houston from getting anything, inside the arc (even the Rockets went 8-31 from deep in this one), it wanted.

In fact, this game’s score almost seems unrepresentative of the kind of drubbing the Knicks received from Houston, as both teams’ superior offenses supposedly were to make this one a shoot-out. Alas, the three-point line was not friendly to anyone, and while the Knicks took even less efficient jumpshots and running takes sort of around the basket, Houston took to the paint and got easy, often uncontested shots, posting a healthy 109 points per 100 possessions. Still, it was the sudden emergence of a Rockets defense, which seemed the stuff of myths up until Wednesday’s game, that made this one so one-sided. The Knicks, proud owner of the league’s sixth-most efficient offense, were held to a downright anemic 94 points per 100 possessions, with only a few Stoudemire highlights to show for an embarrassingly simplistic offensive game that the Rockets kept sniffing and snuffing out. Last night, an elite offensive force entered Toyota Center and found itself controlled and humbled; for the Rockets, in this season of 125 opponent points and 20-point fourth quarters from opposing stars, one big defensive stop will do, at least until the next one.

Houston Rockets 104, New York Knicks 89

Box Score

Knickerblogger

On to the not-so-daily links:

• Carmelo Anthony still has not been traded. Just wanted to put that out there before anyone tired enough of Melogate wanted to give up on reading this bullet. In yesterday’s somewhat shocking news, Nets owner Mikhail Prokhorov announced that his team would no longer be in the trade talks for Carmelo Anthony, leaving the basketball world to wonder exactly what his motivations are. Over at Nets are Scorching, while the pain of losing even a chance at Anthony would seem most painful to New Jersey devotees, Mark Ginocchio applauds Proky for his iron-fisted approach, seeing some leadership where it seemed only tumult remained. Yahoo! Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski, on the other hand, saw the Russian owner’s move as one less influenced by the exercise of control and more affected by a desperate attempt to save face after the outright failure that was New Jersey’s haul from the free agent class of 2010 and an already doomed season. Still, there are those like Tas Melas of The Basketball Jones who believe that even this announcement is posturing meant to better the Nets’ situation in the tug-of-war for the rights to Anthony. Both the TBJ guys and Wojnarowski both passively mention Houston as one of the emerging possibilities for a Nuggets front office that may be desperately grasping for a new deal in which Denver can ensure some return for Melo, so there’s that for you folks looking for a tinge of optimism in this cynical imbroglio.

• As all viewers may have noticed, Patrick Patterson is special. You know, “prettiest jumper any human has ever seen on a rookie”-special. Ian Levy of Indy Cornrows has also noticed Patterson’s brilliance while creating a study on individual player point differential, which shows how much a player is scoring in any particular spot on the floor as compared to what the average NBA player is expected to accomplish when shooting from those spots. Though his very small sample size disallowed him from actually joining Levy’s list of rookie leaders in point differential, had Patterson played more than 9 games at the rate at which he is currently shooting the ball, P-Pat would have easily led the rookie list. Read all of the Patterson talk and the rest of Levy’s fantastic league-wide breakdown of players’ point differentials over at Hickory High.

• When a sports announcer forgets he is just a sports announcer.

• Even though Mikey Proks may have just pulled the soon-to-be Brooklyn New Yorkers (eww) out of the biggest trade talks this season, the Nets keep getting pulled back into transaction talk because another big-time expiring contract/upcoming free agent wants out of Newark: Troy Murphy.

• And Blake Griffin and the Clippers lived happily ever after, forever and ever and ever and ever. Unless he opts out.

• So, it turns out the Rockets have caught that they are not so great at executing in the fourth quarter. Jonathan Feigen elaborates in this article for the Houston Chronicle that features a lot of truth coming out of the Rockets’ mouths: “‘When you have a team such as ours, we have to rely on movement to get guys shots,’ forward Shane Battier said. ‘We struggle to get Kevin Martin the ball at the end of games. The pressure is high. We haven’t found that really effective way to get him the ball down in crunch time. We have to run our cuts harder, set tougher screens, just be tougher. That’s how we have to win games. We continually have stagnation the last four minutes of ballgames. We have to find ways to get better shots when the pressure is rising.’”

• Rockets fans wary of curses upon this team’s fragile, easily-injured head should probably note that while nobody of import can seem to stay healthy in Houston, Portland apparently has laws prohibiting healthy knees.

• While I feel deeply ambivalent about my personal place in the Free Darko-inspired spectrum of liberated fandom, one thing that I truly love about being a loyal fan to a team is the sincere attachment that comes from watching someone play, and usually play well (they are NBA players), 70 times a year. In Sacramento, Carl Landry is simply a scoring, undersized power forward that provides a little bit of stable offense off of a young bench. In Houston, Carl Landry was CARL LANDRY, DESTROYER OF WORLDS. The myths we as fans get to build around individual players because of our private, intimate knowledge (derived from games watched worldwide) exemplify exactly what I want as a fan from having a favorite team. Reading an article on 48 Minutes of Hell, I recognized that feeling in this paragraph about Antonio McDyess, who apparently may get dealt from the Spurs: “He’s Serge Gainsbourg, stubbled, disheveled, and in love. McDyess is the serpentine rise of smoke from Tom Waits’ cigarette. He’s Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine—the especially long version that forgets you’re listening. Antonio McDyess is all these things and a Quitman smile.”

• If you own a domain name like www.clydefrazierapproves.com, you probably like Clyde Frazier a lot and are reasonably awesome. As it turns out, the man who operates his blog StylePoints out of that domain, Jason Johnson, does and is those things. Johnson wrote an NBA style-heavy rundown on how today’s ballers compare to Clyde’s (ongoing) legacy over at Free Darko that should absolutely be read.

• As further proof of Jason Johnson’s skills, I’d like to point to his piece at StylePoints focusing on a problem he’s recognized in both sports fans and society: “As a society, we’ve become obsessed with indignation and outrage.  At a time when our political discourse has devolved to the level of playground taunts and outright libel, we hold onto the notion that ours is genteel society.  This fuels our culture of false indignation.  We simply must be offended.  The problem lies in the fact that this sort of false indignation somehow develops into very real resentment. I’m by no means advocating public nastiness.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I’m just saying that there are much better reasons to dislike a team or player than a little bit of **** talk.”

• The Dallas Mavericks have never not tried to go all in since Mark Cuban has run the show. The list of imported All-Stars that have littered (and a lot of the time, that is basically what they were doing) that locker room during his reign is ridiculous: Antawn Jamison, Antoine Walker, Dennis Rodman, Jason Terry, Caron Butler, Jerry Stackhouse, Jason Kidd, Tim Hardaway, Nick Van Exel, Tyson Chandler… if they were good somewhere else, Cuban made damn sure they were marginal-to-good in Dallas. After Butler’s possibly season-ending injury, it seems the Mavs are on the hunt again, this time with Stephen Jackson and O.J. Mayo as prey (and Carmelo Anthony as the White Whale).

• And on one last inconsequential note, Lil Wayne also is hating on Miami, but for much more practical reasons than the rest of the country: LeBron and Flash won’t talk to him.

As a person with both a job and a DVR full of professional sports games, I am constantly begging to have my soul crushed by some student (I sort of teach) flippantly offering anything he or she knows to create a little conversation, inadvertently ruing my day… and life. One such jerk did such in my last 20 minutes on the clock, throwing out a “Hey! The Rockets won,” more excited about having a thing to tell me than about  the actual thing he told me. After stomping around like an idiot for 20 minutes and getting home, I turned on the prediction-stained game and, not sure if my prior knowledge contributed to my feelings, saw one of the most predictable quarters of basketball I’ve ever seen in the fourth, preceded by a pretty ugly, hair-pulling catfight of a battle.

Scott Skiles has brought a bit of Mike Fratello to the new decade, specializing in the plodding, defensive-minded kind of game that occasionally bludgeons the opposing team into submission. His teams are always quite talented defensively, which this team certainly is, and the Bucks placed the Rockets on lock for the first half of damn near unwatchable ball in this game. Luis Scola, though finishing with a respectable 19 and 14 line, started this game off going 1 for 9 as Andrew Bogut controlled the paint, even with one arm. Everyone in the Christmas colors moved their feet and stayed in front of their men, and just as all the Bucks played superior defense, they all couldn’t muster a bucket to save their lives in that first half. Both teams went a combined 0-11 from behind the three-point arc in that 78-point half of basketball; thankfully, the teams literally switched balls at halftime and got in what would qualify, in this miserable game at least, as a “groove”.

For the first time in league history, Corey Maggette didn’t seem to be putting up enough shots, going 11 for 18 as the Bucks’ only semi-respectable option in the second half. Had he thrown up a few more ridiculous fadeaways and steady-but-slow takes to the bucket, the fourth quarter might not have been the most phoned-in quarter of ball in this young Rockets’ season. The teams combined to score 37 in the quarter in which no one took over or threatened or did much of anything of note. And the Rockets wouldn’t have had it any other way. The team’s star, Kevin Martin, actually got some fourth quarter minutes and, throughout the game, performed like the star he is (racking up a monumental 18 free throw attempts in the process). Houston also saw a massive surplus of offensive rebounds in the game from such varied sources as Scola (5), Shane Battier (3) and Jordan Hill (4), beating the Bucks on the offensive boards by 10, a defining stat of this game.

Watching Houston power through another ill-prepared Eastern Conference team reminds me of exactly how tenacious and persistent the Rockets are (who would have guessed the Rockets would have won a game in which they shot 9% from deep by nine?), the exact lengths they will go to to win a game. For a midday-yawn of a holiday game, the effort was more than enough.

Houston Rockets 93, Milwaukee Bucks 84

Box Score

Bucksketball

On to the links…

• I’m not entirely sure if you, dear reader, are still salivating over the prospect of Carmelo Anthony in Rockets red nor if you should be. I do know that people still like to talk about him a LOT, and there are lots of talented writers, like Henry Abbot of TrueHoop, pondering that exact question of how much Anthony is actually worth to the endless suitors he has clamoring for his services. Abbot’s piece is fantastic, and he even takes the time to mention a very trusted individual around these parts as an authority when it comes to valuing Anthony accurately: “There is no case to be made that the Rockets don’t appreciate the lessons of modern basketball analysis. In assessing Anthony, it’s worth noting that Morey has repeatedly spoken about how elite scorers are necessary to win titles. It’s also worth noting that Morey has reportedly been dogged in his pursuit of Anthony. If true, it’s a powerful message that at the highest levels of statistical analysis, Anthony can indeed be seen as worth a maximum contract.”

• The NBA’s greatest freak show, the Miami Heat, have been a little saddled by the absence of the best player on the planet (I’ve heard the Cavs are having similar problems), and tonight, they’ll engage a division rival, the Atlanta Hawks, with a resurgent beast in Joe Johnson (putting up 29 points per game on 52% shooting and 42% from three in January), who almost certainly would be guarded by LeBron were he available for action tonight (which he might be, although Chris Bosh is not. Gasp! Depth issues for the Heat! Who would’ve thunk it?). Kevin Arvonitz and Tom Haberstroh break down why Miami might be staring down the barrel of its first four-game losing streak of the year.

• John Wall: May I have another, sir?

• Man, LeBron is probably going to catch flak for this one. How does it seem that everything that NBA players say or do to one another ion private seems to be getting leaked to the press? Either players need to keep tighter circles and tighter lips, or something fishy is happening in NBA journalism. Hold on; I think I heard Chauncey Billups’ text alert go off.

• If Blake Griffin isn’t your favorite player not playing for your favorite team, you probably don’t watch a lot of NBA basketball.

Though Durant and Westbrook were transcendent enough to eventually the carry OKC past the Rockets for the first time in Houston in five years (Durant posted an unholy 30 points on 17 shots with six rebounds while Westbrook “underperformed” by dropping 23, 13 and eight on the very suspecting heads of the Rockets), Houston played one of its best games of the season in the losing effort, emphasis on the word “effort”. Despite the Thunder occasionally holding true to the five-men-on-a-string ideal of defense, hassling the Rockets’ wings incessantly even without causing many turnovers, the Rockets consistently found ways to produce Wednesday night, even as the offense had trouble all clicking at once. In the two games since Martin has been on the pine, the constant motion of the Rockets’ offense has been tempered significantly as the man who used all of those screens and cuts so often, Martin, isn’t in action; as a result, Houston’s offense has gotten much simpler. And much better.

After posting 122 points per 100 possessions in Monday’s upset over Boston, the Rockets got a very healthy 113 per 100 last night due to the changed responsibilities in the absence of the team’s best player. Kyle Lowry has not only been the primary ball handler as he was long before Aaron Brooks’ return, but he’s also been able to create more by penetrating without fear of dragging his defender into the neat pockets of space Martin and Luis Scola need to get their very accurate shots off. The result? The Rockets shot almost 54% from inside the three-point line, including a big night from Scola in which he channeled all of his World Championship powers, pretended he was representing Argentina (hmm… I guess he always is, especially with that hair) and exploded into Jeff Green’s face for 31 points and 11 boards.

When Nick Collison replaced Green and mitigated Scola’s damage, another large fellow with a sweet shot took up the burden; Patrick Patterson has been a godsend, missing little and making mistakes even less, and his automatic offense helped Scola and the Rockets curtail the double-digit run the Thunder had put together entering the second half.  His one miss on the night was a little disheartening, one of the wide-bodied, precise engine-of-a-man’s only post-ups since being recalled from the D-League, and the jitters may have gotten hold of him, leading him to throw up a series of unconvincing fakes and half-pivots before releasing a well contested hook shot that careened high off of the backboard. Still, this Rockets team symbolized hope and persistence after a string of injuries so nasty any other team would likely buckle. Even in games in which they are given so many opportunities to collapse (the Rockets were down 11 points in the last four minutes of this one, yet they somehow cut this to two with 20 seconds left. Unfortunately, entering a free-throw shooting contest with the Thunder is like slapboxing with Mike Tyson), the Rockets fight, the Rockets stand, the Rockets bleed from their lips and smile.

When teams shoot 66% in the later half of a game, teams facing the former generally lose. The Rockets were no exception, but they’ll be damned if they didn’t try to become one. And no one can fault them for trying.

Houston Rockets 112, Oklahoma City Thunder 118

Box Score

Daily Thunder

On to the links…

• Royce Young also wrote some post-game thoughts in a fantastic write up on Daily Thunder that features some ridiculous, awesome one line observations about Houston: “And (Scola’s) hair seriously looks like the worst wig in the world. It’s like something you’d find in a drama classroom closet under a bunch of musky costumes.”

• Toward the end of Jonathan Feigen’s blog about Houston over at Chron.com, he gives a pretty hopeful assessment of the Rockets’ chances to get a certain frustrated Denver Nugget, even if hopeful means “having a shot in hell”: “…the Rockets can pick up Anthony and Al Harrington or Renaldo Balkman without costing the Nuggets spending a dime in paying corresponding salaries, just by using the final months of Yao Ming’s contract (with insurance picking up the tab) and either the Trevor Ariza trade exception or the disabled player exception the Rockets expect to receive. If the Nuggets prefer, they can get some short-term help from the expiring veteran contracts of Jared Jeffries, Shane Battier or Chuck Hayes… The Rockets remain a long, long, longshot, of course. And in trades especially, if you’re not first, you’re last. Still, the Rockets keep lurking, knowing that sometimes things change.”

• A few days ago, Bethlehem Shoals linked to the website of professor Yago Colás, a University of Michigan professor who has been teaching a “Cultures of Basketball” course for several years at UM. His basketball criticism stands as some of the most nuanced, insightful and human sportswriting, if it can be denigrated so much so to describe it as such, that I’ve ever read, and his diary of his first day of the course this semester yields some of the funnier neurotic rambling I’ve read this year: “I take off my hat, then feel self-conscious of my shaved head and put my hat back on. Will I be cooler with the hat or without it? If I was Ray Allen it would be okay to take the hat off. If I was Ray Allen it wouldn’t matter if I had the hat on or off. If I was Ray Allen I wouldn’t be here at all.”

• In what was the coolest thing ever, the Clippers hosted the Miami Heat Wednesday night and handled them with aplomb, coming out on top 111-105. In the midst of a furious comeback, LeBron James seemed to tweak his ankle and likely sent half of the country into a fit of schadenfreude-produced glee. Of course, as it turns out, he’s fine and literally hit a three on the same play in which he seemed to get hurt. Because he’s still LeBron, and even after all of the awful PR and overdone marketing, we are still witnesses. God, I hate saying that.

• GAH! THERE’S A BEAR IN A BRUINS BEANIE! AHHH… oh. Right. The big shamrock and all. Got it.

That’s all. Thanks for reading, folks.

Analysis and the not-so-daily links can be found after the jump.

The Boston Celtics intimidate like few other things, much less sports teams. Even without the rabid loon that is Kevin Garnett on the court, the team brims with so many All-Stars, cagey veterans and Rajon Rondos that opponents oftentimes find themselves marveling at some former childhood icon rather than putting up the requisite effort needed to fill the same role for a new generation of basketball fans. The C’s airtight defense and constant molestation allow no team the ability to ease into open shots or good driving lanes. Even the parquet floors at the TD Garden evoke its predecessor and remind those walking along it to look up and be swathed in the team’s endless history (of ridiculous success). Walking into Boston and standing up to its presence and cachet can be daunting, making a team in the midst of a five-game streak of failure missing its best player for the first time all year just about damned before ever getting to step on that gorgeous hardwood. Too bad Aaron Brooks cares about none of this because he cares about nothing. Actually and more accurately, he cares intensely about showing how little he cares for intimidation, pre-game betting lines or basic logic; he intended to win regardless of any of them.

On defense, even without the more-man-than-child, bulging-eyes ferocity of Garnett, Boston swarms and pushes its opponents, easily playing the most aggressive, offensive defense in the league. The same was true Monday night, as the Celtics were good for 13 swipes, a number that would pop off of the page were it not for the measly 16 points Boston created from the Houston miscues. Instead, the Rockets often used Boston’s belligerence against the Celts, getting 26 free throw attempts (and making good on 20 of them) and putting every one of those wide-bodied Boston bigs in foul trouble. The charity stripe treated Houston well against Boston, but so did nearly every facet of an offense that clicked like never before this year Monday night. Houston dropped 122 points per 100 possessions against the best ranked defense in the league, going 50% or better from both inside and outside the three-point arc and doing no wrong. Patrick Patterson continued his award tour by never, ever missing shots (except for that one time he did, when Jermaine O’Neal spiked his layup back to the three-point line, a favor Pat returned later in the game to Notre Dame alum and hilarious-looking fellow Luke Harangody) and being just about anywhere a young, titan-like 4 should. While Patterson got his Luis Scola on from 17 feet, Jordan Hill and Jared Jeffries caused hell against the Boston interior and on the offensive boards, combining for six caroms on that end. Those three large men’s constant activity made the Rockets look like a team full of mobile, long bigs for one of the first times in a season that had seemed defined by the athletic pivots of the league reaching above the Rockets and doing as they pleased. Chase Budinger similarly impacted the offensive end, dropping a very healthy 13 points on 6 shots, but his timid defense allowed the Celtics’ wings to get easy foul calls and layups time after time (my friend watching the Boston broadcast mentioned that a mantra of Boston Celtics play-by-play man during the game seemed to be “Going at Budinger again” in that thick New England accent). The defense still seemed particularly strong for Houston against what has been a pretty efficient offensive attack by the Celts, holding the mythic speed of Rondo in check by giving up only three assists to the young headbanded general in the first half (even if he ended with 12) and denying the C’s at the rim often enough to make them settle for jumpers more often than not.

All of this said, the Rockets still had opportunities to hand this one away, and instead, the team put together a fourth quarter for the ages, starting it off 10 for 12 from the field. Though it may just be hopeful conjecture, a great deal of the team’s poise seemed attributable to the presence of Brooks, the tiny, ruthless sniper, who took jumpshots without hesitation or conscience. His 24 points on 15 shots were not often off of screens or even plays drawn up for the returning combo guard; instead, he created looks out of thin air, plugging away without considering the bodies flying toward him or hounding after his dribble. His instincts simply have been completely absent from a team searching for identity throughout “clutch” moments.

I went to the Saturday night game against the Jazz with my little brother, and while walking into the stadium, we noticed someone practicing jumpers in the gym visibly located below the street level inside the Toyota Center. Upon closer inspection, there was Brooks, prepared to play but not deemed active, readying himself for his return to the big time. There was no easing in this time, no limited bench minutes. He started in place of an injured Kevin Martin, matched up against the greatest shooter of our time and gladly jumped onto that brightly lit, storied parquet. And he couldn’t have cared less about any of the circumstances.

Houston Rockets 108, Boston Celtics 102

Box Score

Celtics Hub

On to the daily links…

• Rockets fans’ interest in Carmelo Anthony and his ongoing brouhaha have considerably waned since his place in Houston shifted from “potential franchise savior” to “dude who might indirectly help the rockets pocket Anthony Randolph”, but the latest news in Melogate, that he may be dealt along with Chauncey Billups (and, very weirdly, Rip Hamilton) to the Nets (Russian billionaires are a persistent bunch, except that there probably aren’t a “bunch” of Russian billionaires), may or may not be of great interest to Rockets fans, depending on their feelings on what this team as is currently constructed should be trying to achieve. For a fan in rebuild-mode, waiting for more playing time for Patrick Patterson and Terrence WIlliams and maybe even a blow-it-up style trade, this move could frustrate given that it may be the death knell for the New York Knicks’ chances at getting Melo, thus making a shipment of Randolph for their own first-round picks (or even one of Houston’s) significantly less likely. For those hoping to see Houston creep back into the playoff picture after the team’s closest rivals, the Portland Trailblazers, twice bent the team’s will over the last week, this move could completely remove the Nuggets from the playoff picture and allow teams like the Grizzlies and Rockets a chance at the eighth seed that was looking less like a viable option by the day. Once again, Houston diehards might be cheering for Melo to find a new home; only this time, they  would probably want that new locale to be far out of the Western Conference. Well, that is unless the Rockets have actually found themselves back in the hunt for the White Whale of Baltimore. Ugh. This story reads like a conspiracy theory from a bad movie (say… Conspiracy Theory?).

• The human reality of sports dictates that a great deal of sadness toward the ends of the great ones’ careers will likely have to come along with the brilliance that proceeded it. As basketball fans, we’re likely very lucky to see our deities stay transcendent as long as they do; Holly MacKenzie of The Basketball Jones writes earnestly and fantastically about this subject by zeroing in on one of our greatest, most divisive fading stars.

• The Rockets aren’t particularly young. They also are not particularly old. Also, Houston is the 16th best team in a league of 30. When asked their favorite foods by the media, the entire team calmly stated, in not too high or low a tone, “Unflavored oatmeal”, in unison.

• So, it seems people, including LeBron James, are starting to figure out that the King has become the league’s premier villain. I am not among the crowd who believes the league needs a bad guy because when I watch James or Kobe or old videos of Jordan, I’m a bit too awed to boo or heckle. Still, the black jerseys? The combination of superpowers? The ability to take out a team of warriors single-handedly? The Death Star looks just as cool these days as when I was a kid, halfway hoping Luke would just get beaten and stop whining already.

Thanks for reading, peoples.

Analysis and the not-so-daily links can be found after the jump.

Kevin Martin does not fare well in comparisons, and it’s a shame. Martin’s skills deviate so far from the norm, his best abilities so unlike those whose point totals look similar, that he cannot be juxtaposed with much fairness against the rest of this league’s dominant scorers. His points come from sly nudges that move his body directly in front of officials and dead-eye three-point shooting given just a few too many millimeters of space, so even when he pours in 45 points (on a mind-numbing 18 shots), Martin shocks all looking at the box score for the first time after the game. Yes, Martin’s stardom and stature in this league feel particularly nebulous in a league where men like Carmelo Anthony and Kevin Durant can appear to throw in 40 even when scoring half of that, and even last night, on a night that so clearly should have been Martin’s, an obnoxiously obvious presence emerged as the game’s model of dominance, the unflappable, steady LaMarcus Aldridge, massacring a rice-paper-thin Rockets frontline for the second time in four nights. Nothing could impede his progress near the basket as the Rockets’ post D proceeded to make him look like David Robinson, and like that, the game was out of the Rockets’ hands again, damned by a fourth quarter spent watching Aldridge without consistent double teams and their own shots clank off of the iron (there was a nine-minute-plus-stretch in which the Rockets missed every field goal until Kyle Lowry dropped a three with three seconds left in the game; as fans, we often remember a folding of our own team as more dramatically bad than it was, but this fourth quarter actually reperesented a collapse for the ages. Zero field goals for more than nine minutes in the fourth quarter of a close game? How does that even happen?).

What an ending. A 13-point fourth quarter lead evaporated. 45 points wasted. A night of miserable defense on a team that couldn’t hit an outside shot to save its life (Wes Mathews and Rudy Fernandez, likely the Blazers’ two best outside shooters this year, combined to go 7 for 23). Another clinic by a Portland defense not necessarily known for its guile. An even better example than the loss to Denver of exactly how dependent this team becomes on whoever possesses the hot hand (only one Rocket not named Martin scored in double digits). One more night for Patty Mills’ highlight reel. A few minutes for Terrence Williams that showed fleeting signs of hope for a team mired in its own lack of it. 16 turnovers ruining any semblance of offensive fluidity.

Ugh. It was the kind of ending that didn’t deserve full sentences to be written about it. The Rockets will have to forget about it if they hope to survive the juggernauts on their upcoming schedule, trying to erase what should have been Martin’s night to remember. Let’s hope his shooting hand has a selective memory.

Houston Rockets 100, Portland Trailblazers 103

Box Score

The Portland Roundball Society

On to the links…

• The NBA has had enough. Seemingly every player, coach, owner and mid-game peanut peddler have been accosted by the great knower-of-all-things Phil Jackson, and all of those guys have decided to shoot back. Adrian Wojnarowski first reported on a bit of verbal sparring between the greatest coach of all-time and my favorite person of all-time, Ron Artest, allegedly stemming from Jackson’s constant poking at Artest through the press; later this week, Mavericks owner Mark Cuban got a few shots in at Phil’s relationship with his boss’ daughter, Jeannie Buss, not necessarily talking about anything in particular but getting to use the phrase “boy-toy” to describe a 65-year-old man after the sextagenarian had questioned the Mavs’ ability to withstand Caron Butler’s season-ending injury. Now, the stale, hilariously dull icing has been put on the cake with former Laker Vladimir Radmanovic’s retort to a Phil Jackson comment made months ago. Beside my somewhat affinity for Vlad because someone once told me that I looked like him, I would like to note that the score is now rest-of-NBA 3, Phil Jackson 1,552,421,250. But everyone else seems to be on a run here.

• I don’t know if you, good reader, have been watching many Clippers games, but please, for the love of God, Buddha and your future/existing grandchildren, watch as much of this as you can physically stuff inside your eyeballs and temporal lobes.

• After all of that talk about Melo and creating one’s own shot, here are some interesting numbers that actually delineate the game’s best shot-creators (the players whose effective shots develop out of their own doing as opposed to a teammate’s assist).

• Bahahahaha… never don’t be Ron Artest, Ron Artest.

• I did not get to catch yesterday’s aging-powerhouse deathmatch between the Spurs and Celts, but 48 Minutes of Hell seems quite perturbed about the end of the nail-biter. I, on the other hand, am mostly gawking at the Celtics’ ungodly field-goal percentage (61%) and offensive rating (115 points per 100 possessions).

Thanks for reading, folks. See ya’ll soon.

Analysis and the not-so-daily links can be found after the jump.

When Tom Haberstroh earlier this year wrote a piece for ESPN Insider detailing the very legitimate reasons that Carmelo Anthony does not reside in the same echelon as his fellow draft classmates in Miami (even Bosh), the Internet and its assembled minions scratched and clawed at his numbers, trying to reconcile the notion of Anthony the dominant scorer that can readily be seen on NBA courts and the inefficient gunner Haberstroh portrays. The one number I felt Haberstroh did miss was the one that did in the Rockets last night: 8.1, the massive number of free throw attempts he has averaged per game this year. In the article, Haberstroh often gives Anthony the backhanded compliment of obviously being able to get his shot off no matter the situation (because he never seems to stop shooting), but that skill appeared very real last night as the Rockets desperately tried to get the ball out of his hands as he barreled toward the bucket like a robot enamored with LeBron James circa 2007, inevitably smacking his hands before they raised up to push in another floater off of the backboard. Monday night exhibited exactly why even a stathead like Daryl Morey would clamor for such a unique scoring presence, as his own nonpareil of efficiency, Kevin Martin, looked impotent and flustered without his usually sugar-cane-sweet jumper falling. Neither Anthony nor Martin left the Pepsi Center with a sterling presence in the box score, but the battered Baltimore native got to leave with another W in his pocket, bought and made at the charity stripe.

While Anthony stood out as the primary catalyst behind the nuggets’ late run that sealed Houston’s fate, the all-around scoring of the Nuggets’ roster also exhibited the fickleness of the Rockets’ attack. Though the Nugs shot a very average 46.7% from the field, the entire starting five posted double-digit scoring, while the Rockets’ first quintet minus the consistent rocks that are Luis Scola and Kyle Lowry produced a staggeringly low combined 16 points. I’m sure Rockets fans remember that completely bizarre playoff loss from several years ago in which only four starters scored at all as the rest of the roster put up a combined zero points; that was sort of like last night, except Scola and Lowry are nowhere near as good as Yao and McGrady. While they may be no poster boys for the next movement in Rockets history, the Lowry-Scola tandem has weirdly become the Rockets’ go-to transition team, a couple of rolling boulders waiting for a crack in the interior to get utterly smashed. Scola, despite his lack of athleticism or explosiveness of any kind, may be one of the league’s best fast-break finishers, almost never flushing it through but always perfectly placed for a lay-up off of the break (and even when he isn’t, he finds remarkable ways to put in his lay-ins off of the glass because that’s just what Luis Scola does); when the Rockets ran last night, things opened up everywhere. The Resurrection of Chase Budinger continued as the fluffy-headed shooter dropped 13 points on 7 shots (while nicely dishing out three assists along the way) and several of his looks came off of fast-breaks or quick sets coming out of transition; Courtney Lee launched what has to definitely be the Rockets’ best regular season dunk on a breakaway, twisting his right arms across his body to punch one in over the arms of the blurry-watercolor-mess that is Chris Andersen (anyone who wants to watch this can click on the highlight package above, provided as always by our good friend Huay-Bing Law).

The Rockets got themselves a decent cadre of highlights in Denver, but it was Anthony’s boring, repetitive walks up to the free-throw line that the Rockets couldn’t overcome in a fourth quarter in which Martin could not even be used for fear of another avalanche of airballs (alliteration!). Another game, another failed attempt to stop a star-driven team, leaving the Rockets wondering where they will find that gem with a flash of brilliance to place alongside these very dependable rocks.

Houston Rockets 106, Denver Nuggets 113

Box Score

Roundball Mining Company

On to the links…

• I know it seems silly, but I am quite happy that Allen Iverson still has more money than God, or at least says he does.

• Hey, the Rockets have been the 16th best team in the league over the last calendar year. That’s perfectly mediocre! If you can’t hear it, that’s the sound of forehead smacking, later followed by a head banging against my wall.

• More links to come later in the day. Until then, thanks for reading, folkers.

Analysis and the not-so-daily links can be found after the jump.

Sunday night, everything seemed a little too perfect before a ball ever touched the Rose Garden’s hardwood. Houston entered the New Year as one of the league’s hottest teams, 8-2 in its last 10 games and finally back at a respectable .500, and seemed primed to overtake the flailing Portland for the 8th seed, a sweet, reassuring sight in the nightly standings had the Rockets pulled out this vital, rare road win. The NBA even televised this one nationally for the world to see Houston’s return to relevance. But of course, the Rockets have never been fans of formulaic plots and came out Sunday night with all of the energy of a band of depressed teenagers with lungs full of clove cigarette smoke. Competitive spirit lasted a while out there; Luis Scola even played some stellar defense in a first quarter that saw the Rockets look starkly aware of the hell that LaMarcus Aldridge could cause them. Then it all unraveled.

Everything just looked a bit jumbled at first; even as Scola pushed Aldridge off of the block, his help defenders allowed open shot after open shot for a Blazers team that wasn’t even up to making them initially; instead, the offensive rebounds marred perfectly good defensive possessions early (the Blazers led the Rockets in the offensive caroms by an eight to three rate in the first half). Still, while the offense never exactly hummed in this offensive clunker of a game (Houston put up a downright embarrassing 95 points per 100 possessions last night), the Rockets did not look damned from the outset. No, that part came along when Aaron Brooks and Patty Mills first matched up toward the end of the first quarter. Immediately, the little Australian looked infinitely more interested in this game than did his ailing, diminutive counterpart on the Rockets; while Brooks may only be credited with three miscues with the ball, his knack for driving into traffic and sloppily passing to big men near the three-point line cost the Rockets several possessions. Brooks had appeared to be emerging from the throes of his ankle injury in recent efforts against Miami and Toronto, but in this one, he looked positively blitzed by the electric storm that was Mills time and again. Brooks found himself lost behind screens, getting beaten to passes and stepping off of a man with a filthy jumper, none of which number 0 showed too much interest in fixing in the second half. Of course, to blame this fiery plane crash on Brooks alone feels not only unjust but silly given that Mills only put in 14 points on 12 shots; no, this game was not lost by the comparatively slow and inactive feet of Mr. Brooks. The game was lost in the paint (where the Rockets were bullied 46-28 by Rip City) or, more accurately, above the rim.

Despite a height increase in its starting center of about five inches in recent days, Houston looked tiny out there Sunday. All of the plays that began the massacre occurred where only tall men reach: via alley oops and rebounds (the Blazers held the edge in boards 47-40, numbers padded after an inconsequential 4th quarter). Aldridge went backdoor over and over again for flushes handed to him by Marcus Camby (the consummate, ideal veteran player… rebounds like a demon-spawn’s grandfather, defends the paint and even sees the court like no other Blazer, as evidenced by his jaw-dropping eight assists from the pivot. Just masterful), and when Aldridge wasn’t plunking it down on the Rockets’ heads himself, he found a number of cutting Blazers wings coming around a series of interior screens that left an already discombobulated Rockets team wondering when this damn thing would be over. By the time the Rockets looked up to notice the 11-point deficit in this typical-Nate-McMillan-plodder, the Blazers had Houston reeling, uncomfortably trying to force balls inside and giving up 22 fast break points because of lazy passes that were robbed, an insurmountable number in a game this slow.

Besides a wasted first half of brilliance from Chase Budinger (being active, looking for his shot, stroking jumpers… all the things he has not done this year) and a first look at Terrence Williams that made him look to be at least partially the multi-tool player he’s been touted as, this one left little positive to glean other than that Portland has, for once, become an occasionally fearsome defensive team. Instead, like the Rockets already had by the middle of the third quarter, this one will be better left forgotten until Wednesday, when these two fight again for what remains of their seasons haunted by injuries, as always. If this game proves at all prophetic, that one may be even more damning for the Rockets’ chances. But then again, when have the Rockets ever followed the storyline superimposed upon them?

Houston Rockets 85, Portland Trailblazers 100

Box Score

The Portland Roundball Society

On to the links…

• While the Boston locker room may be full of veteran leadership and brilliant defenders, no fan can forget its truly abundant resource: raw, unchecked crazy. Hmm… how could that supply be increased exponentially with a veteran minimum contract?

• Ugh. You know the feeling when your team has the kind of night when everything goes so well that your usually reserved old vets crack a few jokes in the post-game interviews? That was the kind of night the Blazers had against Houston Sunday: “And then there was Camby. The player who seems to make everything click for the Blazers had 13 rebounds, eight assists, three blocked shots and one exceptional highlight. Early in the first quarter, before the Blazers had established a dominant tone, Camby rebounded a Jordan Hill miss and drove the length of the floor in transition, finishing the head-shaking sequence with a no-look pass to Aldridge for a dunk.  Yes, it was that kind of night for the Blazers. ‘I just was going with the flow,’ Camby said. ‘I got the rebound and I saw (Luis) Scola was underneath the basket, so I was just trying to push it. And anytime I’m on the break, I’m looking for LaMarcus. Us bigs got to take care of each other.’”

• I always feel like artists never appreciate the appeal of tininess. That said, I am obviously thankful for contributor and Garbage Time All-Stars‘ proprietor Josh Frankel’s miniature portrait of Bron Bron, conveniently subtitled for those unaware of LeBron James.

• Sorry if I keep gushing about the dopeness of Camby, but at least Rockets fans can sleep well knowing their team got punked by the league’s best rebounder, at least this year.

• The Miami Heat’s pick-and-roll defense cannot be topped. That’s that, Mattress Man. Well, except that it can be, and Monta Ellis and the Warriors shredded it for an entire half Saturday before coming up short. Sebastian Pruiti breaks it down wonderfully per usual, and if you haven’t been obsessively checking Mr. Pruiti’s brilliant NBA Playbook blog all year long (and really, if you haven’t, what in Christ’s name is wrong with you?), here are his top five posts of the last 365 days.

• Thanks for reading, folks. Maybe that didn’t deserve a bullet.

If any of the murderers were more guilty than the others, Dwyane Wade and his actions would obviously be judged most heinous. His almost comical penetration and permanent seat at the front of the rim allowed him to stack up NBA Jam numbers, producing an ungodly 45 points on 24 shots and throwing in six boards for good measure. For the third time this year, a combo guard shredded any vestige of a defense that once prided itself on not being beaten by one man by scoring over 40 points, and the ease with which last night’s disemboweling occurred made the scene all the more gristly. Commentators, both on screen and next to me (my father and my best friend, respectively, ever present for big games and opportunities to prove each of us knows more than the other), consistently argued that the Heat just had “one of those nights”, the kind where everything falls, as was evidenced by Miami’s squeaky-clean 58% clip from the field; however, I remember the layup line that took place in the (non-) painted area Wednesday night. Six-footers tend to fall at a much better rate than those shots taken from farther away, and the Rockets cannot help but have their lunches eaten in the middle, lacking a real post presence outside of the in-all-ways flighty Jordan Hill. This will likely be a league-wide issue as the Heat further coalesce into the foreboding Galactus-esque devourer of worlds all NBA fans outside of South Beach secretly sobbed in fear of (and publicly decried) this summer, so Houston finds itself in good (read: endless) company. In fact, the Rockets actually did well enough last night to understand that what is Miami’s horrific, awe-inspiring strength on one end of the court doubles as its embarrassingly well known Achilles heel on the other end: penetration (and stop chuckling… now).

As the Rockets feebly grabbed for rebounds around the titans’ shoulders (note that the Rockets sent their tallest starter, a 6’9″ power forward, to tipoff against a 7’4″ elderly man and easily, and reasonably, lost the tip), it was only fitting that Houston’s own pillar was the shortest man on the court, the hilariously ballsy Aaron Brooks, giantkiller extraordinaire. His 20 and 9 line stands out quite prominently among his performances since returning from injury, but his determination to work the middle against Miami kept it on its heels, if not quite at bay. Because of his Argentinian-induced-absence, Brooks had not shared the court with Brad Miller very often, and though it may have only accounted for four or six points, their combination made Miami reevaluate its entire defensive strategy. Unluckily for Houston, it did just that.

The Rockets cannot quite hang with Miami in the talent department, a fact anyone not wearing Rockets red (and maybe a few who do) would have told you prior to last night, and Houston’s effort should be applauded. As Wade incinerated the very fundamentals of the Houston defense, less prideful squads would have simply folded. Too bad the bloodletting becomes all the more horrifying when you’re powerless to stop it.

Houston Rockets 119, Miami Heat 125

Box Score

Heat Index

On to the (not-so-daily) links later in the day.

Analysis and the daily links can be found after the jump. And if you don’t always watch the highlight packages that the fantastic Huay-Bing Law puts together for each game, please make sure to watch and be appalled by this one.

Many have complained a great deal about this incarnation of the Houston Rockets’ ostensible lack of a future, but after last night’s parade of fireworks and explosions and giant flying men, I simply must ask all involved in the grumbling, myself especially, a simple question: are you having fun yet? Houston will no longer provide the kind of consistency that used to evoke swoons from pudgy old columnists, but this collection of misfits and one-dimensional novelties produces some of the most compelling Rockets basketball of recent memory. Because of its lack of any semblance of a real defensive mentality (Chuck Hayes, Shane Battier and Jordan Hill do their best, but three earnest, assiduous men do not a defense make), Houston will make what should be routine blowouts into struggles of late-game execution; on the other hand, the endless supply of talent that lines Rick Adelman’s bench lends itself to catching talented teams off-guard. Basically, the Rockets are always good for a watch, and when playing the freak show that is the Los Angeles Clippers, the game becomes the kind of thing you make sure to have recorded for repeat viewings (so far, I’m at two).

The first quarter dizzied anyone who had the strength of heart to survive it, as the Rockets burst out to a 16-point-lead only to have it revoked by the Greek myths that are Blake Griffin and Deandre Jordan. Every play toward the end of the first period felt as if it would end eight feet above the rim, including a moment where Griffin somehow finished an alley-oop in which he seemed to have to move his head in fear of directly hitting it on the rim, the kind of fear that is usually relegated to pigeons or characters in Space Jam. Griffin’s last name feels ominously appropriate, the man-child a strange meld of majesty, violence and audacity; watching him against the generally ground-based Rockets boggles the mind. Do they even play the same sport? If so, is it legal in this absurd, beautiful sport for two entirely different species to share the court? He never stopped trying in this one, posting a cartoonish 24 and 18 line (the uncanny play of Hayes defending the post caused the rookie to have to use 20 shots to produce those numbers, though), and through his dynamism, along with an impressive showing by Eric Gordon in the fourth quarter (I cannot currently find the stat for it, but I recall reading that he was, at some point, this league’s leading 4th quarter scorer this year, believable given his poise and lack of restraint in shooting despite intense defensive pressure), the Clippers could not be taken out of this game, routinely catching up when the Rockets’ reserves entered the fracas (the impotent Rockets bench went a downright humiliating 8-26 as Griffin stayed in for most of the game, picking apart the mere mortals who ride the pine in Houston). In return, the Houston Rockets’ starters crushed the Clip Show, especially the fiery mass of human that has been Kevin Martin. He smiled and cheesed his way to 28 points on 19 shots, stuffing a few other space on the box score in the process with four boards, four dimes and two takeaways. Along with another automatic 21 point effort from Luis Scola, Martin worked within the offense, curling and showing when necessary. Now almost a year into his run as a Houston Rocket, Martin has made readily apparent where and how he wants the ball, and, for now anyway, he seems to be getting it in those spots and taking advantage of anyone who doesn’t already know the deal.

Go back and watch this one 85,000 times and remember how much fun this game can be, even if neither team shoots or plays particularly well. Revel in Kyle Lowry’s addiction to grabbing the ball. Gawk at Shane Battier’s ability to swat the shots of players 124 times as athletic as he. Keep in mind that, while yes, these are the Clippers, this Los Angeles team is so young that this performance only provides a squinting, furtive glance at what could define the future of this sport. Think about all of it as you snicker about how these lowly teams are a combined 15 games under .500 and ask yourself: are you having fun yet?

Houston Rockets 97, Los Angeles Clippers 92

Box Score

Clipperblog

On to the links…

• Griffin channels his inner Jay-Z after the game because he already told you he’s major, you cockroaches.

• After reading it over at Hardwood Paroxysm, I’m a little embarrassed I hadn’t already linked to Zach Harper’s fantastic Yao eulogy (yes, that has officially become a blog type). In it, Harper talks about why his injury may have hurt a little more than Oden, a bit more than Bowie or Sampson, mostly because he was no minor threat: “Yao Ming showed us glimpses of substance, then was too injured to stay on the court, then came back for (in retrospect) one last hurrah. In the 2008-09 season, he played 77 games. And it wasn’t like the experiment of this season in which they limited his minutes and shut him down on back-to-backs. He played 77 games and averaged 33.6 minutes per game that season. And he posed as a big threat to the Lakers’ big title hopes in the second round. I’m not going to sit here and tell you the Rockets win that second round series against the Lakers if Yao his healthy for seven games instead of just the three he played. The series went seven because the Lakers could coast and still come out the victor. But the threat was there and most god-fearing, non-Kobe slurping Laker fans over the age of 17 know this to be true.”

• While his movies, as important and brilliant as they often can be, are not always of utmost quality and his penchant for talking trash rivals Reggie Miller’s when it comes to the far softer world of Hollywood, I have consistently missed Spike Lee’s presence in basketball. He’s silly, earnest and, most importantly, unquestionably passionate. He made a couple of commercials that will debut on the NBA’s Super Bowl, Christmas Day, and talked to Henry Abbott about the game he never seems to stop loving in the process.

• Though avant-garde rock god Captain Beefheart’s death is unmistakably more tragic than the departure of Gilbert Arenas from the Wizards, Bethelem Shoals still found a way to craft both of these occurrences into an ode to the Weirdo and his/her place within American society for The Awl.

• Ball Don’t Lie contributor Eric Freeman made sure to not forget exactly how special last night’s game against the Clippers was for both teams, highlighting a play by a particularly dogged, ridiculously willful Rocket that appeared to win it for Houston as it happened. And if you haven’t caught it, read Freeman’s piece on Earl Barron’s exit from Phoenix. It is undoubtedly the best thing that has ever been written.

• In the NBA, especially given the ballyhooed roster building of the Portland Trailblazers and Oklahoma City Thunder, a great deal has been made of the “success cycle”, the idea that a team must either decide if it is making personnel decision based on competing immediately or building for the future. Basketball Prospectus‘ Kevin Peltons blows a gazillion holes in this ostensibly logical process that hasn’t actually worked out very often: “Looking through modern NBA history, it is equally difficult to find examples of the success cycle at play in terms of teams going completely through the rebuilding process and emerging as championship contenders. Instead, what we see is that the teams that make it do so haphazardly by adding a superstar through the draft, often with lottery luck… Beyond that, looking around the league, we see numerous examples of teams being in the right place at the right time. The Boston Celtics are the anti-success cycle poster boys, having gone from the lottery to the championship overnight by virtue of dealing for Ray Allen and Kevin Garnett. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Lakers took the next step by putting themselves in position to deal for Pau Gasol. Both teams, and especially the Celtics, had to stockpile assets in order to make the trades, but if Minnesota and Memphis had been unwilling to deal, the course of history would look entirely different.”

• Who has this year’s best player been? Kobe Bryant? Chris Paul? Kevin Love or Amar’e Stoudemire or Rajon Rondo? According to one (quite brilliant) man’s silly little stats site’s metric, it could be a very old, very crazy man.

Analysis can be found after the jump.

Monta Ellis saw it, as did every other eye on Oakland. We’d literally seen the end of this one less than two months ago, and I, a few glasses of wine in, could not help but wonder if I’d rather watch the freak show continue or my team actually pull out a victory. That is the conundrum that the sudden, Jason-Terry-but-with-God’s-fury bursts of Monta Ellis presents to a fan. What is being watched is no more an expression of Ellis’ hard work or will than any seemingly interminable scoring outburst from a role player; it’s just that he does it with such intensity, with such ferocity, that we are forced to wonder if this young man could be the best scorer in the league or the world or any sport. The transcendence he reaches in these supernova nights reminds the viewer of Gilbert Arenas, except Ellis’ on-court persona has to provide the style that he cannot, so sometimes, he overcompensates. Monday night, he certainly did just that; when he touched the ball, it crackled, waiting to be snapped against the net it could not avoid anymore than it felt that this game could avoid that imminent conclusion.The Rockets were watching this all over again, these moments that seemed like a stranger’s montage of highlights, but this time, they decided that if this story were going to be given a sequel, it would have to develop some new twists.

And like that, Monta just couldn’t get to the ball. No disrespect, but shoot it, Dorrell Wright. Flip it up there, Jeremy Lin. Be beaten by anyone other than that beady-eyed destroyer of worlds waiting for the hint of an opening or the whisper of a non-doubled screen (Courtney Lee’s smothering man-to-man defense did not give Monta much room, either). Houston did not budge, though; a victory would have to be disengaged from its clutches with a crowbar if anyone else really wanted it, and apparently no one else did, as much anyway. Monta Ellis would have to be content with a night that would evoke “Hallelujah”s from his fantasy owners (44 points on an unrealistic 20 shots with seven assists and three steals, and yes, he is on one of my fantasy squads), and the Rockets left another road game with a win, even if it were another against one of those California teams that isn’t the Lakers. The game looked, at least in the first half and beginning of the second, like one of those messy simultaneous-collapses that the Warriors sometimes goad opponents into via their predilection for terrible shots and wild passes; though they “only” combined for 30 turnovers, both of these teams obviously picked up steam in the final 20 minutes or so of this one. Luis Scola awoke from his slumber to dominate David Lee on the block at will, and while he may have needed 21 shots to get his 20 points, the Divine Argentine racked up six assists to help bolster the team’s numbers up to 31 on the game (the Rockets are currently ranking third in the league in assists per game and sixth in assist ratio). Kyle Lowry made up for another poor showing by the recovering Aaron Brooks by furthering his run of efficiency dominance, throwing in 13 points on six shots, eight assists, four steals and only two turnovers while ably manning an offense in the fourth quarter that desperately needed his playmaking ability as Ellis proceeded to dice him up on the other end (not that Kyle could really be blamed for any of it). More important than any other Rocket, though, was the team’s best scorer, a man who had neglected to appear as more than a ghost of flailing chicken legs in fourth quarters earlier this season, Kevin Martin. He appeared to be everywhere, answering Ellis three-pointers with his own, swarming Monta along with a couple of other Rockets defenders at any given moment and exploding for a two-handed jam that appeared to seal it toward the end. Martin (30 on 14 shots for the thin man) has looked different in the ends of games recently, even against tougher competition. I wouldn’t call it poise just yet, but he wants the ball, which is always a good sign from your premier scorer.

For the first time this season, the Rockets are sitting pretty on top of a three-game winning streak, only two games under .500 for the team that was the last to win its first game this season. Nothing appears that bad, even if nothing appears all that great. Even if Ish Smith, Patrick Patterson and Terrence Williams may not be playing (although Rick Adelman will have a lot of ‘splaining to do if Williams continues to be pushed aside for the freezing cold Chase Budinger), development through Lowry and “Hair Jordan” Hill has been both increasing and benefiting the team in the short-term. That will have to do for a team that still lacks that guy, the one who will save us all, the one Monta Ellis appeared to be when this team could do nothing but sit back and watch last night. Houston made sure it didn’t last long, though, through some inspired team ball, the kind the Warriors couldn’t muster and the Rockets had not been able to for months; after all, no one man should have all that power.

Houston Rockets 121, Golden State Warriors 112

Box Score

Warrior’s World

No links today; I will get back on it when I can. Have fun, readers.

Analysis and the daily links can be found after the jump.

Despite all of the preseason hype (plenty of which was provided by yours truly), the Houston Rockets of the 2010-11 season have looked a lot like they did last year, sans Yao Ming and sped up, outside of one all-important detail: the verve, the buzz that seemed to fill every moment of early-season Rockets ball from last season, just has not been present. Blaming intangibles for a significant drop in victories holds about as much analytical weight as saying the sun the rises because it wants to do so, but anyone who watched the games saw the difference. That team had it; this one did not. Well, when Yao Ming announced his second-consecutive season-ending injury Thursday, this team picked up just where it left off almost nine months ago. Friday night was the Grizzlies’ turn to see exactly how the Rockets would “fold” after the huge man’s announcement, and Sunday night saw a poised, exuberant Rockets team do what both it and Sacramento have so often failed at this year: get it done in the fourth quarter when all seemed destined to collapse.

Houston hobbled into the fourth quarter down two, seemingly mired in its own arrogance and giddiness about the return of Aaron Brooks (something for which we should all get a bit giddy), but then came the Jordan Hill Experience (featuring the Kevin Martins). He spent those 12 minutes hurling anything that came near the rim back toward the hardwood, taking the obviously gifted DeMarcus Cousins out of his game. Cousins still finished with a more-than-respectable 19 point, eight rebound and four block effort, but his general punking of anyone wearing Rocket red on the low block came to an end with Hill’s turn in the last period of this one. Hill can at times appear to bring nothing to Houston, yet when acting as more than an imperceptible blip with dreadlocks, Hill embodies all that the Rockets are not but hope to be: athletic, relentless and explosive (Bomb Squad-worthy stuff). He’s the kind of burst of kinetic bench energy that demands a nickname; in his post-game interview (that had to be his first as a Rocket, right?), when asked what this team needs, he responded a “big, tall dude” who knows his team’s dearth of such bodies. That would do, Jordan.

Like last week’s meeting with Sactown, this game provided as much optimism as could be shoved in one 48-minute-period. The aforementioned Brooks return, Kyle Lowry’s seeming omnipresence (13 points with two made from long range, seven assists, six boards and five turnovers for the quickly emerging point man), Shane Battier’s four blocks to match Hill’s- all of the moments were there. All of the moments that weren’t earlier this year; maybe Houston’s just getting it together a month-plus into this young season, but once again, like it were 2009 all over again, the Houston Rockets look like a team with something to prove. We can’t expect anything more from them.

Houston Rockets 102, Sacramento Kings 93

Box Score

Cowbell Kingdom

On to the links…

• Ah, even if we’ve already accepted it, we have to talk about it. Yao Ming won’t play again this season, and the giant person may never again. Though Yao may be chilling, the rest of us have taken to our keyboards and gotten to eulogizing. Eric Freeman of Free Darko has taken up Tom Ziller’s role on “The Works” and immediately started with a guarded but more than complimentary piece about of this league’s best guys: “Unlike other joyful athletes, Yao’s skillful, fundamentally sound game has never seemed like an outlet for self-expression, but it has become clear that basketball is supremely important to what defines him as a person. It’s painful to see someone you like unable to do what they want to do, and Yao is now relegated to the bench. Fans around the league were saddened by this news, but not because they were being deprived of an incandescent talent. He is, more than anything, a likable personality currently robbed of his greatest athletic gifts. The onlooker’s pain is about compassion, not personal loss.”

• Where Freeman got elegiac, our friend Chi Tung makes it all kinds of NSFW in his polemic for the Yao-naysayers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it plenty of other, future times: Yao Ming is a warrior. Chi makes sure all of those with selective memories about Yao’s dominance remember exactly why he shouldn’t (and likely doesn’t) care about all of the talk from the revisionist historians and armchair pivots: “You might be bowing out gracefully now, but who’s to say that someday, when all this is in the rearview mirror, you won’t tell all the apologists and fairweather fans and media lapdogs and government bloodsuckers to go (politely) **** themselves? I hope that day comes. Because when it does, I’ll tell everyone what you’ve always known, even when felled by a simple, routine crossover — that anger would simply have to wait. That it’s not the size of the man in the fight, but the fight in the man who chooses to size up no one but himself.  Leave it others to gawk at your accomplishments without ever appreciating them. It’s what people do with peacocks. Well, you’re not a peacock, Yao. You’re a lion. Let them hear you roar.”

• Red94 contributor Josh Frankel seems to always find a way to encapsulate the essence of an entire NBA game, with all of its lead changes and free throws, in four panels over at his fantastic comic-strip-cum-NBA-diary Garbage Time All-Stars. Check out his recap of last night’s battle with the Kings.

• The rest of the league may be wondering what the Rockets will do without the large man, but as Rockets fans, we have a pretty clear idea: run, shoot, run, shoot and feign defense. John Hollinger already figured it out and breaks down not only why the Rockets might still sniff the playoffs, but also what could be done with Yao in the future.

• Other things happened besides Yao’s debilitating ankle this weekend in this wonderfully absurd league, like one of this league’s biggest personalities relocating to one of its best teams. See our True Hoop colleagues break down the Magic/Suns/Wizards deal in detail over on our umbrella web log.

• Lee Jenkins did a brilliant piece on one of my favorite players and this league’s other young superstar power forward in the works, Mr. Kevin Love. The baddest white boy on the planet looks as interesting off of the court as on it: “In addition to 1½ seasons in L.A., Stan played two for the Washington Bullets, and he gave Kevin the middle name Wesley in honor of rebounder extraordinaire Wes Unseld. Kevin did his best to live up to the name, doing fingertip push-ups like the ones Unseld did to grow his forearms bigger than other boys’ biceps. Kevin watched NBA Superstars videos over breakfast, and when he had devoured them all, he called family friend Bill Feinberg, a sports p.r. executive, for footage of Philadelphia Warriors Hall of Famer Paul Arizin because he liked Arizin’s rebounding technique. Kevin was eight. Several years later he sent Feinberg an instant message: ‘I want to be a rebounder like Dennis Rodman. I want to get every rebound and f— everybody up on the boards.’”

• For those of us who mourned the tragedy of Eddie Griffin, Keon Clark’s tale does not sit too much better.

The Sacramento Kings tend to do the same things for an entire game, sticking almost obsessively to a game plan predicated on isolation sets for its stars (of which there are none, especially with Evans on the shelf) and pick-and-rolls that can occasionally create easy buckets. Those basic things were all clicking at the beginning of Tuesday’s blowout; at some point toward the end of the first quarter, the Rockets’ telecast spotlighted the Kings’ 67% shooting in opposition to the Rockets’ 35% mark. The Kings led by eight at the time and only three by the end of that period; they were shooting the lights out essentially, and when reality set in, they had nowhere to go. Carl Landry seems particularly misused in the team’s offense, almost never being allowed the space to take his man in the post thanks to the usual presence of Cousins. While I don’t think Landry should be starting (young big Jason Thompson serves as a better rebounding complement to Cousins’ endless offensive skill set), the bench seems to use him as the starters did last year: a big body for setting screens that can shoot the open jumper, a skill Landry possesses but is certainly not his strongest attribute. This team oozes youth and skill, but something about the team seems particularly ill-conceived, making people do things with which they just are not comfortable and allowing opposing teams the ability to capitalize on its uncertainty. Sacramento’s defense doesn’t constantly cause ulcers, but its flip nature with the ball (20th in the league in turnovers and embarrassing in its giving up 11 steals to the Rockets this night, at best a middle-of-the-road pack of thieves) will constantly undermine all of that skill, as possessions end with layups on the other end of the court eight seconds after the shot clock starts. This team’s future’s bright, particularly with the soft-handed, patient Cousins emerging, but it’s present seems frustratingly misguided.

In this family reunion of a game (Kevin Martin, Brad Miller, Donte Green, Rick Adelman, Luther Head and now Jermaine Taylor have all been associated with the opposing team at some point in their careers, and if you want to count Martin’s ghost in the form of Fransisco Garcia, I wouldn’t begrudge you it), the Rockets guffawed and smiled their way to several twenty-point leads in what became a laugher after the Kings’ initial hot shooting went limp. Maybe we can’t glean much from this one, but hey, it sure as hell was fun to watch.

Houston Rockets 118, Sacramento Kings 105

Box Score

Cowbell Kingdom.

On to the links…

• Because he was in town, fan favorite Landry was answering questions about returning to the Rockets (hell, even the Rockets themselves had made such inquiries) and found the time to respond diplomatically, perhaps giving Rockets fans a little more hope for a reunion: “‘The fans here were great to me,” Landry said. ‘I had great support. This is a place I enjoyed. I’d consider it, definitely, but that’s so far away I haven’t thought about that yet. I’d consider every team. It was my dream to play in the NBA, not for a certain team.’”

• I feel terrible (or mostly embarrassed) about it quite often, but I generally find that my favorite player at any given time in the NBA usually happens to be its best. I’ve been devout Kobe and LeBron followers at different points during the last half-decade (Chris Paul and Carl Landry also have held this unwanted, universally irrelevant title), and this year, the guy I can’t stop watching or talking about wears orange and blue and plays in the Mecca. Kelly Dwyer, why is Amar’e so nasty?

• When a bunch of bad teams trade draft picks and unrealized potential to each other, no one seems to care. Well, except the always mindful fantasy crowd.

• Bun B may be from Port Arthur, but we Houstonians know where his heart (and his body) can usually be found. He spoke to the Score about something called an MMA (I’ll get back to you guys once I figure out what that is… perhaps some sort of retirement package?), but later in the conversation comes some great basketball analogies and a great story about Vernon Maxwell and guns that doesn’t really involve Mad Max (but definitely involves guns).

• Tracy McGrady has now discovered Twitter (and curses on it! For shame, Tracy), where he has unveiled the next progression in his illustrious career: baseball, a sport in which first-round-exits can sort of be counted as accomplishments (I keed, I keed).

• Henry Abbott of our umbrella blog True Hoop wrote a quite interesting analysis of the “active player”, the one who looks like the Jolt Cola he guzzled pregame just won’t wear off (basically, Kevin Garnett). His juxtaposition of Andre Miller and Brandon Roy as the “active” and “non-active”, despite their huge age gap that would invite opposite assumptions, left me wondering whether our preconceptions of whose game relies on what can be too influenced by box scores. Abbott describes the fear and discomfort caused by a team of “actives” quite eloquently: “Now, all that hyperactivity can be dumb, wasteful and bewildering. It can mean broken defensive schemes and excessive fouls. But it can also be a thing of beauty. For instance, witness the Boston Celtics’ defense the last three years, where bodies are flying all over the court at all times, but in coordination. A little pet theory I’ve been cooking up, late at night when I really should be sleeping, is that there is special benefit when you play a lot of active players together. Having a couple of wing players flying all over the court can be wasted if their teammates are watching, standing still. But get four or five guys really hustling and moving, and it can rattle the other team. It can make them feel, and look, like they’re playing against a windstorm.”

• Everybody get in the living room!!! There’s a billionaire fight!!! BILLIONAIRRRRRRE FIGHTTTTT!

• The Houston Rockets are kind of on a roll right now (four wins out of the last six played, what qualifies as a run in a 8-13 season), and they don’t care when it started. They just want to keep it going, as Jonathan Feigen lets us know: “In December’s four games, the Rockets have averaged 112.3 points, making 50 percent of their shots and 51.2 percent of their 3-pointers while averaging 24.3 assists. They held double digit leads in three of those games. ‘We’re executing better,’ Courtney Lee said. ‘We’re taking our time on the offensive end and getting what we want as far as Kyle having the ball on the top in pick-and-roll and reading the roll and Luis (Scola) popping. On the defensive end, we’re starting to get stops. We’re realizing in the fourth quarter, it’s about how many stops you get. That L.A. game was a turning point. We saw what it takes to finish games. The last couple games, we were able to execute down the stretch.’”

• Man, the Rockets sure could use a talented lottery pick big man to help with the offense in times of uncertainty. In other news, Patrick Patterson was just called up.

• Rony Seikaly has been making the blog rounds in the past few years as a disco DJ, but getting in the New York Times because of a hobby-turned-career may give him something about which to brag to Rik Smits and his crotch rockets: “’The most important thing is to capture that moment where all of a sudden everybody is in a great mood, everybody starts dancing, and all of a sudden you feel it click between you and the crowd,’ Seikaly said. ‘And as soon as that click happens, it’s not something that anybody else can feel except that person playing the music. As soon as you feel that connection to the crowd, then you know you’ve got them. And then you can take them on any journey you want.’”

What three years ago would be considered a particularly non-productive showing by McGrady stood out last night as a statement. For only the third time this year, McGrady hit double figures in scoring (a nifty 11 on 6 shots) without completely obstructing the Pistons’ second unit’s offense; he instead played the very reminiscent role of playmaker, putting in some great work that ended in three assists and would have amounted to more had his finishers known what they were doing (sound familiar?). Watching his older, chubbier body look for the angles and seek the open man was not supposed to be depressing; at worst, this game should have evoked chuckles about how silly we all were for thinking it would work, Tracy included. Because of the shower of catcalls rolling down his back every time he touched the ball, though, this all became some miserable Twilight Zone parody version of LeBron in Cleveland, the prodigal son returning to the drunken, angry father; he opted to go the Bron Bron route and force some jumpers that looked a lot like old Tracy McGrady shots (in location and result, though his actual jumper didn’t rise off of the floor in the same cartoonish way it used to, so it was actually as contested as it should have been all of those years his athleticism allowed him that peek at omnipotence), a strategy that sometimes snuffed out the boo birds but ultimately reminded all of us why this is so hard. He’s not the only tragedy of his sort (Grant Hill made a reclamation project out of his predicament, and Brandon Roy better figure out how he’ll handle his fall back toward mortality), but he could have been the one. Everything felt right when he came, dreams of rings in our heads cemented by the towering presences of those two freaks of nature, and as he leaves, on a plane to New Orleans to battle even more young men whose awareness of him dwindles, everything feels so wrong. How did that, the Rockets’ perfect shot at relevance with two men whose pairing seemed downright serendipitous, turn into this?

A poor game was also played last night, one that ended in a Rockets victory thanks to the very steady performance of Kyle Lowry and the breakout firestorm that was Luis Scola Tuesday night. For them, even former teammates of Tracy, last night represented a flawed win, the kind of rough one that you’re happy to have but know must be fixed. And I’m sure the Pistons don’t just feel like last night’s loss was an acceptable outcome (except maybe Rip Hamilton, who seemed to be thrown out in the second quarter because he wanted to do anything but play in this particular basketball game), but for them, road losses have become routine. This game’s significance, if there was any, will not be found in their reactions. No matter what he tells Detroit newspapers, Tracy McGrady cared about coming home. He cared enough to try and remind Houston of what he was, even if we all were left wondering why he isn’t (and we aren’t) what could have been.

Houston Rockets 97, Detroit Pistons 83

Box Score

Piston Powered (Make sure to take a look at Dan Feldman’s less emotional, but similarly T-Mac-centric take on Tuesday’s match)

On to the links…

• In a talk with the Houston Chronicle‘s Jose De Jesus Ortiz, Tracy McGrady got to talk about his homecoming himself, and he really doesn’t seem so glum about the whole thing or his career as metaphor for human suffering or any of it; however, he does talk at length about a favorite topic around these parts (especially as the Rockets struggle to reclaim relevance): what could have been. Like Gladys Knight, McGrady thinks about the good ol’ days and his chance at redemption that has since slipped away (OK, maybe he did sound a bit glum): “There were only memories of unfulfilled dreams and unfulfilled expectations that Houston fans once had envisioned for him and Yao Ming. ‘Good, bad, what could have been, what should have been,’ he said. ‘I have those thoughts all the time. … It’s frustrating because I look back on the year that I got hurt, the year we added Ron (Artest). I felt like that was a championship team. If you look at what they accomplished in the playoffs that year taking the Lakers to seven games without Yao and myself, I felt like that was the year. And who knows what would have happened after that if we would have kept the same team moving forward if I was healthy and Yao was healthy. I mean, who knows?’”

• While you were busy sulking at your house and thinking of how you miss the years when your team had that guy who looks like Hitch, there were actual games being played last night (well, I guess there was one here, too, but that didn’t count. For anyone besides Luis, anyway). Like this one, which was apparently great and featured a man being congratulated for coming off of the bench and collecting five fouls. Oh yes, and John Wall and Kobe Bryant.

• You may not have noticed, as none of us ever seem to until February, but the Orlando Magic are really, really good. Eddy Rivera of Magic Basketball, however, is aware of this, and he noted in this fascinating piece that the Magic seem to be better than ever at defense, a thought that can’t be all that appealing to Miami, Boston or Chicago fans.

• Ah, the life of the NBA backup center. No one really expects you to be much, unless you’re some old hippie legend on his last legs, pay corresponds to the number of inches you are removed from the ground and cigarette breaks come during TV timeouts. And if you’re Chris Dudley, you get to almost be the governor of Oregon and get two fat contracts in your journeyman career, including one never-happened deal with the Knicks that makes for a pretty good story: “What is perhaps even stranger than a team going to arbitration in an attempt to sign Chris Dudley is the fact that the 1997 incident was the second time this sort of thing happened with Chris Dudley!… After the 1992-93 season, Dudley became an unrestricted free agent. He would then sign a seven-year deal with the Portland Trailblazers for $11,000,000. The deal was definitely on the low side for a free agent back-up-level center at the time, especially an in-demand player like Dudley. The Nets, for instance, offered him $10 million more dollars than Portland over less years. In the first year of the contract, Dudley would make under $800,000 (just enough for the Portland Trailblazers to sign him under the salary cap). However, what really drew the NBA’s ire was a clause in the contract where Dudley could opt-out of his contract after the first year and become an unrestricted free agent once again.”

• The NBA will never be done with the issue of race. No amount of PR or images of Pau Gasol and Kobe Bryant hugging will do away with one of humanity’s basest, dumbest impulses: differentiating one from the other and subsequently judging. Even NBA referees can’t avoid it, according to a study by a couple of Ph.D. students at Cornell. Their study reveals the bias that refereeing crews show towards players with regard to race, a bias that even the study’s makers dubbed “unintentional”. I’ll avoid the layers of a debate like this one in a Daily (though I certainly don’t discourage talking about it in the comments), but I can’t imagine how David Stern feels about this.

• Breaking down the Spurs’ suddenly fearsome fastbreak.

• THE FD POWER RANKINGS ARE HERE! REJOICE! And somehow they are not led by Blake Griffin!!!!

• Think what you will of President Barack Obama, but I must admit how cool it is to get the president’s (THE FREAKING PRESIDENT’S) thoughts on day-to-day NBA happenings.

• I had all of these. And I thought Joe Smith was going to be soooooo good. Thank God third-graders don’t (excuse me, didn’t) have blogs (Thanks for these, Fat Shawn Kemp).

Analysis and the daily links can be found after the jump.

Even as he plays directly into the defense’s hands, rising up from several feet behind the almost 24 foot hash mark to throw up a bomb that seems predestined to hit the back of the iron, Kobe Bryant still strikes fear in all opposing fans’ hearts at the ends of games. Bryant lifts off, Battier rises to meet him and extend his arm, and all at home recoil as they prepare for the worst. Wednesday night, the shots that should clank did clank, and the team that played with the most consistent effort did pull it out. The Rockets looked like a team searching for redemption as the defending champion Los Angeles Lakers came into Toyota Center, and they were lucky to find a Lakers team too wrapped up in its own vendettas to notice exactly how well the Rockets were playing this night. Almost everything went right, and the Houston Rockets defeated the world champions and left the court feeling good, and deservedly so, for what is probably one of the first times this year.

After a first quarter that ended quite sourly with a Laker run to recapture the lead (with an added Matt Barnes swipe at Chase Budinger’s head for good measure), the Rockets looked to their reserves to help fend off the newly formidable Laker bench (it turns out that a bench is usually better when its best player is not Sasha Vujacic), and Ish Smith responded by pulling out every single trick stashed in his coffers. He ran circles around every other player, Lakers and Rockets alike, before delivering some of the best passes I’ve seen from anyone in a Rocket uniform since Tracy McGrady; his shooting touch, which was somehow miraculously present on this night (2-2 on a couple of the same runners he routinely makes look like the worst shot in the NBA), may be completely lacking, but the vision of Smith cannot be underestimated, as his activity single-handedly invigorated Houston for a second period in which all of his fellow bench members, outside of the walking speedball that is Jordan Hill, fell flat in their collective performance. In fact, point guard play was a distinct advantage of the Rockets in this match, as Kyle Lowry penetrated and kicked out his way into 10 dimes, a number that impressed me almost as much as the fact Lowry only put up four shots (and made a couple of them). He and Smith recognized the importance and intensity of last night’s game and shot remarkably conservatively while constantly pushing the ball and producing more open shots for teammates than I saw Houston take all year (some of this can also be attributed to LA’s often condescending help defense that simply doesn’t think your less potent three-point shooters will knock down open looks). And on the receiving end of most of many of those assists was Wednesday’s savior, the wily veteran that may be the only NBA player able to outsmart Kobe Bryant, Shane Battier. His was a performance of pure inspiration, knocking down big shot after big shot in the fourth period (pouring in an enormous 11 points in the period) and more importantly not allowing Bryant any level of comfort, any proper look at the basket. Throughout most of the game, thanks to some awful matchups (imagine Kevin Martin trying to stop a Ron Artest post move and not shattering into a hundred little pieces), Martin was checking Bryant, something Bryant noticed and attacked over and over; Adelman made sure to adjust in the final minutes when the chance that any plays going to Ron Ron would be unlikely, and he placed the man who was born to defend Kobe right in front of the Mamba, letting the two go to work on their island of pump fakes and push-offs. Bryant kept missing and slipped while defending Shane, allowing him to claim his own moment of Bryant-like greatness and walk away with not just the W but a reminder that he is not too old to check the baddest man on the planet at the ends of games.

Kobe Bryant should not have taken so many shots. Pau Gasol should have been a much bigger presence. Lamar Odom should have been allowed to go to work on Scola (who fought valiantly but poorly against Odom, whose legs never seem to age) more often. Many things should have happened differently last night, but they didn’t. The Houston Rockets have been building for years to defeat the Los Angeles Lakers, and though the team has much bigger problems than that these days (like, say, beating the Charlotte Bobcats and Toronto Raptors), it was nice for that goal to be accomplished, if just for one glorious night.

Houston Rockets 109, Los Angeles Lakers 99

Box Score

Forum Blue & Gold

On to the links…

• Jonathan Feigen of the Chronicle knows exactly how rare the Battier-over-Kobe result of last night was, and he made sure to talk to the Dukie about it after the game. Battier and Feigen both seem impressed with the team’s composure and willpower over the game’s closing moments, the ones that have traditionally marked the beginning of the end for the Rockets this year:  “The Rockets got that late burst after the sort of possession that so far this season had been crippling them. When Bryant hit his 19-footer on the Lakers’ third shot, he gave L.A. a 97-94 lead with 3:10 left. ‘I think that was the turning point,’ Battier said. ‘Kobe hit a tough shot, but I was proud of the way we reacted. Instead of just saying, ‘Oh, this is Kobe and the Lakers; this is that time for them to take over,’ we fought back. That’s what you have to do. If you go down, go down firing.’” Say whatever you want about this year’s Houston Rockets (and I have, repeatedly), but hearing a team’s captain talk about “go(ing) down firing” warms the heart.

• Where the Rockets found inspiration and strength in this outcome, the champs started to rip at the seams just a little more. Though Kobe and Phil will always play up the insouciance (because they must not care if nothing else), both sounded obviously rattled after the Rockets extended the Lakers’ losing streak to four: “‘How do you know how good we think we are? We’re fine,’ an obviously annoyed Bryant said. ‘Are we going to win a three-peat today? Probably not, but the [expletive] is not played today.’ Los Angeles coach Phil Jackson denied being concerned about his team. ‘Concern? It’s way too early in the season, and we’ve got a long ways to go,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some guys struggling and need to get better.’”

• This offseason, the Orlando Magic was routinely chided for not bulking up its roster in a manner similar to its East Coast rivals in Miami and Boston, and the only “major deal” floating around them involved taking on the ludicrous contract of Gilbert Arenas from a Washington team that wanted Gil and young star/messiah John Wall as far apart as possible. Well, it turns out that little piece of nonsense has some legs and may get even sillier, involving Vince Carter, Andray Blatche, Rashard Lewis and everyone else on your fantasy team as well. The Magic have shown similar flaws to past years at the beginning of this season (which still has been a rousing success at 14-4), making a perimeter scorer not afraid to take important shots endlessly appealing, but adding Arenas and, more importantly, his contract will decimate the future of a team already far too invested in the futures of Rashard Lewis and J.J. Redick (both fine players, but both overpaid. Eh, calling Lewis overpaid is like saying Steve Nash shoots free throws pretty well) without immediately adding anything that guarantees to put them over the top. While an Arenas-Nelson backcourt seems formidable, I don’t see the immediate distinction between it and Ginobili-Parker or James-Wade. This all seems too bizarre and mostly likely an experiment in seeing if a team can implode due to a goofiness overload.

• Yes, LeBron always had too much to do in Cleveland. But entering tonight’s deathmatch back in Ohio, let us not write revisionist history and say that he was not on championship contending teams, as the brilliant M. Haubs over at The Painted Area points out: “Further, I would argue that a reason Cleveland may not have been even better was that LeBron never committed to the Cavs for the long term, and the front office may have felt the pressure to make short-term moves to win immediately and appease LeBron. Listen, I don’t begrudge LeBron’s right to make The Decision one bit. I truly believe that pretty much any franchise he would have joined would have been on the brink of championship contention just by adding him. But to suggest that he had to leave Cleveland because he couldn’t win a championship there is complete, outright fiction. Cleveland conceivably could have won in 2009 if the bounces had gone their way, they could have won in 2010 if LeBron had played — and led — better, and they conceivably could have built a longer-term dynasty if LeBron had made a longer-term commitment there.”

• True Hoop has a house band as of today. Houston basketball nerds, I think you know what we need from you.

Analysis can be found after the jump.

And that is what can happen when a team plays solid defense, just solid, even for a night, even against a very talented team. Perhaps it helped that the Oklahoma City Thunder rarely seemed to care to implement any particular offensive scheme for the majority of the night (“chunk it to Durant, no matter the situation” seems to be a popular thought as far as Thunder ballhandlers go). Still, the Rockets stared defeat in the face once again last night and, for once, reacted like a team full of veterans instead of a collection of underrated talent. Team captain and all-around champion of the world Shane Battier had one of the eight nights a year he generally has that look great in a stat sheet (18 points on 11 shots, including some very timely threes and a runner that somehow looked good all the way until it smoothly passed through the net), but as it usually is with the cap’n, Battier’s harassing defense of Kevin Durant made every one of those impossible shots Durant attempts look slightly less plausible and wrested control of a game in which the Thunder seemed to gladly turn it on at will. In the end, the discomfort caused by Battier won this game, as he literally made Durant’s last second fadeaway the kind of blind circus shot that only the greats can make and attempt to take any kind of real credit (thankfully, the great Durant hit the front of the rim and Houston fans went home happy*).

The Rockets did make curious choices on offense throughout the night, consistently going away from its strengths and leaving a lot of balls in Kyle Lowry’s hands that should not have been (anyone who watched this game knows the particular play that comes to mind as Lowry wasted 19 seconds of a shot clock in order to create a step-back shot at the elbow, the kind of possession that would have been abysmal with five minutes left and literally left fans dumbfounded as the play ended with a Thunder rebound with three ticks left on the game clock). Luis Scola’s final totals may not look too gaudy, but he was getting whatever he wanted through deliberate work with Jeff Green’s thin chest behind him in the first quarter; Scottie Brooks noticed such and took Scola off the block by unleashing Nick Collison on the Argentinian. Though this led to many bad shots for Scola (his 5 for 14 line is easily his worst of the year), the team neglected to run the offense through him ever again; similarly mind-boggling was Chase Budinger, who is having the worst sophomore slump I’ve seen a Rocket experience in ever, staying in the game until the last four minutes as the Thunder creeped back into the game. In the Year of the Great Rotation Wars, though, coach Adelman made some fine moves, such as keeping an ice-cold Scola from replacing Jordan Hill and his burst of athletic energy in a front court that often looked like most of the action was taking place above it for much of Sunday’s contest (Serge Ibaka scored 12 of his team’s first 14 points on what felt like a 100 offensive rebounds grabbed right in front of Scola and Chuck Hayes). Hill, as well as a headband-ed and invigorated Brad Miller, dominated the boards in a second half in which no shot felt easy for Houston.

Sometimes, earned feels better than easy. Not allowing Kevin Durant to touch the ball anywhere where he is comfortable (which feels like it is every single place on a basketball court) was earned. Funneling Russell Westbrook into a cloud of defenders must be earned (though Nenad Kristic’s absence did hurt the Thunder’s spacing tremendously, as the team shoots the worst three-point percentage in the NBA. Kristic’s ability to knock down the 19-footer often keeps overmatched defenders waiting to collapse on Westbrook honest). Outrebounding a team that appears to feature more athleticism in its seven-footers than any human on Houston’s roster was earned. The Rockets did those things, not all things, but those important things well tonight. The team grabbed its most impressive victory because of it.

* I was a spectator at last night’s match, seated comfortably in the top of the lower bowl. My view was great, as it seems all at the Toyota Center are, and because of such, I got a first-hand glimpse of what a miserable crowd shows up to these Rockets games. I was stared down by small children waiting for me to stop cheering, as I was one of the freaks getting excited when shots were made, defensive assignments missed and turnovers created. I must have seemed a raving loon given the complete lack of excitement in anyone else within a 10 row radius. I have called for this team to be decimated, routinely lumped criticism on players I felt were not given requisite effort and questioned some of this team’s offseason moves. But, as a spectator at a game, I am a fan above all else, and as a fan, I should exude as much energy as humanly possible in hopes that that energy could somehow help the home team. Instead, the laconic lower bowl sighed and exited en masse from a Rockets game with a minute left, still obviously hanging in the balance. I doubt this will matter to those reading it, likely the kinds of fans who are actually, well, being fans when going to games and cheering more for inspired Houston play than free t-shirts. For the rest of you season-ticket-holding, company-comped suckers twiddling your thumbs as a Houston team tries to hold its ground in its best battle this year, step your game up. The team needs you more than ever to act like you give a damn to validate that they still are.

Houston Rockets 99, Oklahoma City Thunder 98

Box Score

Daily Thunder

No links. Sorry; I’m having a bit of a problem with internet connection at the pad and do not have enough time to amass all of the links elsewhere. I will, at some point this week after my connection issues are solved, unleash a flurry of links like no man, woman or child has before seen. In the meantime, bide your time with the Russ Westbrook dunk that almost toppled the Rockets’ hard-fought effort and certainly made me stop cheering for the team I have since childhood for a second to yelp in the wake of Westbrook’s glory.

Analysis can be found after the jump. Thanks to the national holiday and my predilection for cornbread (and need to fill my face with it), the links will have to wait until tomorrow.The Rockets won a game yesterday. It seems strange that this feels like an event, a happening, as Rockets fans have grown accustomed to winning consistently over the years (especially at this time of year, when it matters least). Alas, last night’s victory was the fourth of fourteen games, a gasp for air a few minutes after the coroner had finished up. Despite its seeming meaninglessness, beating the Warriors in November should give Rockets fans wishing to pull this season out of the mire of irrelevance a bit of hope. Things looked absolutely right at times; Rockets drew fouls, made defensive recoveries that exhibited more than the requisite amount of effort and fought (fought!) for loose balls. The Warriors made runs because they’re the Warriors, and, for once this year, the Rockets responded because, well, they’re the Rockets: a team that should be capable of handling one like Golden State at home when keeping their two best scorers to an atrocious 39 points on 40 shots. Houston did just that.

I’m not much one for handing out game balls, but Kyle Lowry and Luis Scola did everything they are so good at yesterday without showing their faults too often. Scola knows where this offense needs him to be so well, and he helped a team without much interior penetration move the ball just enough so that shooters had that extra foot or so of space that makes the difference between shooting .337 from behind the arc (the Rockets’ mark for the year) and 10-20 (Houston’s expert percentage last night). No, the Warriors didn’t put up much fight or move guys like Kevin Martin or Shane Battier off of their preordained “I will make it from here” spots, but unlike in the past 14 games, the Rockets took advantage and executed. On the defensive end, Lowry tipped balls, convinced high-octane scorers Monta Ellis and Stephon Curry that their best options were to launch from deep (not that they need to much coercion) and helped anchor a Rockets defense that really needed to prove to itself that it could make stops when they counted and still have enough energy to create efficient shots on the other end of the court. Over and over, the Warriors pulled to within one or two in the third quarter, breathing down the Rockets’ necks, daring them not to fold like they had seen them do earlier this year (and, if the Warriors had been paying attention, a lot of times since).

The Rockets did not blink. Rick Adelman shortened his rotation, and the men in the game played with that confidence that their coach had shown in them. With that, the Rockets played fluidly and happily. Chuck Hayes made no-look-passes that led to easy buckets, and Chase Budinger hit a couple of shots behind that painted line that has haunted him so much this year. Saying that demons were exorcised last night simply does not take into account the competition last night (a very poorly motivated Golden State outfit that is in the middle of a bad losing streak, a common theme among all of  the Rockets’ beaten foes this year), but if you’re looking for hope from this version of the Houston Rockets, something could be mined from last night’s victory. I’m just not sure for what Rockets fans should be hoping. Let’s all hope the Rockets keep positing that dilemma to fans like me by continuing to climb out of their collective grave.

Houston Rockets 111, Golden State Warriors 101

Box Score

Warrior’s World

For all American readers, have a happy Thanksgiving and enjoy whatever it is that will put a smile on your faces today.

Analysis and the daily links come after the jump.

In basketball, some skills must be swept under rugs and appreciated only in seedy backrooms. Flopping cannot be praised on television, or those damn Euros will figure out they were right all along. The ability to push one’s man off subtly, despite the move’s literal omnipresence in every single play in basketball at any level, will not be given its own section in upcoming Free Darko encyclopedias, but those best at it likely coincide with this league’s best performers. One of those dirty, unspoken skills doesn’t even take place on a court, or at least it doesn’t always. No, admitting defeat generally takes place in some boardroom full of glassy-eyed executives who thought everything was going to go a lot differently than this. Houston Rockets executives, meet this. It has come, and the time for making moves has as well.

There’s not much more to say about a 3-10 team that looks a lot better spread around as role players around the league and not a mismatched goulash of non-complementary talents all going through slumps concurrently. Those brilliant Daryl Morey contracts that screamed “tradeable” towards the end of their on-court effectiveness‒ trade them now, Mr. Morey. It it not that this team as presently constructed is awful; this simply cannot be the case. Though the team’s record may look more like that of a team that could win the lottery next year, the Rockets are not 3-10 bad; injuries and early season scheduling are certainly to blame for some of the team’s travails. But through 13 games, we have all learned a lot about this team. We have learned that without Aaron Brooks, ball movement is always precipitously close to ceasing to exist. Without mismatches guarding our best two offensive players left (Luis Scola and Kevin Martin), the effectiveness of both will decrease exponentially. And without the ball movement necessary to create those mismatches… I think you get it. And defense… I have never seen a Rockets defense gone so wrong. Flat-footed, uncaring, badly planned‒ the defense reeks of failure throughout, from the best defenders slower steps (Lowry and Battier simply can’t make their men work as hard as they have in previous years) to mismanagement in the lineups and defensive schemes (there is no help to be had once the initial play is made. God help the Rockets if the opposing offense actually reacts to what is being given to them).

This is not to say that this team is without its charms. Their movement will look much better against worse defenses (though only four of the team’s losses have been against teams ranked in the top 10 for defensive efficiency) when all of the team is intact, and I’d be surprised if, given the time, this team’s defense didn’t start talking more and being better prepared. None of that will change what this team is, though: mediocre, at best. Mr. Morey, you know what to do; you always have. The proposition of rebuilding strikes fear in fans’ hearts, but it shouldn’t with a talent like Morey at the helm. But because he is so good, I anticipate the nuclear option. Blow it up; it’s time.

Houston Rockets 116, Phoenix Suns 123

Box Score

Valley of the Suns

On to the links…

• Our fearless leader Rahat Huq dropped some knowledge over at Hardwood Paroxysm yesterday, blessing us all with a new “The Senate” that asks some fascinating hypothetical questions about the very fabric of the contemporary NBA.

• Speaking of the brilliance going on over at HP, Noam Schiller talked a bit about Derrick Rose and the ineffable argument that pervades Internet discussion of NBA players to a maddening degree: “You’re just hating.” Schiller sips a Big Gulp of Haterade and goes in on the logic of that particular remonstration: “And when the hype and anti-hype collide, that other H word comes out. Stand in the way of the hype at your own peril, lest you be called a hater. It’s a ridiculous argument, of course, one that basically admits all other arguments were lost and yet you refuse to admit discussional defeat. And yet it’s incredibly hard to prove otherwise – YOU HATE HIM, I KNOW IT, DON’T TELL ME OTHERWISE is as irrefutable as cherry pie. The worst thing about this terrible debating technique is how easily it can be thrown your way. You don’t even have to show any dislike for a certain player or team – all you have to do is rationally promote your position as to why he’s not the best ever or why the team can’t win 83 games in a season and you’re a hater.”

• We live in an age where we as basketball viewers have had to start to learn to balance what we see and think we know from our hours, days and years of watching basketball with the cold, terrifyingly accurate statistics that suffuse every inch of worthwhile basketball discussion. Because of that, we have to deal with bizarre, completely counter-intuitive thoughts. Like, I don’t know, that David Robinson was clearly a better player than Hakeem Olajuwon. Look and argue; I’ll have more thoughts on this fairly old post from Nerd Numbers the Blog later, but I’ll throw one thing out there for now: no playoff numbers are taken into account.

• Congrats to Sebastian Pruiti on his new gig with the brilliant Basketball Prospectus people. Read his fantastic first post about why the Raymond Felton pick-and-roll just isn’t working out.

• Kobe Bryant talked to Adrian Wojnarowski in an article on which I can’t even begin to explain my feelings. You simply must read it after you check out this quote: “’In an individual sport, yes, you have to win titles,’ Bryant said. ‘Baseball’s different. But basketball, hockey? One person can control the tempo of a game, can completely alter the momentum of a series. There’s a lot of great individual talent. Oscar Robertson was a great individual talent. So was Elgin Baylor. Part of my frustration was that I didn’t want to go down that path for the second half of my career. I didn’t want to be a Dominique Wilkins. I didn’t want to be an Elgin Baylor and not win… Part of the pride within me was that I won by being the sidekick. I’m going to be the only player in league history that’s won being a sidekick – and I had a lot of responsibility – going to be the only player to do that, and being the main guy. I’m going to show you that I can do that.’”

• Lockout roundup: Henry Abbott knows who will really get stiffed in the upcoming CBA negotiations, and Kelly Dwyer thinks the owners have dug their own graves; the players may think they can win this, but as many of them told the Wall Street Journal, that doesn’t mean they aren’t saving.

• The league’s best team made a deal Saturday to help bolster its playoff chances by adding important depth at the two most important positions to do so, center and point guard. Now, didn’t that sentence sound way more exciting than saying that the Hornets traded Peja Stojakovic and his ridiculous expiring contract to Toronto and got back Jarret Jack, David Andersen (oh yeah, that one) and Marcus Banks?  While this deal won’t likely cause any major waves on one of this league’s most surprising breakout teams or the Rockets’ last opponent, it should be noted that one-time lottery pick and athletic freak Jerryd Bayless was also sent up north in this deal, yet another sign that the kid just isn’t getting it (he showed great promise at times last year in Portland, but he was quickly shuffled toward the back of the bench after struggles with Nate McMillan). Here’s hoping he really finds a place to turn it on now that he’s not facing in any pressure in T-Dot.

• Rockets fans may be able to console themselves with the fact that one of the league’s best teams according to record, the Boston Celtics, was also felled by the crafty Toronto Raptors this weekend; Sebastian Pruiti writes about how a four-point Boston lead quickly became a one-point deficit because of a few smart gambles (or at least well executed ones) on coach Jay Triano’s part. Quick note about this matchup: superstar point god Rajon Rondo, he of the almost 15 assists a game, did not suit up against the Raps.

• Check out this Warriors-but-also-stats-based blog’s take on why some of this summer’s Team USA stars, particularly those who played a great deal of minutes like Kevin Durant and Chauncey Billups, may be starting this young season off so poorly. Though I think it is important to note that both Durant and Billups are basically strict jump-shooters whose legs might not be under them due to their excessive play (wonder if Scott Brooks might have anything to say to Coach K?), I’d love to see this regression include players from other countries who played similar minutes (the Rockets’ own Luis Scola is obviously not suffering a similar drop in stats at the beginning of this year).

• Harrison Barnes can totally make 40 cool, but Freeman and Shoals are totally right about 51.

• No matter what schedule-adjusted offensive and defensive rankings may assert, the Houston Rockets are convinced that they have been a pretty bad team to start this year. Shane Battier thinks the team could use some due diligence: “None of that was a revelation, but the Rockets said the chance to get home and get back to work offered a chance to do something about it. ‘We need to see ourselves on tape,’ Battier said. ‘We need to be on the practice court and sort of remind ourselves of the things we practice every day. You tend to forget when you’re in a travel-heavy schedule the things we worked on in practice. A lot of mental mistakes, but the eye in the sky never lies. It’s good to see it on tape. There’s no easy fix, no magic beans, no magic powder we can sprinkle on the Toyota Center. We have to go out and get through with hard work.’”

• Miami Heat fans might, just might, need to worry right about now. Do-everything sixth-man Udonis Haslem will be sidelined until at least the All-Star break, the kind of news the Heat has seemed to accumulate daily this season.

• Tiago Splitter’s helping San Antonio fans miss Luis Scola less and less now that the season has actually started.

• Ish Smith, by some people’s rankings, is one of the 10 best rookies in the game this season. Who cares that he’s tenth?

• Check out Arturo Galletti’s 100 worst seasons and players since 1978, lists both replete with Houston Rockets.

• You may have caught this somewhere else, but if you haven’t, behold my favorite moment of a still-ridiculously-young season. Amar’e's winded but winning, yet even he knows what just happened. There doesn’t need to be any tired “changing of the guard” metaphors attached to this instant, just a simple acknowledgment between the freaks of what will be coming nightly to the NBA. Color me geeked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMXhAjvF8b4

Analysis and daily links can be found after the jump.

For the last two years or so, a common question asked about the team by major media outlets kept popping up anytime the Rockets were mentioned: who will come up big in the fourth quarter (or, who will take the last shot)? Though the team’s tried to promote from within like any good business, Aaron Brooks, Trevor Ariza and Kevin Martin all held the plastic crown in very recent history, all leaving something to be desired. Houston may have had its share of fantastic role players in the last few years, but it has clearly lacked that presence that strikes fear in an opposing defense’s heart come the clutch moments of a game, the kind of guy that can have entire defenses thrown at him and still find a way to make not only the right play, but the winning play. Basically, the Rockets could really use a Derrick Rose; sadly, Tuesday night at least, he played for the other team in red. The one that won.

Attributing losses to the “lack of a star” may seem oh so passé to those accustomed to watching All-Stars have their way with Houston late in games, but there really isn’t another direction in which I can point my finger other than that of Rose. Because of foul trouble, he missed the last half of a third quarter that the Rockets dominated, putting together an eight-point-lead after outscoring the Bulls by 16 in the third period; this team needs Rose (at least as the team puts its new-found identity on hold in preparation for Carlos Boozer’s arrival) as badly as any team in the league relies on its star, particularly for offense, and when Rose simply cannot come through, the team flops around and pokes at defenses instead of attacking them, leading to the kinds of possessions in the third that left Luol Deng bamboozled by Shane Battier’s post defense. Unlike the past, Rose shows up nightly these days, and on Tuesday, he brought his shiny new three-point shot with him. Rose’s talents appear limitless when defenders cannot go under screens to defend him, as his speed and power when barreling toward the bucket with reckless abandon are rivaled only by men with names like LeBron and Carmelo. With a jumper in the mix (Rose hit 4 of 5 from behind the arc last night, with all but one make taken in the fourth), defensing the Derrick Rose onslaught will not work without the kind of double-teaming that generally looks like bad defense on highlight clipshows as three-point shooters go to work with endless space in which to cock it back (cue Kyle Korver and his ridiculously efficient line of 10 points on 4 shots, 6 boards, 4 assists and 3 steals in 26 minutes of work). Blaming the Rockets for not being able to handle the 16 points poured in by Rose in the fourth seems as unfair and useless as blaming the victim of a crime for not better reacting to a situation; maybe the victim could have handled it a little better, but jeez, how could anyone have seen it coming?

So, high off the lead at home against a very solid team, the Rockets relented and were soundly demolished by the rollicking train that is Rose. There were other stories in this one (the insane points posted in such a slow game, especially considering the turnovers involved on both sides; another impressive turn for Brad Miller in lieu of the large man; Kyle Lowry looking outmatched… well, I guess that isn’t really a different story), but there was one that decided this game. That story was titled “Derrick Rose Goes Nova”, and the Rockets simply couldn’t rewrite it when it mattered.

Houston Rockets 92, Chicago Bulls 95

Box Score

By the Horns

On to the links…

• Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle appears to be seeing stars just as much as I, at least after last night’s fourth quarter upheaval by Mr. Rose. Today, Justice made some interesting points about how Daryl Morey’s consistent, moderate success has left the Rockets in a perpetual state of mediocrity: “Morey has kept the Rockets competitive, and there probably are days he regrets it, because one John Wall can turn a franchise around… But the Rockets are short on talent, and in the NBA, talent always wins out. It’s a team that needs one more bright and shining light, the kind of player Tracy McGrady once was, the kind of player Yao once was. Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good. At the moment, the Rockets are neither.”

• If you trolled the Internet in search of basketball news in the early 2000′s, you are probably hyper-aware of Kyle Korver’s resemblance to a certain Punk’d star. If you are Bill Worrell and Clyde Drexler, the Houston Rockets’ home broadcasting team, that realization probably hit you live on television last night (for my money, Korver’s always looked much more like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer bloodsucker than Ashton Kutcher).

• What’s this? Another fantastic new column from our own beloved Rahat Huq over at Hardwood Paroxysm? Yes, the boss himself talks over at HP about exactly why Steve Francis wasn’t quite the headcase that has been retrospectively presented to us.

• Why did Rick Adelman decide to try and foul the Bulls, Joakim Noah in specific, when down three in the closing seconds of last night’s contest? Sebastian Pruiti of NBA Playbook delves into the (misguided, in his opinion) choice of fouling or not in the last minutes of a nailbiter: “Now, I understand that with less time on the clock, the Bulls would probably have milked some clock, but you have to trust your defense here, get a stop, secure the rebound, and give yourself a chance to tie the game.”

• “I’m a star in my head like Boobie Gibson”- Chip Tha Ripper

• Trey Kerby’s endless manlove for Brad Miller continued with yesterday’s Chronicle article touting Noah’s BFF-relationship with Miller; the story included Noah’s description of Miller as a “redneck”, the intimation that there were bets placed on last night’s actual game between the two besties and the secret to guarding Noah: make him chuckle.
• A brilliant comic strip summing up last night’s affair.

Analysis and links can be found after the jump.

Of all of the terrible things that can be said about the 2010-11 Houston Rockets, no one can ever say that they are the New York Knicks. And for that, we should all be very, very grateful. This incarnation of Rockets has at times shown a lack of effort on defense, a predilection for low-percentage jumpers and a generally blasé attitude regarding late-game execution; of all of these sins, the Knickerbockers are greater offenders, and simply looked quite offensive Sunday night. New York may not have found its world-changing superstar this offseason, but Amar’e Stoudemire was no slouch and soon found himself surrounded by talented, if less than proven, role-players and a familiar, brilliant coach. Something seemed as if it would finally go right for the boys in blue, but alas, the Knicks currently reek of ineptitude on the sidelines (“seven seconds or less” looked brilliant when Roger Mason wasn’t your best three-point shooter, eh, Mike? How about telling these guys to not shoot 19-footers immediately after bringing the ball up the court?) and find a hollow shell where a true star once was in Stoudemire, at least so far. Granted, this team looks a lot better with Ronny Turiaf patrolling the paint (I know it seems nuts, but the former Laker/Warrior hypeman has gone nuts on opposing offenses this year, blocking just under two a night and presenting a lot of troublesome length when combined with a motivated Stoudemire), but there were Kramer-esque, “luxurious” passing lanes that the Rockets were allowed (and consistently took advantage of) all night. A few times, Brad Miller and Shane Battier slung beautiful, delicate passes through the middle that led to high-percentage shots, and all I could think of was how more ball-hawkish defenders like John Wall and Chris Paul would have never allowed some of the passes the Rockets were executing ever take place. Thank God for the Knicks.

Throughout last night’s local Houston telecast, the men calling the game repeatedly argued about Stoudemire’s viability as a superstar and his worth in comparison to that of Scola, the first a common tale to be spun by sideline talkers in this early season and the second a ludicrous assessment based on a tiny sample size and huge helping of homerism. Prior to this year, Stoudemire has consistently produced exactly like the star the media portrayed him to be (if not more so, as Steve Nash has been attributed essentially every iota of success from the SSOL-era of the Suns post-mortem), but all of the unfair questioning of Amar’e's deal seems, well, quite fair after underwhelming results as the focal point of an offense that badly needs structure and leadership. Though Amar’e piledrived through Scola repeatedly in the first half to get layup after layup (and set up his simply gorgeous mid-range game), once pitted against the one-man-team-defense that is Chuck Hayes, Stoudemire folded and submitted to his worst inclinations, disappearing on play after play due to his frustration with Hayes’ defense and facilitating, though not at all causing, a culture of insouciance among this impressionable young group of Knickerbockers. Yes, Amar’e Stoudemire’s brief run as King of New York has started poorly (though regime changes are never pretty), but that in no way places him in the same stratosphere as Luis Scola, a garbageman of a star, if one at all. Scola collects his points through a series of post-ups when mismatched and open jumpshots created by active, dangerous teammates; his recent inclusion in moronic, completely hypothetical trade talks for Chris Bosh (which Rockets fans would somehow not want!!!) and this juxtaposition with Stoudemire exemplifies the  abuse of the new sabermetric style of viewing basketball. I know Scola’s PER looks as handsome as the caveman himself, but  Rockets fans are all kidding themselves if they’re convinced Scola has taken the jump to compete alongside these men as titans of the four because a team featuring Scola in a manner similar to the way D’Antoni is currently showcasing Stoudemire would likely be worse than the 72-73 Sixers by a longshot. Great raw stats like Scola’s may look mighty healthy, but remember the results that have come from his and Martin’s stat-padding (I am not in anyway implying anything about either of those men’s intentions, simply that their fantastic statistical seasons have come along with a truckload of losses).

Their champion stats looked great for the Rockets last night, though, and when combined with what are arguably the Rockets’ three best defensive players (Hayes, Battier, Kyle Lowry), those two helped pin the Knicks in the third quarter. That exact lineup seemed to find the groove between offensive chemistry and constant defensive pressure that this team has kept missing in the first few weeks of this young season, as Martin and Scola’s sieve-like defense and Battier’s non-existent offensive presence were consistently masked by good ball movement (and terrible, terrible shots on the Knicks’ parts). Regardless of New York’s complete collapse in the second half, the Rockets used this weekend’s two victories to learn about each other and make up for what injuries have taken, exactly the kind of progress that’ll be necessary for the team to have any chance at making a run later in this year.

Houston Rockets 104, New York Knicks 96

Box Score

Knickerblogger

On to the links…

• Amar’e Stoudemire wants you to know that he is an apparent leader of men. They just won’t go when he goes. Stoudemire railed against his teammates’ lack of enthusiasm at the end of the game after the end of the contest last night, implying that the result of the game was of no consequence to his teammates and that he “wasn’t used to this.” As much as I love the big, ambiguously Jewish star, I can’t help but wonder from where Amar’e thinks this entirely new collection of teammates is taking its cues. Every half-hearted swipe at a wrist that will probably lead to an and-one, every bit of unchecked help defense that leaves your man wide open, every pout after a teammate’s failure‒ that band of losers is learning how to lose right now, Amar’e, from you.

• Even if one thought it strange that last night’s broadcasting team in Houston repeated the phrase “not a namby-pamby” with increasing vigor in reference to this man, Chuck Hayes sure abused the New York Knicks last night. When talking to the Houston Chronicle‘s Jonathan Feigen, Hayes exudes the kind of confidence that one would expect of a bench player who just sauntered onto the court and completely locked down one of the best pure scorers in basketball: “Hayes shut down Stoudemire. And with the Rockets no longer forced to twist the defense to stop the Knicks’ top scoring threat, the rest of New York’s offense crumbled, too… ‘I’m on an island, me and him,’ Hayes said. ‘We don’t want to double-team because they have such good shooters. We want to play him man up and make it hard for him.’ The Knicks’ frustration became obvious, coming to a head with four consecutive turnovers midway through the fourth quarter as Hayes, Scola and Kyle Lowry scored for the Rockets to stretch the lead to 95-77. ’That happens to every team,’ Hayes said. ‘Everybody gets to pouting and pointing fingers. Once you got a team like that, you want to keep them there.’”

• A real gen-u-wine celebrity came down and watched the Rockets play basketball last night. Her name is Kim Kardashian, and though I’m not entirely sure what the numerous talents I’m sure have made her so famous are, she sure looks beautiful. And who is that with her? R&B sensation The-Dream, you say? Who is featured on Kanye West’s breathtaking new single “All of the Lights”, you say? This all seems like an excuse to post that last link, you say?

• Even though Jared Jeffries seems like a perfect “Rockets guy” given his demeanor and on-court attributes, his status as “occasional stopper when Rick gets bored” probably doesn’t leave him feeling super about his role with the Rockets. According to the New York Daily News, Jeffries tried to work out a buyout when he was dealt to Houston as a part of the Kevin Martin deal; he simply didn’t get on the first plane back to New York because the Rockets wouldn’t give him enough to get out of his deal.

• Kelly Dwyer reminds us all to not get our undergarments in too many knots regarding the Oklahoma City Thunder’s fall-to-Earth of sorts.

• Luis Scola: Interested in defense on Twitter, if not on basketball court.

UPDATE 2:33 P.M.: Updated with game analysis and the daily links.

Blame away. It sure feels like there’s a lot to give out. Blame Daryl Morey for constructing a team around the most precarious of building blocks. Blame Manu Ginobili for his dirty play that will sideline the only guy in Rocket red who wants to take show in the last five minutes of a game for six weeks. Blame Chase Budinger and Courtney Lee for leaving their respective jumpers in October. Blame Kevin Martin for only being what he is: at best, a third option on a great team. Just as well, blame Luis Scola for his already apparent flaws, and blame them both for their embarrassing brands of defense. Make sure Rick Adelman and Elston Turner get a heaping plate of enmity as well, as that defensive philosophy doesn’t only falter because of Martin and Scola’s thin chests and slow hands. And, my God, please do blame that league-worst defense that turns average jump shooters into Steve Kerr (because who can’t hit a wide open three in the NBA?) and D-League talent into quality role players (Gah! Our defense has become Morey). Yeah, there’s a lot of blame to be handed out, if that’s your kind of thing. But I think every reader prepared to fire and bench may need to take a long look at this team, this roster, and see it for what it is: a collection of very solid role players. Or, if it needs to put more bluntly, this team consists of a lot of men that fans don’t want taking the shots that count in an NBA game.

Honestly, after watching last night’s tug-of-war with the lowly Wizards, I am far more interested in talking about one young man that will change the dynamic of this league. The kind of ingenuity apparent in every moment Wall holds the ball (outside of a basic half-court set. I know this seems like a gigantic caveat, but the kid is a one-man fast break ready to bust loose at any instant, so knowing that his half-court game will come along feels like standing directly in the eye of a storm. Oh yeah, I was writing a sentence) rivets the viewer constantly, allowing no let-up to the audience. Every play can be another steal (I know his line of 5 steals seems outlandish, but when after watching him last night, you could have told me he had 43 and I would have said, “That sounds about right.”) or cross-court dart landing in some blessed Wizard teammate’s hands. Last night’s game looked miserable in terms of genuine offense being produced through smart passing and good movement, but Wall simply didn’t care: when there was nobody open, he parted the sea with his chaotic penetration and found BlatchYibertorton. I hate to denigrate the batch of fun, if mercurial, skill players Ernie Grunfield has placed around Wall because the role players never looked bad in this one, but John Wall just makes it all better. He revitalizes and builds and, on defense, demolishes. The Houston Rockets looked spooked all night by Wall’s hands and Javale McGee’s never-ending reach, and as a result, the team fell back into its uncreative ways of moving the ball, which simply isn’t an option while John Wall looms around the perimeter snatching balls like a bird of prey.

The Rockets didn’t have anything prepared for Wall, and though Lowry (through an obviously nagging injury) and Smith valiantly tried to contain the agent of chaos, the kinetic freak burst free and trampled all over the Rockets’ transition defense (while the Rockets simply got outsized in the middle by Blatche and “Plastic Man” McGee). Game after game, the Rockets have gotten overpowered by one star or another (Gasol, Ellis, Paul) and found themselves unable to handle the blows. Without the consistent threat that comes from having a volatile explosion like Wall running the offense, the Rockets will continue to be punished by those types. Note to anyone gleaning hope from that sentence: the league is bursting with “those types”. Blame them for this season.

Houston Rockets 91, Washington Wizards 98

Truth About It (The Washington Wizards’ True Hoop affiliate blog)

On to the links…

• Nope, it’s not a fever dream you had. Yao Ming left the court after playing five minutes in last night’s match, leaving on account of pain in his ankles that may have resulted from a couple of collisions with McGee. There’s no word on when he’ll be back or what the results of tests he’s supposed to undergo are yet, but regardless of the severity, think of the morale blow being dealt to the Houston Rockets right now. Everyone’s injured again (a day after a bump in minutes for Yao was floated), and it isn’t banding together and sneaking out victories because of it like in past years. Miserable. Brad Miller and Jordan Hill, and their so-far minimal results, looked fine as back-up centers who get a little extra run, but the idea of them actually being the actual center rotation makes me think of lottery balls. Well, I’ll wait until I hear the test results before I start a “blow it up campaign”, at least publicly (can anything going on in one’s mind be a campaign?), but I’m already missing the many faces of Yao.

• Mike Beasley chunked in a crazy-tastic 42 yesterday. The Heat will likely win for a long time, but I bet they’ll wonder what could have been if Beasley truly develops.

• Yeah, most of the living world (except probably his own coach) would like to trade for Kevin Love. Well, the Rockets did try. I hate to say it, but I really hope that kid becomes a Houston Rocket, even if it costs us this year.

• In non-Timberwolves-related news, Yao Ming told Jonathan Feigen a little about his injury, which left Feigen with the impression that, “(Yao) did not seem optimistic.”

• In this great article about how the Hornets should approach the coming flood of excitement about the team, writer Michael McNamara talks about the Hornets having their eyes set on a particularly efficient shooting guard who happens to start for the Houston Rockets.

• Ish Smith did a fantastic interview with Truth About It, the aforementioned Wizards blog.

• Sorry about the brevity of the links today; I’ll try my best to get you your deserved “Rockets Daily” tomorrow.

It wasn’t a must win. It won’t define the rest of the season, and we already knew that opposing star point guards, much less Chris freaking Paul, would have their way with our defense, or at least Aaron Brooks. But everything was going awkwardly, even when things worked. Luis Scola got 16 rebounds, but remembering one that meant anything shouldn’t be as hard of a proposition as it is. Chase Budinger and Shane Battier found themselves open behind the three point line time and again, yet neither could find his shot and ending up a combined 2-9 from behind the arc. Last night, the failures came in bunches, and the Rockets looked ill-prepared to handle them.

This Hornets team is not the world-beater that its 4-0 record implies, but I’ll be hard-pressed to remember a time (other than when he pummeled the Rockets for 40+ last year) when I have seen David West get such great post position (Scola caused so many forehead smacks to my face while I watched him play defense last night), basically needing to lean to one way or the other for a ridiculously high percentage shot. And Chris Paul? He still does as he pleases. Don’t protect the basket? Dead. Overprotect to not allow his under-the-basket craft? Dead, off of one pass (Paul hits his guys so well they usually don’t need to swing to give him the hockey assist). Step off his three so that you just don’t let the little warrior rip you apart inside? He was one for one from behind the line. In a game in which the Hornets only took 79 shots, it produced 107 points quite effectively. The New Orleans Hornets may not overwhelm many, but when Paul’s allowed to play ringmaster out there, the game is over before it begins. His is a talent so great that it will eat up any other team’s story that doesn’t want to impose its defensive will on him. And last night, Houston saw exactly what happens when a genius is allowed to roam free; he creates brilliance everywhere he goes, to the chagrin of the men in red and white.

Box Score

Hornets 24/7

No links today. Sorry; I’ll get you guys tomorrow.