The good news is that Terrence Jones saw nearly 20 minutes of playing time and left us with a brutal highlight to enjoy. The bad news is that there was a game tonight. With the nascent form of a D’antoni offense set up in Los Angeles, the Lakers had their way with the Rockets, punishing them from the arc, from the paint and from the free throw line. They shot 45% from deep. They hit 54% overall. They only hit 18 free throws out of 28, but they got 28 free throws.
Note that this was written prior to the Rockets-Lakers Sunday night affair. The events of that game had no bearing on the author’s assertions. – Ed.
By the time this is published, the Rockets will probably be 4-6. They’ll likely trudge along near .500 for the entire season. And at this rate, there’s a safe chance they land at the 14th pick once again. But you know what? For the first time in years, I won’t mind.
The big games keep coming for the Rockets. First the Heat and now the Lakers inside a week! The storyline dominating the national conversation about this game will the be arrival of Mike D’Antoni as Lakers coach. This will be his first game patrolling the sideline for LA, and after all the protracted “Phil or Mike?” discussions it will be intriguing to see the product that he can put on the floor.
As you may have noticed, Red94 was offline for a better part of the last 48 hours. As I explained on Twitter, we were upgrading to a different server. Hopefully that should make things faster and cut down the error messages you all were used to seeing.
Let me know in the comments, or via email, if things seem faster to you. If you all are still experiencing the same problems, we may need to look into a completely different route.
Thanks.
After the challenge of facing off with the defending champions, the Rockets’ next task is a team from the opposite end of the NBA spectrum. Before the season started, it wouldn’t have seemed wholly unreasonable to predict that the Hornets would lose as many games as the Heat would win. New Orleans have made a mostly promising start to their season though, racing out to a 3-2 start. They arrive at Houston on the back of four days of rest, so don’t expect any tired legs here!
Lineups:
The Hornets’ strength is their frontcourt. They’ve put together a very solid big man rotation with Robin Lopez and Anthony Davis starting while Ryan Anderson and Jason Smith come off the bench. All of these guys provide slightly different skill sets which work together nicely. If only they had some decent backcourt players, they’d be in business, but unfortunately for them that side of the court is sadly underpowered. Greivis Vasquez will start at PG flanked by Austin Rivers and Al-Farouq Aminu. Off the bench, you’ll see Brian Roberts as the backup point along with Roger Mason Jr. and Darius Miller. The Hornets are hoping to see development from all of the young guys there, and in time perhaps this strategy will pay off, but for the time being it leaves them bereft of consistent scoring punch. It might be different were Eric Gordon around, but he has been slow to recover from his latest injury.
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