FanPost

The Rockets Play Dumb Defense

Let's start with the obvious: if the Rockets continue to play defense as poorly as they've played it to start the season they are not making the playoffs, especially as the 4th worst offense in the NBA.

A year ago the Rockets were the 6th best defense in league with the same group of wing defenders that now has them ranked as the 5th worst. Dwight Howard played half the games last year, just like this year, so the free fall can't exclusively be attributed to that, and it's not like Josh Smith was Bill Russell last season for Houston either. The scheme is the same, despite the coaching change, and the players are the same, so what's been different?

The easy answer is Patrick Beverley. But he missed 25 games last year and while he's good on defense very rarely do great point guard defenders turn a team from bottom 10 to top 10 on their own. The biggest differences are effort level, which have been discussed ad nauseam, and poor decision making. Houston's wing defenders so far this season are just doing dumb stuff.

Bad Decisions

Harden bails the Knicks out late in the shot clock

In this clip Arron Afflalo has just caught the ball flat-footed and spends 3 seconds trying to make a difficult entry pass to Carmelo Anthony in the post. After a few seconds James Harden inexplicably lunges at Afflalo, opening up a driving lane and bailing out the Knicks late in the shot clock. Why is Harden suddenly lunging at a ball handler 30 feet from the basket with 6 seconds on the shot clock? That's just a bad decision made by a bad defender that leads to a clean layup look late in a tie game.

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Bad defensive decisions leads to layups

Afflalo actually blew this layup pretty badly and the Rockets grabbed the rebound, but that's not the point. The point is the process, and the Rockets have been making bad decisions on defense despite being blessed with a scheme that proved successful last year with an array of average or worse individual defenders. The scheme is the same but the execution of that scheme has been a joke.

That's not to absolve the coaches entirely in this situation. Looks who's on the floor for the Rockets in these images. It's Harden, Marcus Thornton, and Jason Terry on the floor. Houston's goal every night should be to make sure Harden is their worst defender on the floor at all times, especially late in games. In this sequence though he's 3rd worst, ahead of both Terry and Thornton, and instead of getting to hide on Langston Galloway, he's stuck on Afflalo and gets forced into playing 1 on 1 defense at a crucial point in the game.

The problem with this is that this Knicks possession came after Harden made free throws. There was an opportunity to make substitutions – say, Corey Brewer for Jason Terry's corpse – for a defensive possession and the Rockets' staff missed it. The result would've been Harden on Galloway or Jose Calderon instead of Afflalo, and anytime Houston can get Harden to guard someone that's never going to drive that's a win for the Rockets.

I realize this is only one possession and even the best defensive teams make mistakes, but this sequence is a microcosm of the Rockets' season and why they currently have only a 1.7% chance to make the playoffs currently. Harden has been bad on offense, but he'll play his way into shape and that'll came around. What's worrisome is the decision making and execution on defense. This is a bad defensive team that relies too heavily on the superhuman efforts of Dwight Howard, and get painfully exposed when he's not in the lineup.

The silver lining is that Patrick Beverley is due to come back against Memphis and he'll fix some of these problems on the perimeter. But with an injury history like his, it's terrifying to think that his presence in the lineup is this important to the Rockets success. If Houston doesn't start playing smarter defense soon the season is going to get away from them.

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