I’m not really sure what the Houston Rockets hoped to accomplish by firing Kevin McHale. Daryl Morey and Les Alexander pretty much admitted that themselves after the firing, as they said that it was done as a warning sign for this team to get up off their butts and do something.
Well, it hasn’t happened. Yes, the Rockets won their first game under Bickerstaff as Harden dropped 40+ points. But that already happened twice under McHale. And tonight was just another one of those losses that happened under his tenure, as the Rockets couldn’t hit anything and forgot what defense is for large stretches of this game.
First off, I think that a look at two stat lines should be noted:
Player A: 8.2 ppg while taking 9.0 shots per game and a .419 True Shooting percentage. PER: 8.8. Win Shares per 48 minutes: -0.026
Player B: 8.3 ppg while taking 8.9 shots per game and a .410 True Shooting percentage. PER: 7.5. Win Shares per 48 minutes: -0.035.
Player A is Lance Stephenson playing for Charlotte last season, who was viewed as the worst player in the NBA playing big minutes.
Player B is Ty Lawson as a Rocket. And tonight, coming off the Rockets bench as a way to supposedly jumpstart the Rockets offense, Lawson scored just 8 points on 2-6 shooting.
And he wasn’t even that bad compared to the rest of the Rockets bench. Thornton looked like a steal for Houston over the first few games, but he has begun to show why he was barely in the NBA at the end of last year as he looks for his own shot far too much. K.J. McDaniels does try and you can see the effort he’s putting in ( I would consider putting him above Brewer at this point), but he remains offensively incompetent.
Not that the rest of the Rockets were much more competent on the offensive end. Houston finished with a season high 23 turnovers, and some of them were just downright embarrassing. There was one pass which hit Dwight Howard in the back, Howard had his own bobbles in the post, and we even got some old-fashioned “Trevor Ariza tries to create a shot” lowlights circa the 2009-10 season.
I’m just not sure what to say at this point. James Harden wasn’t great, and he is continuing to miss defensive rotations whether it’s rotating over to cover the roll man in a screen and roll, getting caught ball-watching like he has always done, and even letting Mike Conley score on him in on-ball defense.
But the Rockets have beaten the Grizzlies in games where Harden was playing even worse. So far this season, they have continually needed 40 points games from him to accomplish anything. All of the offense originates from him, as Lawson has been a disaster and Motiejunas is out.
Not that Motiejunas’s return will fix much offensively. A strong post player like him needs good three-pointers around him to get the most offensive value, and that has not been Houston’s strong suit at all this season.
Though then again, what has?
And I don’t know how to fix this – if I did, I would be working for the Rockets, not writing this. And while Morey’s decision to fire McHale is perfectly rational, I just can’t figure out how things are going to get better. And I can see how it will get worse.
How would it get worse? For starters, there is the obvious fact that McHale was Dwight’s guy. McHale was a large reason why Dwight came here to Houston in the first place. Dwight is the one player who you can’t blame at all for how this season has gone (actually, toss Capela into that group too.) But Dwight is no longer good enough that he can compensate if the other four players don’t know what they’re doing on defense. Prime Dwight was, but not this Dwight.
And now McHale is gone. And while Howard continues to play when he can, Harden and the rest of the Rockets? Well, they’re doing something, even if that is not necessarily basketball.
Enough about this game and the state of the team. As the incompetent Rockets prepare for a not actually incompetent Knicks team tomorrow, perhaps they can take pride in the fact that they have held a NBA team to under 100 points for the first time this season.
