I just hope that with all this days off, Rick Adelman has devised a strategy to beat the Jazz, you know work on your biggest weakness!

i need to fix some of the series records. b/c i wrote it on 1 hour of sleep. but i think the matchup situations are pretty on the point
http://www.thedreamshake.com/2009/3/26/810911/rockets-playoffs

Good work, sir.

Who’s going to whack D Wiliams’ knee with a big piece of rebar. Rick says the guy has experience, and will do a better job the second time around.

All joking aside, the Jazz are just a crappy matchup – no wing players to neutralize, a SF pretending to be a C and shooting 3s, shooters at every spot, and for my money, the best all-around PG in the NBA. There, I said it. D’ron is the best PG in the NBA, overall. Are you happy Utah? Of course its widely known that the Jazz also have atrophied testicles as a result of all that flopping, and Williams is going to have to live with that the rest of his life.

That said, we can still beat them – Utah, in general, can be fouled out. Boozer isn’t particularly special, and can be neutralized. If you can limit Williams, perhaps by attacking him whenever possible, Utah is beatable. A more integrated attack from Brooks and Lowry could keep Williams out of the game.

The drive and dish or the pass out from Yao is one key, another is maintaining defensive discipline, and the final thing is hoping we don’t have soccer refs officiating the series. Take just one in SLC, and we win it.

Who would I rather play – Dallas, New Orleans, Portland, Denver, Utah, in that order.

Dallas – Has no answer for Yao. Only Nowitski can create offense. Can be ground down due to a weak bench. Kidd can be horribly exploited by Brooks/Lowry. Only Dirk is a superior player at any position in this series. I think Dallas will give LA more trouble than they would give Houston for reasons I won’t go into here. As a shooting team, though, they are capable of getting hot and burying anyone, just not over a long series.

New Orleans – I thought last year’s team was something of a mirage. Paul makes his supporting cast look better than it is. Fatal team depth. Paul can’t quite beat Houston by himself, and that’s what it will take. Attacks from Houston’s PGs could help offset CP. Scola and Landry can run wild with the defensive focus being on Yao. Win against SA notwithstanding, Houston is a bad matchup for NO. I worry somewhat over Paul’s longevity in the NBA, as he takes an Iversonian beating most nights.

Portland – PDX’s main weakness is youth. This is a contending team from 2010 on out. Right now, though, Roy is the main spark to go with oodles of seemingly random talent across the board. LA, Houston and Portland have the deepest benches in the West. Portland’s problem there is that no one is clear what all that talent is FOR just yet.

Aldridge can be pushed around, and fades out of physical battles. Oden is playing scared of everything it seems – injury, failure, celebrity, etc. Roy is the true threat, and is ALMOST enough on his own. Multiple games against the Rockets D will either see him rise to a new Kobe/D Wade/LeBron level, or disappear until next year.

Ultimately, Portland can’t handle Yao, and can’t score enough on the Rockets to win a series this year.

Denver – Possibly the most emotion driven squad in the West. If they get on top of a team, they can pile it on like no other, if they get down, they can look simply awful and concede games in the first half. Karl is not exactly a steadying influence. Is there a better pure SF than Melo? Pierce maybe. Playing at altitude gives Denver an advantage. If they get home court in their first series, look for them to win it.

Denver poses several matchup problems for Houston, like Utah they have a big, scoring, PG and fantastic athletes across the board. Capable of fielding a big, physical front court that can hamper Yao with constant fouling, etc.

Utah – Houston’s bete noire is covered above.

LA – the one team where having a 100% TMac is probably crucial. Houston has no real answer to LA’s megawattage, Battier’s famous D excepted. Depth at every spot, and a couple of stars at other positions. LA is the most TV-friendly matchup for the NBA, so unless David Stern begins making noises about the China market, expect fouls to be called when defenders first form a thought about covering Kobe. There may be a rule enacted so that all opposing players begin games against LA with 3 fouls by the time you read this.

On the plus side, no team is as capable of throwing a series because of petulant ego-fueled fits. It’s not just Kobe. If LA gets its sulk on, no one, not even the refs, can save them.

As an aside, I’d like to compile a book of Phil Jackson’s backhanded compliments -it would be the size of the LA yellow pages. It’s hard to believe someone can be as unfailingly snide and nasty as he is. Why people think he’s wise and wonderful is beyond me.

Utah’s schedule really surprised me. It seems they’re facing the scheduling they normally enjoy in reverse. If their home opponents weren’t so weak, they could go 3-7 from here on. I’d love to see them finish 8th and play LA.

is the Orlando game at home. Rafer’s Return. We get the edge in the point guard battle, for sure (with apologies to the Lad and Corner). I wonder what the fan reaction will be like.

That being said, I see us finishing 3rd and getting Utah, of course. A 4-3 win ending in Houston might rank up there in the top 5 playoff series won by the Rockets, just due to our history with them.

I think Porland and Denver are two teams we can beat. I know everyone talks about how much bigger Chauncey is than ABZ (he is), but Aaron has played Denver well, and Ron and Battier can contain JR Smith and Melo. Just sayin’…

i said this in the last thread, rockets need to finish at the 2 or 3, if they do that, we have a very good shot at facing the lakers in the conference finals.

i CANNOT wait for rafer to return! anyone want to buy me tickets so i can throw something at him? WOULDN’T IT BE AWESOME IF ORLANDO IS DOWN BY 2 AND HE MISSES THE CLUTCH FREE THROWS JUST LIKE HE DID AGAINST THE LAKERS IN JANUARY??? fucking asshole.

i don’t care who we play.
odds are we’ll play one of these teams.
portland, new orleans, or utah.
and i don’t mind playing any of those teams.
but i think our best chances of winning the series are in that order. portland, new orleans, utah.
most likely we’ll have home court advantage against those teams. and with the exception of the hornets, they’re all below .500 on the road.
portland
we match up very well against them. shane battier or ron artest to neutralize brandon roy and nick batum. steve blake is a below average point guard so abz will exploit this. aldridge will meet his match with scola who may not be as athletic, but definitely has the better skill set. yao ming will have a physical battle with pryzbilla. but will dominate that matchup. only to face greg oden who brings even more defensive intensity. my only worry is that yao might get into foul trouble. portland is a young team, they might win a game or two but the rockets win this series hands down.

new orleans
if chris paul was only 6 inches taller and a bit slower. they’d be pretty identical to portland but less of a threat due to injuries. since that didn’t happen, it’s just a matter of how much can abz/lowry ease the dominance of chris paul. b/c lets be honest, he’s going to dominate the game. yao ming will equal or surpass cp3’s dominance by destroying tyson chandler/hilton armstrong. luis scola will equal david west, ron artest and shane battier will shut down their wing players while adding some much needed offense. i don’t think this series will be a high scoring game so every point counts. due to injuries to some key players, i doubt they will all return 100% healthy and playing 100% of their potential. i will say rockets 4-2.

utah
arch rival. our kryptonite. the jazztards. whatever you want to call them. i just have a strong feeling we’re going to play them again b/c….that’s just how it is. the mavs will never win a championship. rafer alston will never be good. the rockets play the jazz. that’s just life. i like watching these games though. they’re intense and exciting. and from all the past history, you know both teams will give 100%. the home court advantage favors the rockets greatly. yao favors the rockets greatly. karma favors the rockets greatly. with the matchup with deron williams. look above at the matchup with chris paul. pretty much the same thing. ron battier both did a bad job on defense the last game. don’t look for this to happen again. ronnie brewer will not get good looks. cj miles. heh. no comment. carlos boozer is not that good. luis scola can equal his output but also bring hustle and intangibles that boozer can’t. okur is not that good. it’s just matchup wise, he causes some problems. which can easily be fixed. yao will cause foul trouble for the jazz big men b/c they just can’t guard him. rockets 4-2. i see them winning once at SLC.

I was going to make this into a separate fanpost, but I figured this would be a better place to put it. The simplest (and ironically the most accurate) method for evaluating the quality of an NBA team is simply Point Differential adjusted for pace. More simply, this is just net points over 100 possessions. Historically, this has shown the best predictor for both regular season records and success in the playoffs.

Here’s the top nine teams in the West ranked by adjusted point differential:

1. L.A. Lakers- 8.1
2. Portland- 4.9
3. San Antonio- 4.5
4. Houston- 3.9 (See Below)
5. Utah- 3.6
6. Denver- 3.6
7. New Orleans- 3
8. Phoenix- 2.5
9. Dallas- 1.9

A few quick comments right off the bat: The Lakers are by far the best team in the conference (more on them later). Portland, in 2nd place, is quite a ways back but still very good. They are going to win a playoff series if they can get home court in the first round. I’ve seen plenty of people around here hoping for a first-round series with them, but I definitely am not one of them. While they are one of the better matchups for us in that they play a traditional center and have an elite wing scorer in Roy, they are still a really good team. San Antonio is also very good, despite not having a healthy Manu for most of the year. Despite this, I don’t think they are much better than their point differential shows. Last year, for instance, they were a +5.4- I can’t imagine their a better team than they were last year.

New Orleans and Denver, however, are less good. Both have outperformed their expected records. I hope we get one of them in the first round.
Also, you can see, Phoenix is a little bit better than Dallas, but given the several roster shakeups they’ve had this year, I’ll abstain on making any real comment on Phoenix.

The two wildcards for me are Utah and Houston. Utah has not had its stars healthy until very recently, yet are still fifth in point differential. They haven’t had enough games together for me to make a statistically significant argument about their quality, but I’ll conjecture they are very, very good. One thing that hurts them in every playoff series, however, is their absurdly high foul rate. They will NEVER win an NBA title as long as they continue to foul at the rate that they do, unless they are absurdly BETTER than every team in the league. It’s ridiculous how much more they foul than every team in the league. A foul is the worst result of a defensive possession, and yet Sloan hasn’t picked up on that yet- he teaches his teams to slap, grab, etc and it kills them in the playoffs every year. I, for one, will lose no sleep over this. (Utah sucks!)

Finally, on to the Rockets. For me, this is where it gets quite interesting. If you take the full-length season for the Rockets, they are good but not great. However, if you take the portion of the season since the Rockets lost McGrady was shut down and traded away Alston, the Rockets are an impressive +7.7, which puts them nearly at par with the Lakers. While the sample size is small, it’s all we really have in evaluating the Rockets as they are constructed now. Additionally, our strength of schedule over that period is quite reasonable. On the same note, the Lakers have significantly regressed since the Bynum injury, going from an exceptional +8.7 to a still very good +6.0. While I’m not saying we are better than the Lakers, I’m saying it’s much closer than NBA pundits think, especially considering current constructions of the team.

All in all, I think we have a very good shot come the playoffs. We are definitely better than Dallas, New Orleans, and Denver- I think we beat any of these teams handily in the playoffs. Second, I think we are slightly better than San Antonio and Portland, but a series with either team would be too close to pick a winner. Utah is the wildcard here, as it’s difficult to judge how good the are- I think they are really, really good. They would a lot better if they didnt’t foul so much. Finally, I think a series with LA would be tightly contested, and we probably have the best shot of any Western Conference team of knocking them off.