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
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.
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