Houston Rockets Have No Room for Error in NBA Playoffs' Second Round
The Houston Rockets have advanced to the second round for just the first time since 2008 by solidly beating the Dallas Mavericks in five games. Now they hope to advance to the conference finals for the first time since 1997.
After the Rockets sent the Mavericks home, ESPN.com's Calvin Watkins quoted general manager Daryl Morey, "I wish we could have McHale out there playing. James [Harden] and Dwight [Howard] came up big tonight. If we're going to win and go as far as we want, and we've got great players around them, it's going to come down to James and Dwight executing, and they did it tonight."
It's going to take that, but it's going to take more than just that.
They don’t know who their opponent is going to be. In some ways, it doesn’t much matter. It’s like asking which eye you prefer to have a red-hot poker jammed in—either way it’s going to hurt. Probably the most the Rockets can hope for is a seven-game series that leaves the winner exhausted before heading to Houston.
Behind Door No. 1 the Rockets have the Los Angeles Clippers whose plus-8.4 net rating is third-best since the All-Star break, per NBA.com/Stats. They’re led by Chris Paul, arguably the current owner of the unofficial title, “Greatest Player without a Ring" (either him or Kevin Durant).
While Paul has never made it past the second round before, this is his best chance yet. For the first time, he’s in the postseason with a genuine “Robin” who is playing like a superstar during the playoffs.
Blake Griffin is balling out of his mind, averaging 23.8 points, 13.4 rebounds and 7.2 assists. Per Basketball-Reference.com, the only other player to post similar numbers in a postseason is the 1963 version of Oscar Robertson.
And that’s the “easy” road for the Rockets because the alternative is the reigning champion San Antonio Spurs. They are led by the greatest active player, with or without a ring, Tim Duncan. (Apologies to Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, but that’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it.)
Not only that, but the Spurs are equipped with the Defensive Player of the Year and perhaps the best wing defender since Scottie Pippen, Kawhi Leonard. Furthermore, if you were to design a player for the specific purpose of guarding Harden, it would be Leonard. When the two were on the floor together this season, the Beard was just 35.7 percent from the field.
So whoever the Rockets face, it’s going to present difficulties. And some of those challenges will be consistent, regardless of who their opponent is. Some lapses in concentration that were exposed in the first round can be exploited tenfold in the second if they aren’t properly addressed.
Setting up the Half-Court Defense
The Houston Rockets were not good at getting back on defense, and when they did get back, they weren’t settling in very quickly. The Mavericks made 43 field goals “very early” in the shot clock, a telling range.
Most of the shots in the first two seconds tend to be off things like offensive rebounds—tip-ins or three-point shots from tip-outs. It takes even the quickest teams a couple of second courts to get from end to end.
Fast-break points can understate transition defense because they don’t convey what happens when a team is back on defense but not yet settled in. The 18- to 22-second range is more inclusive.
Seth Partnow wrote for Nylon Calculus:
"While there appears to be very little relationship between speed of offense initiation and a team’s efficiency on those early attempts, every team in the NBA is more efficient early in the shot clock than at any other time, even removing high value offensive rebound putbacks from the equation, by an average of 8.2% in eFG%. In other words, much like getting more assisted shots would be good for any offense, generating more early looks will help any squad to a degree.
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Now there is a bit of a cause-or-effect question here. Are teams making shots because they’re getting them off early, or are they going in more often because shots taken early tend to be better looks?
In other words, the later into the shot clock a team gets, the more likely they’re going to take a “bad shot” because the alternative is increasingly worse. For example, a terrible shot with one second left bests no shot at all.
That said, it’s moot for this discussion because the Mavs had those easy, early looks. They got 16.2 shots in the 18- to 22-second range, which is the most of any playoff team. They made 8.6 of them, which also leads the league.
The Clippers were the second-most efficient team in that range during the regular season, and the Spurs were fifth. If the Rockets are giving up that many shots to either team during their next series, it’s going to be a rough time for them.
Too Many Uncontested Shots
One of the major tenants of analytics (and common sense) is that open shots are better.
Using the NBA’s tracking data, and defining an uncontested shot as one without a defender closer than four feet of the shooter, we can determine that the effective field-goal percentage on uncontested shots is 52.5 compared to 47.5 on contested ones.
While the Mavericks, for the most part, weren’t very effective on uncontested shots during the series, they were able to get a ton of them. They averaged 44.6 points per game on such attempts (based on the tracking data and math), which trailed only the Golden State Warriors.
During the regular season, the Clippers were the best team in the league scoring on uncontested shots, averaging 48.0 points per game. Since the All-Star break, the Spurs are the fourth-best with 40.2.
The Rockets surrendering so many uncontested points to the Mavericks continues a trend since the All-Star Game. Prior to the break, they were yielding just 38.1 points per game on unchallenged hoists, but over the second half it was 41.8.
This is Space City and all, but….you get it.
Shooting
There are only two Western Conference teams that held Harden to a negative plus-minus, an effective field-goal percentage below 50, and fewer than 22 points scored: the Los Angeles Clippers and the San Antonio Spurs.
That does not bode well for the possible MVP in the second round. Harden has been terrific this postseason, averaging 28.4 points per game with a 65.2 true shooting percentage. But there’s only so much one can do, particularly if it’s against an elite defense.
The Rockets’ second-leading scorer in the postseason is Josh Smith (17.4 average), and their third-best is Howard (16.6). That could prove to be problematic for Houston, regardless of which team they play.
If San Antonio wins, Gregg Popovich has shown a willingness to embrace the “Hack-a-Whomever” philosophy to an annoying level. Josh Smith (43.5 percent from the stripe) and Howard (46.3 percent) are both easy targets for such a trend.
Should the Clippers win, the Hack-a-Whos could have a field day both ways with DeAndre Jordan doing the rim-clanking honors for LA. And really, who wants to see a prolonged free-throw shooting contest between Jordan and Smith? Egads!
So maybe that doesn’t happen, but with Jordan, whose rim protection earned him a third-place finish in DPOY voting, it’s going to make it that much more difficult for both Howard and Smith and to score inside. And while Smith has been a terrific find for Houston, his three-point shooting isn’t at a level of consistency that can carry a team into the Western Conference Finals.
That means the other three-point shooters on Houston, such as Trevor Ariza and Corey Brewer, are going to have to be hitting their shots. Brewer was terrific against Dallas, 53.3 percent from deep. Ariza was not at 22.7 percent.
Ergo, whether it’s free-throw shooting or three-point shooting, the Rockets not named Harden are going to have to get the job done on offense. Climbing over either of these defenses with a team strapped to your back is too much to ask of any one person.
It’s worth noting Rockets have shown an ability to handle all of these areas of concern during the regular season. They’re things the Rockets need to button up on, not “fix.” They don’t need to make whole-scale changes.
They have the potential to get to the Western Conference Finals, but only if they’re playing focused and attentive basketball. That means doing things like hurrying back and getting set on defense, closing out on shooters and making their shots, even the free ones. If they do those things, it won’t matter who they’re playing—they can beat either team.
If they don’t, they’ll lose.
All stats not provided by NBA.com/Stats or Basketball-Reference were determined by the author using the data available at NBA.com/Stats.
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