Lessons Learned from Houston Rockets' First-Round Series with the Mavericks
There are two lessons the Houston Rockets can take home from their first-round series with the Dallas Mavericks. On the surface, they may seem contradictory, but both are true.
On one level, the Rockets need to learn to not overreact to Sunday's Game 4 loss. The best thing they can do in response to much of what happened in the 121-109 defeat is nothing. On another level, though, there is a degree of “calibration” required which it magnifies.
The Rockets need to tweak things, not change things.
Learning When to Do Nothing
Sometimes, the best thing to do is nothing. However, in the playoffs, it can seem if you’re not overreacting, you’re just not reacting. One of the big lessons mature teams learn is when to not panic or make too much of a single loss.
Kevin Ferrigan, writing for Today’s Fastbreak, made a great point after the San Antonio Spurs lost to the Los Angeles Clippers in Game 1 of their series.
"One thing that often gets left out of playoff analysis, however, is how much the result of any one contest can be attributed to what amounts to randomness or noise. It’s much more fun and narratively satisfying to attribute certain results to players “rising to the occasion” or “wilting under pressure.” Unfortunately, there’s just not that much evidence that that’s true. Generally speaking, what’s really going on, is that a single game is a very small sample of observations, so any small deviation from expected outcomes that are more reflective of “true ability” can have a large effect on the result of the game.
"
The following story illustrates why the Rockets don't need to overreact:
I once read about a statistics professor. On the first day of class, when going over the syllabus, he’d always give his students a simple assignment: Go home, flip a quarter 1,000 times and record the results.
The next class he had all the students bring up their papers one at a time. He would glance at the papers for a couple of seconds and then mark them “A” or “F.” After a while, one of the students (usually one receiving an F) would ask, “How can you grade these?”
His response was, “Grades are based on whether you really did the assignment.”
To which everyone would wonder, “How can you know if someone really did it?
Then he would explain that if you really do the coin tossing, you’re going to have at least one string of seven heads or tales, as the odds of such happening are 1-in-128. Ergo, in a thousand tosses, that will happen.
But most people writing “fake” results aren’t going to list more than four or five like results in a sequence.
The lesson is the nature of randomness is counterintuitive. It will produce a series of events here or there that “seem” beyond random.
Looking at a single playoff game that is beyond the norms and trying to figure out what happened is like to trying to determine why that quarter landed on heads seven times in a row. It just did.
Game 4 was such a case of randomness. Mars and Venus were aligned just right or something. It was just a weird, anomalous game.
Per Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle, James Harden said, "We can get to the rim; we can shoot jumpers. We just didn't make our shots. I think it was a combination of us taking a couple bad jump shots, contested jump shots that led to transition points. But we shoot 3s. That's what we do. We'll be all right."
That might sound dismissive, but it's true.
Consider this: the Mavericks and Rockets had the exact same results on contested shots, per NBA.com/Stats. Both teams were 23-of-59. However on uncontested shots, the Rockets were 15-of-42 and the Mavericks were 28-of-55.
On shots that were completely undefended, the Rockets were colder than the South Pole and the Mavericks were hotter than the Amazon Basin. That was the difference.
Per Basketball-Reference.com, the two teams were nearly identical in effective field-goal percentage over the course of the season. The Mavericks shot 51.5 percent; the Rockets shot 51.2 percent. However, while the Rockets held their opponents to 48.6 percent, the Mavs gave up 50.4 percent.
Furthermore, while Houston held its opponents to .6 percentage points below their season averages during the regular season, the Mavericks gave up .3 percentage points more. So, there’s no reason to expect Dallas to have a vast statistical advantage on uncontested shots.
And, in fact, looking at the tracking data from the respective box scores over the first three games, Houston shot 50.4 percent on uncontested shots to Dallas’ 42.4, which is much more in sync with what we’d expect to see.
Point being, the real difference in the game was just pure random noise. There’s no reason to project too much about the Rockets’ offense here. Shots just didn’t go in. Josh Smith was 4-of-5 from deep and the rest of the team was 3-of-24. How often is Smith going to outshoot the rest of the team from deep combined on 19 fewer shots?
Houston doesn’t need to “fix” the offense; it’s not broken. Just keep playing the same.
Where Houston Needs to Switch Things Up
For some reason, the Rockets seem to be switching more on screens during this series. They were already prone to this, but they’ve gone even more in that direction in the series against the Mavericks.
There’s no specific way to measure this. And not only are they switching more, they’re doing it unsuccessfully. The Golden State Warriors switch a lot. But because they have versatile defenders like Draymond Green, Klay Thompson and Andre Iguodala, it works for them. Switching is great if it works.
It’s not working for Houston.
For the Rockets, it’s resulting in mismatches—like Terrence Jones on Monta Ellis right here:
Or, it’s leaving the Rockets lost and completely out of position—almost as though they don’t know who is supposed to be where—like here:
The ridiculous rate that Dallas was making its uncontested jumpers is just an outlier, and the frequency with which it is happening is not good. That’s largely do to the excessive switches.
Provided they advance, the Rockets will face the winner of the series between the Los Angeles Clippers and San Antonio Spurs.
The Clippers have Chris Paul, and that could be fatal. Paul is one of the great pick-and-roll passers of all time, and if there are mismatches to exploit, he’ll do so.
If the Spurs survive, it could be worse. They use screens to get mismatches better than anyone in the league.
The Rockets’ defenders need to fight over screens more. They need to hedge more. Houston needs to stop taking the easy way out. Otherwise, it will getting beat like a drum in the second round.
The Rockets have a good defense, as exhibited by their sixth-place ranking. They need to trust in it more, particularly with Dwight Howard returning to his Defensive Player of the Year form.
On offense, the Rockets need to hold course. On defense, they need to return to the kind of play that got them the No. 2 seed. Other than that, the biggest lesson they need to learn from in the first round is to trust in what has them where they are and not panic. And that can be a tough lesson for a young team like the Rockets.
All stats provided by NBA.com/Stats unless otherwise noted.
.jpg?w=600 "Colts Release Kenny Moore")
