The Houston Rockets showed up ready to play. It’s been a truly grueling 28 games, and at this point it’s a major step forward when the Rockets simply look like they want to be on the court. They climbed back up to .500, sporting a shiny new 14-14 record, which would be pretty depressing if it weren’t preceded by a month-long waking nightmare. The game itself featured some waking nightmares in which the Clippers (and the Rockets to a lesser degree) used hacking to slow down and close up the game. It was hard to watch much of the time, but in the end something good seems to have happened.
The good thing was a win built on effort and identity. One could speculate for hours on why the Rockets might have been extra motivated on Saturday, December 19th 2015 (though I can guarantee that it wasn’t Kevin McHale’s birthday), but what matters is that they were motivated. This isn’t just a game that they eked out under Harden’s heroics. This wasn’t a shootout that they happened to win. This was a long, strange, tough game in which the Rockets established themselves as the better team early and then stayed there. That’s the most important thing the Rockets can take away from this game.
James Harden didn’t hit a single three pointer and his 18 points on 5-13 shooting, 5 rebounds and 11 assists still led the team to a decisive victory. Don’t let that final score fool you; the game was a full-blown blowout before the Prigioni-led Clippers bench tightened things up in the waning minutes. The team shot poorly from three overall (32%) but yet they still won. This is because of a bizarre new spell that the Rockets just discovered and will hopefully exploit before it gets banned.
The played some, any defense.
There were plenty of lapses and bad possessions, but it was the defensive failures that stood out more than the successes, and that’s a quiet distinction that they haven’t had for a while. They still gave up way too many open threes, but the paint looked quite a bit more verboten than it has in quite a while. Just a few games ago, DeAndre Jordan would have been all over Houston’s rim, driving the Rockets into the ground with a fusillade of dunks. He still dunked and did so with great vigor, but the were less frequent, and less founded upon embarrassing alley-oop setups and easy backcuts. The Rockets dared the Clippers to shoot them to death, and the Clippers weren’t up to the task.
Instead, the Clippers fell back on he tried and true tactic of hacking Dwight Howard and Clint Capela, who ended up shooting a combined 9-24 from the free throw line. That is… not good. This allowed the Clippers to get back in the game during a long and grueling fourth quarter. Doc Rivers instructed his team to foul with reckless abandon, which worked but also piled fouls onto his best players. The gamble brought them close, but ultimately the Clippers couldn’t prevent basketball from happening for an entire game, and the Rockets were simply dominant as long as basketball was being played.
The Clippers have some problems, not the least of which are their terrible bench and Austin Rivers’ late-game ankle injury. Good luck to a fellow lost soul.
Of note was Ty Lawson’s absence due to suspension. The team looked a lot like last year’s team, and Lawson’s absence may or may not be connected to that. It remains true that Houston’s ceiling is higher with a fully integrated Ty Lawson, but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards right now. Tonight seemed to be a proof of the theory that last year’s team was good and should still win a lot of games. Now the Rockets have to decide where to go from there.
The good news is that they may have a path back to the top half of the playoffs, and that they know they can do it if they need to from time to time. The bad news is that they did so not by moving forward, but by sliding backwards into a year in which they had no chance of beating the Golden State Warriors. The Warriors have only gotten better, meaning that if you can’t beat the current champs you don’t have a real shot at a championship. If the Rockets want to call this season a win, they not only have to stabilize what they’re doing now, but also integrate new parts (like Lawson or any potential trade target) by the end of the season.
There is still a long road uphill for the Rockets, and the hope is that this impressive win is the start of a path that goes forward and up that hill, rather than a hasty retreat back to their old habits. only time will tell, and they need to rack up more of these before it runs out.
