Item 1 - Houston 95 - Utah 104.
Summary - we gave this one away. The game was a lot closer than the score indicates, with the Rockets holding a slim lead until late in the 4th. No, its not your imagination, once again, at crunch time in a close game the Rockets offense looked like a goat rodeo, with no clue who was doing what, where or when.
The Rockets gave away 23 turnovers, with no Rocket other than Shane Battier not responsible for at least 1 TO. Brooks and Ariza paced the Rockets with 5 and 4 respectively. I love Brooks, but he really, truly, needs to quit giving the ball away on sloppy plays. I'm not talking about turnovers on aggressive basket attacks, or daring passes for big scores, I'm talking about weak little efforts to an open teammate 8 feet away that the defender simply scoops up on his way to a Sportscenter highlight.
So in a nutshell, the Rockets could have won, looked rusty after a long and much-needed break, and the Jazz were the Jazz. Everything you hate about them was in full effect tonight. And Deron Williams lovers, the time has come to admit it. He's gone over to the dark side. He's a Jazzhole now, and that's a taint you can't ever erase.
Item 2 - Houston vs Milwaukee
A back-to-back to open the post ASG portion of the season? Of course! How else? Anyway, Milwaukee looks to be a team that is going to be pretty good, pretty soon. If Jennings goes crazy we probably lose this one, if he doesn't, we should win. Andrew Bogut appears to be a pretty cool guy. Incisive analysis!
Item 3 -
Tracy McGrady remains a Rocket for now. Apparently our trading partners had a "moment of clarity" and said, 'Wait! This isn't TMac! This is the corpse of Tracy McGrady! We don't want THAT.'
Item 4
In these times, in this economy, we've got to make bandwidth and photons stretch as far as possible. So this is ALSO a game thread.