The Rockets’ attempt to become a serious team began in earnest last season. the defensive end. It’s no surprise that their attempt to take the next step this season — from serious to scary, from runner to contender — started there, too.
“Every team that has won a championship is usually a top-five defense,” Rockets head coach Ime Udoka said recently. said Michael Pina of The Ringer. “This is non-negotiable for me.”
Building a top defense – what Udoka and Co have done, as Houston enters Thursday’s matchup with the ranked Warriors second in defensive efficiencyaccording to Cleaning the Glass – sets a high standard. In the age of pace, space and unfettered 3-point bombardments, this is the other end of the court that often determines a team’s ceiling.
Twenty of the last 21 NBA champions were in the top 10. The one that didn’t, the 2021-22 Warriors, had Stephen Curry… which, you know, is basically the same thing. These Dubs also scored 116.4 points per 100 possessions outside of trash time in the playoffs; it would have been the second best offense in the league during the regular season.
These Rockets aren’t built around a single-megawatt offensive force like Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, a healthy Kawhi Leonard or Nikola Jokić. They’re not built around an armada of shooters like the Celtics team this Udoka used to trainor a crushing tandem like the LeBron James/Anthony Davis duo that led the Lakers to the 2020 title. Fourth-year center Alperen Şengün offers about as convincing as an imitation of the Joker as is the case in the game, but he has seen his shooting efficiency decline both inside and outside the arc. After five straight 20-plus point performances to open the season, former No. 2 overall pick Jalen Green declined again, shooting a career-worst 47% from 2-point range and 33.1% from 3 with a barely positive assist. -turnover rate. Fred VanVleet remains a rock-solid setter, but he is missing more than two-thirds of his triples.
Houston is off to a fantastic start with a 15-7 record, a game and a half out of first place in the Western Conference. But that lack of firepower could end up being the dividing line between pretenders and pretenders for Udoka’s club, which ranks 26th in the team pass percentage And 3 point percentagedead last in assistance rate and just ninth in offensive efficiency.
…Wait a second. What?
That’s right: despite the fact that only one rotation player shoots 50% from the field (Amen Thompson) and one rotation player shoots above league average from 3-point land ( Dillon Brooks), and despite being in the bottom four in both cases. effective success percentage (which explains why the 3 points are worth more than the 2 points) and true shooting percentage (which takes into account 2-point, 3-point, and free throw accuracy), Houston is scoring 115.1 points per 100 possessions outside of trash time this season – which is tied with the Resurgent Bucks for the ninth in attack, according to Clean the glass.
Which, given these shooting numbers, raises a question: Uh, how?
It turns out the first step to building a high-level offense without high-level shooting: relying on your best defense.
Led by All-Defensive Team Brooks and newly dubbed “Twins of Terror” Thompson and Tari Eason, the Rockets rotation is full of wings with long, athletic, mean arms and magnetic hands. They don’t just get stops; they break offensive trips, ranking seventh blocks10th in stolen11th in deflections and 12th in opponent turnover rate. They also prioritize putting periods at the end of their defensive possessions, ranking 10th in the standings. defensive rebound rate.
And once the ball is recovered, the Rockets launch:
Houston only scores 92 points per 100 possessions in half court settings – 25th in the NBA. However, in transition, when you are ahead of the defense or the defense backtracks and is unstable? This goes up to 127.6 points per 100 – And 140.3 points per 100 after a flight. When you have a way to take your attack from terrible to great, it’s a good idea to do it as often as possible; in a related story, only four teams attack more frequently in transition than Udoka’s Rockets, and only Denver scores more fast break points per game.
Even if you prioritize picking up the pace, you’ll still spend at least three-quarters of your offensive possessions playing in the half-court, against stopped defenses – which, as we just noted, doesn’t isn’t exactly the strong point of a Rockets offense that struggles to shoot straight. A good second step to building that top offense, then: get a lot of shots.
Houston leads the NBA in field goal attempts per gamepartly thanks to the avoidance of turnover of elites – after having finished dead last in turnover rate in the two seasons before Fred VanVleet arrived, they ranked sixth And fourth since the arrival of the sure-handed lead guard — and in part to the absolutely voracious marauding of the offensive glass:
All of Houston’s centers – Şengün, Steven Adams and Jock Landale – can either root in front of the rim or bulldoze potential performers underneath to get their preferred position. All of Houston’s fast-twitch, tarantula-armed forwards and swingmen – Thompson, Eason, Jabari Smith Jr., Cam Whitmore et al. – having the quickness to weave between opponents in the paint, the jump to get the ball over them and the instinct to follow the shot, whether it’s theirs or someone else’s.
While some coaches would seek to tone down this aggression and send everyone sprinting to avoid quick baskets, Udoka asked his charges to relentlessly pursue misses. The logic is twofold. On the one hand, making it harder for opponents to get the ball back makes it harder for them to punish you with it. (“We thought you could crash at a high rate, and that’s almost the first layer of your transition defense,” Udoka said to Pina.)
Next: the reward of another bite of apple far outweighs the risk. The Rockets swallowed up 34.5% offensive rebounds available this season, leading the NBA, and has turned those overhauls into 17.7 second chance points per gamesecond behind the Hornets. Houston scores 106.6 points per 100 on withdrawalswhich is nearly 15 points per 100 above its overall half-court offensive rating, and a major asset to the results of a team that needs to work some magic in the scoring margins.
Three Rockets place in the NBA top 25 in offensive rebound rate: Şengün and the Terror Twins, 6-foot-8 Eason and 6-foot-7 Thompson, who throw themselves at the backboard at speeds and angles inaccessible to most other humans. This trio only played 146 minutes together this season; in them, Houston carried a absurd 38.4% of his misses.
Eason’s production this season deserves a brief sidebar. After missing most of last season with a growth on his left shinthe 23-year-old forward is putting up eye-popping per-minute numbers on the Houston bench: 17.8 points, 10.1 rebounds, 3.3 steals, 1.7 assists and 1.6 blocks. by 36 minutes of work. The third-year pro grabs offensive rebounds on over 10% of Houston’s possessions and comes away with blocks and steals on over 3% of Houston’s possessions. the adversaries possessions. Only two other guys in NBA history did it…and they are Hakeem Olajuwon and David Robinson.
This team-wide relentlessness and commitment to pounding the basket – Houston’s seventh-most in shooting share directly on the rim – has another advantage downstream: the Rockets generate a plot whistles.
Only the magic, the grizzlies and the nuggets make more mistakes per game than Houston, with bull-in-a-china-shop Şengün leading the pack with 5.5 per game – tied with Kevin Durant for eighth in NBA among players who made at least 10 appearances – and only the Nuggets attempt more free throws by competition. Only the Magic and Nuggets spend higher share of their offensive possessions in the bonus than Houston.
This is important because, as Owen Phillips recently noted in The F5“On average, accessing the bonus is worth about two offensive rating points.” This season it’s about the difference between being a a top-10 offense and a down-10 offense – who is a very big difference, especially for a team with very big projects.
“The goal is to go deep,” VanVleet said recently told Kelly Iko of The Athletic. “And not just to make the playoffs, to make a real run.”
A true run will require true offensive creativity and cohesion: the ingenuity to find multiple paths to points when the game slows and is stressful, the know-how to generate good looks against the best defenses, and the skill to overthrow them. Whether these Rockets can develop that — whether this top-10 offense is solid or smoky — is one of the most interesting questions in the NBA right now.
You can go a long way beating people on the offensive glass, taking care of the ball, forcing turnovers and getting out in transition. On the way all the path, however, requires more.
