All you really need to know about last night’s season-series sweeping win for Golden State over Houston was that the Rockets starters had an average plus/minus of about -27, the Warriors +26. And it wasn’t even that close.
The Rockets turned the ball over more, shot worse, and played with less conviction/composure. The Warriors’ have now posted the two highest scoring totals the Rockets have allowed this season (131 & 126), and their 40 point third quarter was the most points a team has put up on Houston in any quarter this season. James Harden’s 33 points hide the fact that he wasn’t able to dictate much except from the free throw stripe. Josh Smith’s double tech-ejection makes you forget the nice alley-oops he threw Dwight Howard. And nothing Pat Beverley or Trevor Ariza did could slow down Steph Curry or Klay Thompson. On the bright side, this games wasn’t on TNT, so no Rockets’ fans weren’t subjected to what surely would have been an evisceration of Dwight Howard by Chuck and Shaq. The box score wasn’t THAT much different between Dwight (7 points, 11 rebounds) and Andrew Bogut (9 points, 10 rebounds), but their impact couldn’t have been more opposite. Dwight spent most of the game hacking and banging shots off the glass, while Bogut protected the rim ferociously, finished strong in the paint, and even ran a beautiful semi-fast break to a back door Klay Thompson. As an ardent Howard-defender, this was the type of game that makes that stance so difficult to defend. In his defense though, there were multiple times when Howard found himself being guarded by Draymond Green and David Lee and the Rockets just didn’t do enough to get him the ball in those situations. But overall, Howard looked like the lackadaisical and overblown oaf that so many pundits claim he is. The Rockets’ bench is the only aspect of this game that you can point to and say they were better. The group of Joey Dorsey, Kostas Papanikolaou, Corey Brewer, Alexy Shved and Jason Terry took a huge Warriors lead at the end of the third quarter and whittled it down to nine with four minutes to play. But even that was likely due to the Warriors checking out after playing with with such a large lead for most of the game. Steve Kerr was forced to reinsert Steph Curry and Klay Thompson, who quickly pushed the lead back out of reach. I certainly don’t blame Kevin McHale for leaving the unit that made it a ballgame again on the floor, but seeing as most of those players are not used to playing 10-plus minutes at a time, it would have been nice to see what James Harden could have done with a single-digit lead. I typically keep a pretty level head throughout the long NBA regular season, but this loss, following Saturday’s drubbing, already has me looking ahead and hoping the Rockets don’t end up in the 4-5 spot in the West at seasons’ end. Any combination of the conference’s parade of contenders would be better than a potential second round match-up with the Warriors. There’s just something about Golden State that makes Houston look impotent. Last year the Rockets swept the San Antonio Spurs and they still managed to win the title, so having a bad inter-conference match-up isn’t a death sentence to title hopes. But San Antonio also caught a break when the Blazers upset the Rockets in the first round. If Houston has any real chance at a title, it looks like they’re going to need the same kind of break.
