Is Kevin McHale the Right Coach to Take Houston Rockets to Next Level?

Kevin McHale is a legend, a Hall of Famer, a champion—as a player. As a coach, he’s considerably less decorated, and Houston Rockets fans are right to wonder whether he’s the man to take their team into true title contention.

But it would be overhasty to pound the gavel on McHale’s performance just yet. He’s had a short time on the job—this is just his third season holding the clipboard in Houston—and in it, he’s had to make hay with many different casts of talent. Of the roster McHale started with, only Greg Smith and Chandler Parsons remain.

That he’s compiled an 87-73 regular-season record through so much shifting with the team is certainly a positive indicator, especially given the beastly nature of the Western Conference of recent seasons. But the true test of McHale’s leadership comes now, as the franchise’s expectations have raised starkly and a host of new personality management issues have come into the fray.

Not least among these is the task of balancing two superstars in Dwight Howard and James Harden—a dichotomy that might be the undoing of many a coach.

McHale’s experience as a player, though, seems to be serving him on this front thus far. With the Boston Celtics, he was not only a superstar himself, but also played alongside one of the greatest of all time in Larry Bird and a slew of other stars like Bill Walton and Robert Parish.

McHale’s sense of how mega-sized talents can coexist seems to be rubbing off on the historically mercurial Howard, whose usual ego sideshow has been downright boring through the early weeks of 2013-14. McHale’s also sold Jeremy Lin on a non-starting role, and the point guard’s playing his best ball in a while as he averages 17.6 points on 53.1 percent shooting through 12 games.

McHale also boasts a cozy relationship with GM Daryl Morey, acting often in tandem with the infamous stat head in order to impress certain basketball ideology onto the team.

Chief among their successful tenets is the team’s emphasis on taking only shots with favorable risk/reward ratios—attempts from beyond the arc or from within the restricted zone. This approach has led to one of the league’s leading offenses over the past two seasons.

Somewhat less encouraging is the Omer Asik quagmire, which has bubbled up under the team. Perhaps this is more of a Morey problem—he could have expected two higher profile natural centers to cause lineup problems, many suggest. But until he deals the Turk away, the work of maximizing his substantial abilities is McHale’s work.

So far, he hasn’t been able to, as Asik has been disgruntled and subjugated to a non-playing role over the last few games. His playing time also suggests a longer-standing criticism of McHale—that he is too aggressive and stubborn about his somewhat fickle lineup decisions.

The much larger issue, however, is with the team’s defensive performance. Here is where McHale’s work is very much cut out for him. The arrival of Howard has not helped nearly as much as some hoped it would. Despite averaging 2.4 blocks per game (good for fourth in the league), Dwight anchors a defense that gives up 104.5 points per contest, which is fourth-worst in the NBA.

This simply isn’t going to be good enough in the playoffs, as in the vaunted Western Conference, seeds one through eight will all have the capacity to win in a shootout. McHale’s squad needs a more stable formula for winning than having the biggest gun.

A lot of the team’s problems defending are clearly cultural. The go-go style implemented last year is still embedded in the minds of Rockets perimeter defenders like Lin and Parsons, who are constantly giving up ground in order to be ballhawks.

They’re over-thirsty for the transition game, and the onus is on their coach to switch their focus more toward getting ground-holding stops. It's unclear whether McHale has given his team a proper philosophical sense of half-court/full-court balance to work with.

Kevin McHale's effort to instill enough defensive pride and discipline in his players is the largest issue facing his job performance now. If he can take his team over that hump, there will surely be more questions about whether he’s the right man to take Houston to the promised land.

He’s in the hot seat now.