Hard as it may be to admit, the Houston Rockets are not a particularly good NBA team. Do not misunderstand; they have a fair amount of talent, skills that usually show up on both sides of the ball, and Houston has won several more games than it’s lost in this farcical slight of a season. Instead, what I mean is simply this: the Rockets can simply not overpower any team with its talent on almost any night. Never can this team take a game off in regards to either its defensive or offensive schemes and expect to not be staring at a double-digit defeat. Eh… such is the function of winning through a strategy of calculated risk.
Listening to Luis Scola do an interview on a local radio station last night, he repeatedly made reference to the fact that he thought the Rockets actually played a relatively bad game last night, and he had a point: the first quarter had been a 40-25 bloodletting on the part of the Lakers in which the 16-time champs posted a filthy field goal percentage of 62% during which the all of the Lakers’ strengths (Kobe Bryant’s all-around offensive wizardry, their massively skilled and sized Gigantors inside, their ability to force turnovers and shots away from the rim) shined as reasons teams like the Rockets cannot beat LA. Throughout the game, the Lakers looked dominant on the interior (while Houston won the overall rebounding war, this was mostly thanks to a 17-8 advantage in the fourth), making Houston have to do what they also have to against better teams: play like madmen. Instead of trusting their two relatively newly acquired big men on the inside to hold down the fort, the Rockets played a constantly moving, ridiculously dangerous brand of defense focused on ball-hawkery that eventually worked out as the Lakers continued to try to feed their three dominant players in Bryant, Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol. As those three would predictably make their moves, even against double teams, third defenders would either take bear-like swipes at the ball or head to the weakside to opportunistically lunge at the kickout pass, hoping (and in this game, succeeding enough) to get their hands on what would lead to one of the team’s only easy buckets on the other end. While this kind of defense can often have adverse effects when kept up throughout the entirety of a game (I’m guessing everyone’s YMCA coaches have already established the moral failings of selling out for a steal), Houston recognized that it was terribly outmatched on one-on-one plays and had to cause just enough chaos to make the Lakers try to either beat them another way or foolishly keep at this brand of iso-ball.
Offensively, the Rockets had almost nothing coming consistently on offense, unable to feed Scola or Patrick Patterson in the post thanks to the moving forest of Lakers bigs or penetrate with Dragic thanks to mostly the same reasons; to combat this, they opted for the home run swing over and over again, whether it be the aforementioned layups on the fast break, the always beloved three-ball (the Rockets opted for 20 of em, 25% of their overall shots at the basket) or pull-up jumpshots in delayed transition. Without offensive anchors Kyle Lowry or Kevin Martin to either run the offense or run the offense through, the Rockets look to their sampler platter of sort-of offensive skills: pindowns for Chase Budinger and Courtney Lee, pick-and-pop plays run explicitly to get Scola open 16-footers, allowing Dragic enough air space on pick-and-rolls for the feisty Slovenian to gobble up some contact and go to charity stripe. On any given night, watching this mashup of plays and half-hearted ideas come to life can be alternately inspiring and cramp-inducing, both thanks to the simplicity and diligence involved, and a few times in this past month, the Rockets have been able to steal a few wins from the Thunder and Lakers thanks to similar tactics, along with some infantile moments from Russel Westbrook, Andrew Bynum and some NBA referees.
Playing superior teams can often feel like an endless burden for teams like the Rockets, stuffed full of players that can only do so much as opposed to the few Lakers types that can do so much, but when facing such limitless power, a team can either crumble and stick to the old game plan or do the only rational thing: go crazy. Taking risks can always lead to consequences no one wants to face, but if losing’s the worst that can happen, why not overstretch, overexert, overextend? Sometimes that’s the only way to victory.
