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The Red94 Roundtable: The Rockets in February

McGuire: The ghost of Tracy McGrady is looming over, if not outright haunting, Dwight Howard. Let us not forget that while it was 2008-09 when T-Mac’s knees and body fell completely apart, I remember that there were concerns about his knee the previous season – a season where he led the Rockets to that great 22 game winning streak and six games against the Utah Jazz. Knees in the NBA rarely get completely better.

We know that Dwight Howard is going to miss a month as he deals with his right knee again, and we know how badly Houston needs even a limited Howard. Saturday against Detroit was evidence enough, as Drummond and Monroe just overpowered Houston’s remaining bigs.

So how worried are you about Dwight Howard for both this season and long-term? There is no way that Houston will ever trade Howard, so let’s not even talk about that. But how are the Rockets going to adjust over these next few weeks against other teams with strong big men?

Dover: Drummond and Monroe dominated the Rockets on the boards and in the post, but I think a lot of that can be attributed to the team being on a back-to-back. With rebounding in particular, you are going to be less able to fight for position or jump that extra centimeter you need.  You can compensate for size with effort to a certain extent, but it is harder when players are tired.

We saw last time Howard was injured that it is possible for the Rockets to win games without him. While his loss hurts, the coaching staff have shown they are capable of designing defensive schemes around his absence. And you have to remember that the roster still has plenty of capable big men even if most of them are nominally power forwards. It is not going to be a bare bones situation like before where if Motiejunas gets in foul trouble we have to put Papanikolaou in at Center. In terms of the team’s prospects for the rest of the regular season, I am not too concerned.

Of course, slightly longer term it could be more of an issue. The Rockets are not getting anywhere near the title without Howard manning the middle come playoff time even if Harden maintains his MVP caliber play. Getting his knee healthy for the post-season is one of the team’s main concerns going forward. I would hope that the coaching staff are willing to wrap him in cotton wool and let him take his time to get back to full strength before putting him out on the court again.

If there’s any silver lining here, it’s that Motiejunas has been blossoming even further with Howard out. Given how poorly Harden played in the last two games you could make a case for him being the best player on the team in that span! Long may that continue. I just wish the team would try to play through him a bit more when Harden is out of the game. His play would be great to stabilize the scoring output of the second unit, but it often feels like he doesn’t get featured in the post to the degree he’s capable of in the slightly more chaotic offense of the bench mob. Is that just me, or are you guys seeing that too?

Felker: The Pistons game, while still disconcerting, was somewhat of a worst case scenario for the Rockets with no Dwight. They start what are essentially two centers; Greg Monroe is going to be a max player after this year and there hasn’t been a rebounder like Andre Drummond since KG was still in ‘Sota.  D-Mo played well, but the Rockets just didn’t have enough size for Detroit’s jumbo lineup. Besides, the more disheartening part of the Pistons game was that DJ Augustin and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope destroyed the perimeter defense for a combined 56 points.

As much as it might hurt the Rockets’ seeding, I would like to see Dwight sit out as long as needed and get completely right. Looking ahead to February, the Clippers and Mavs will be challenging without Houston’s second best player, but neither of those teams play inside out. The Bulls (Wednesday) and Portland (Sunday) are the two teams that could really capitalize on a sans Dwight Rockets team. Anyone hoping to see what D-Mo could be as a starter/focal point will get their chance when he has to matchup against Pau Gasol?

And for anyone who was on the fence about the Josh Smith, how do you feel now?  He may end up having a drastic impact on this team for the next month or so, for better or worse.

Li: Call me crazy but I’m not overly concerned about Howard’s absence. The loss will be felt most defensively. DMo now shifts into the center role and a lesser defender (Jones and, at times, Dorsey) will be assigned to the opposing power forward. As has been noted, there are a lot of excellent power forwards in the western conference. The combination of Howard and DMo might have been one of the best defensive counter punches to the glut of capable 4s in the west. Not any more.

The reasons I don’t think Howard will be strongly missed is because I’m in the growing camp of people (I like to think I got here early) who believe that Howard is a detriment offensively. We know he’s not very good when he touches the ball, yet, unlike most players who are not good when they touch the ball, he and the team still insist that he does touch it, leading to very crappy possessions. I complained about this earlier this season, and I think Rahat did, too. The team is much better served with Howard playing ethereal defense, crashing the boards, and doing little else outside of dunking on the offensive end. But everyone’s insistence that he be some kind of dominant inside presence results in a super high opportunity cost for the Rockets.

In the end, it’s a simple matter of what’s greater–what the Rockets lose on defense, or what the Rockets gain on offense? I’m inclined to believe the defensive loss is still greater than the offensive gain, but the fact that there’s an offset lessens the blow a bit.

On a somewhat related tangent, can we please send the Rockets a memo to stop riding its horses into the dirt? With Howard out due to lingering injuries, Harden appeared to injure his knee quite badly. Luckily, it turned out to be a bad bruise, but one would think this sequence of events would have been a wake up call. Instead, Harden still plays 36 minutes on a bad knee, despite having gone to the locker room for half the second quarter for said bad knee. Meanwhile, Ariza plowed through 39 minutes. Something is going to give, and I don’t want to be there when it happens.

McGuire: Harden is averaging 34 mpg in January, compared to 37 in November and December. 34 is perfectly fine, and I thought it was fairly clear that he has played less minutes since Brewer is the best out of our recent acquisitions.

As for Howard: probably the most disappointing aspect of his play this year is that his post game has just collapsed this year. Howard was not Hakeem last year, but he was serviceable enough as opposed to what’s happening now. And while we can talk about the opportunity cost lost with Howard’s offense, the reality is that the opportunity cost of playing Joey Dorsey out there at all is far too high. ( never mind the fact that while Motiejunas continues to prove me an idiot for doubting him, I still really do not trust Josh Smith.)

That said, I think Mitchell made a really good point in that Houston got burned just as much by our perimeter defense against Detroit as opposed to what Monroe and Drummond did. And I really want to focus on Patrick Beverley. Here are some numbers courtesy of Vantage Sports:

Patrick Beverley’s Overall FG% Against, which is defined as “FG% by opponents for all shots defended”, is the fourth-highest among all NBA point guards at 51.87 ( though I suspect on watching video that this may be skewed since Beverley hangs around the paint a lot for a point guard). His Contest+, which is what percent of opposing shots he contests, is barely above average. And for all his frenetic activity, he is below average in TO Forced per Chance at .030 compared to .032 for the average point guard.

And I can’t be the only one who’s noticed this just by watching games, have I? Or am I alone in noticing that Beverley has not been himself on defense over the past month or so?

Walker: Nope, Beverley has been atrocious lately. His play on both ends of the court has been well below his standards, apart from that runner he seems to be focusing on now. You might suspect that teams have finally started to gameplan for him, but I would posit that it is fatigue as much as anything. He doesn’t have an effort dimmer switch in his brain, just an on button that’s stuck at a million percent.

Like everyone, the Rockets have a lot of rest in February, owing to the All-Star break. They’re also a few games ahead of most teams in games played, so the rest is coming. They only have ten games in all 28 days of February, and the two sets of back to back games are immediately before and after the break. Even without Dwight in the mix, the only games I am particularly afraid of are the two matches against the Clippers.

The point of all this is that if there is a time for Howard to miss time and get right, this is it. Jones is back to do some heavy lifting, Smith is somehow buying into the offense and Motiejunas has never looked better.Joey Dorsey may be starting, but McHale seems to be doing that thing where he puts a deep bench playing in the starters instead of changing the bench rotation, so as long as Houston can survive ten minutes or so of Dorsey a night, I’m not too concerned. It’s not gonna be fun, but everything is for the greater good of playoff health.

Dover: On Paul’s point about Howard’s post-game – Zach Lowe made an interesting observation on one of the Grantland podcasts a while back. He pointed out that Dwight will go through these stretches where he just dominates on the block and everything seems to click, and then other periods where he is just awful. And that is borne out by what we have seen from him in the past (Do you remember that time he just demolished the Pistons on the block? Or how he roasted Lopez in the playoffs?). He posited that Howard has to be feeling 100% healthy in order to make his post game work, but as soon as there’s a little niggle or something it causes things to fall apart. Big men take a pounding when they try and play through the post so I can understand why it would work that way. It just makes it even more imperative that the Rockets wait until he’s back to full health before unleashing him again.

On Beverley – he’s been torched by both Monta Ellis and DJ Augustin recently. To my eye he is really struggling to keep up with his man when he has to navigate through screens and just generally a bit slower laterally than usual. With Harden lapsing back into bad habits on the defensive end recently as well, the backcourt defense has borne a startling resemblance to swiss cheese. Hopefully the All-Star break will help them both get healthy and back to their defensive bests.






About the author: The son of transplants to Houston, Paul McGuire is now a transplant in Washington D.C. The Stockton shot is one of his earliest memories, which has undoubtedly contributed to his lack of belief in the goodness of man.

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