CAN THE HOUSTON ROCKETS SAVE THEIR SEASON??

CAN THE HOUSTON ROCKETS SAVE THEIR SEASON??

In this video I’m going to talk about the Rocket’s recent struggles how did we get here what can we do to move forward tap in right now Enjoy the Rockets Chop Shop is your One-Stop shop for all your basketball needs for highlights analysis podcast we do it all here at the Rockets Chop Shop make sure you hit the like button on the videos that you watch if you enjoy them hit the Subscribe button to get

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If you want you can support us through our Partnerships with our sponsors the rocket Chop Shop is made by fans for fans and we’re going to keep rocking and keep dropping that heat you deserve from me this is something something I I phase two phase two was getting ourselves back into the playoffs

Learning how to win again and uh hopefully soon I won’t be up here for anything except to tell you how great it was to win a championship and uh that’s in phase three so let’s have phase two right now you’ve got a you’ve got you

Had to crawl and now we’re going to walk and then we’re going to run but but uh we’re all expecting a lot and uh I definitely think that uh we have the leadership here between these two gentlemen Rafe eay and Patrick uh who tremendously does a lot does a lot so

And uh so thank you guys congratulations coach and u a happy day for the Rockets so our Houston Rockets have dropped to 23 and 29 six game below 500 um this is not obviously where a lot of the fan base including myself expected us to be

At this point in the season um because we assumed a lot we assumed that the Rockets would take strides towards uh making that push for the playin that they were looking for and we haven’t seen that obviously you guys have seen the trade deadline the Rockets did

Absolutely nothing the only move we made was getting Stephen Adams who is a nice player but it’s going to be coming off a a knee injury a year ending season ending knee injury um and by the the time he actually probably gets back to form I don’t think it’s going to be in

October or November of next year right A lot of these type of players take a while to ramp up so you’re going to see him minutes restriction you’re going to see no backto backs you’re going to see him being kind of uh getting back into

Form a lot of times it takes about a year for that to happen and he’s an expiring contract next year so the only move we probably made was a salary move right and and the reason that to me this is pertinent for us to discuss right now

Is because the rockets at the start of this season um they’ve said some things that that to me set a standard for what they wanted to do this year right we saw at the opening press conference with Tilman fatita with Rafel stone with um with Coach adoka when they came in they

Set the standard uh with Tilman saying that this coming season is going to be phase two and what he expects in phase two is to make the playoffs and then phase three is when you’re contending for championships right and and it’s not something that you just say if you just

Think that well it kind of really means that we’re going to be a lottery team again so there’s a clear distinction between where the Rockets Are Falling Towards right now and what the goals of the ownership at and I wanted to start at ownership because I feel like that’s

Very important to to set the table because obviously he is the one that owns the team so what he wants it’s what’s going to happen mind you this is the same tman fatita that during uh the tank seasons was nowhere to be seen and

You know the LA you know last we saw him was yelling pray for Victor so he is not you know I can tell that this is not a guy that’s happy with losing coach adoka is not a guy that’s happy with losing I’m not sure about Rafel Stone but I’m

Sure he doesn’t like losing so all of this just like I said I’m setting the table here Tillman ferti is saying that phase two includes making the playoffs one of the key things that coach adoka had pointed out for the team when he came on board was um assessing the

Roster and the biggest things he said they they needed at this moment in time was shooting and a big man awesome uh so now as far as what’s coming up ahead I mean have you guys already sit down and have any talks as far as what maybe you

Would like to add to the team with free agency and then the draft coming up yeah that was part of the obviously the interview process and so we start with our guys that we have first and how we can improve them but the cap space that

We mentioned we like to had some veteran pieces there um shooting is at a premium in an area we struggled this year so we want to improve that and then just some contrasting pieces to what we already have whether it’s bigs alprin does some things really well but we we’d like to

Add some different types of bigs uh shooting on the wings but we have a ton of talent across the board and it’s my job to utilize that a different type of big a different variation of big man from Al changon shooting and a big man you know what coach you were right

Brother you are right in assessing correctly that this is where the team was lacking was in the shooting Department right and just to prove the point I’m going to go through some numbers just to show you guys how much the Rockets have actually struggled um in both of these departments uh of both

Shooting and having uh another type of big man that isn’t Alber chenon so what I want to look at right now is the rocket three-point percentage by month you can see in October 29.3% we were 27th in the NBA only three games so and not really enough to really make

Anything out of they’re figuring out uh November was our best month um this year right when eight and5 um in that in that month had the ninth best three-point shooting team so this was the outlier for the month and this is when Dylan Brooks especially was going crazy Fred

Had a good good three-point shooting um Jaylen didn’t struggle as much uh Jabari was on the up so we had that month there you can see it’s reflected in the record in the month of December uh went 7 and seven that month 36.8 so about League average 18th in three-point shooting and

Then January the shooting cratered um 32.8% dead last in the NBA in three-point shooting um so that kind of shows and currently we’re 22nd so only four game five games into the month of February so still pretty much bottom third in shooting in the shooting Department three-point shooting department and this is definitely

Pointing at what kosoko was saying at the start of the year so now we’re going to look at wideopen threes by month these are uh wide open threes where the closest Defender is only 6 feet or more away which is actually a lot that’s like basically a practice shot for your team

October we shot 25% on these shots so kind of a small sample size 29th November our best month we’re shooting 40.9% on wide open 3es which was eighth in the NBA December 37.5% on those shots 23rd in the NBA which is bottom third in January we were

29th right 29th only the only team that was worse than us on this was Charlotte and February we’re 15th I’m sure it’ll normalize to being bottom third as the month goes on so this is your shooting so one of the key metrics that you want

To look at for this team and this is kind of obvious on film is going to be how they defend the rim and usually for teams that don’t have a traditional rim protector um in their starting five you want that Elite perimeter defense to prevent those attempts in the first

Place and um and try to shut down other zones on on the court but this was an area that the Rockets were actually doing good on for a majority of the season and in recent times it’s fall off the face of the map October you can see

Three games we were just bad that was the Orlando game and things like that 71% I also wanted to correlate with Alin shenon uh field goals defended at The Rim you can see he was at 75% in November 59.5% for the Rockets RP was at

59.1 just to give you a standard of what um that ranks amongst the league the very best Rudy gobert his Rim uh field goal uh percentage at The Rim uh defended is about 52% on the season about average for most centers in the NBA is between 55 and 59%

So anything between 55 and 59 would be about League average anything above 59 so when you get into the 60s you’re getting into being below average and then anything below 55 is pretty much a leite so you can see for shenon October you know three games and you get to

November League average a little bit slightly uh slightly slightly below December the best month he had defending the rim 58% but the team still struggled at 62.2% um so you can see that there’s a gap there there and then January 62% so we’re trending to below average the team

Is above at 63.9 and then February in just a few games um which he got shut down from being hurt uh he looked bad in the past like six seven eight games right so it made sense that if he was injured because he wasn’t even jumping

On any of those attempts there are plays he would just stand there with his hands straight up in the air if you’re going to be H like that I mean he should have been playing in the first place but with the Rockets bad roster it kind of forces

You to to play guys that are hurt that kind of circles back to what I was talking about with you know what the expectations are for this team so we’ve just seen right the Rockets are a bad shooting team and they’re a team that they can’t protect the rim especially

When shenon isn’t playing well so if he’s not playing well on defense the defense as far as the rim goes down because you look at some of the other players uh they’re not even getting attempts to block the shots we don’t have a lot of guys I think shenon gets

About eight or nine um attempts of of people going to the rim on them the other players are like two and three per game so Jabari gets about two or three attempts you get um uh Jeff Green gets about two attempts so we don’t have any

Other variation of a type of player that that we need to have a complete team we don’t have a weak side shot Blocker we don’t have a second big Off the Bench that we can play against certain lineups um because while all of this is going on

The Rockets have fielded a top 10 defense for the entire season so they’re defending the three world they’re defending in isolation if you look at their field goal defended overall for all areas of the Court we’re pretty much Elite which you know with uh with Fred

Van vet and alpr shanon being the best um out of out of the the team um obviously Jaylen would be the one that struggles the most Dylan’s uh F uh field goal Defender overall has really slipped over the year it started off in the low

Mid 40s now he’s up in the in the low 50s as far as opponent field goal percentage um so you have all of this guys are really progressively getting worse what this tells me is is that there’s a lot of fatigue right a lot of fatigue there’s fatigue we had one of

The top uh lineup minutes played in the NBA up until about January till guys started getting hurt the Jaylen green Fair van vet Dylan Brooks Al shenon and uh Jabari Smith Jr for most of the season was Head and Shoulders above everybody else in minutes played and possessions played together because we

Heavily relied on this lineup for the lack of depth that this team have for the lack of dep that this team have I’m saying all this what I’m doing is setting the table to make my case here we’ve heard what Tilman had to say we’ve heard the words of Coach adoka Riley

Identifying the needs of the team so that is why I am perplexed at the fact that we have reached this point in the season after the deadline and the rockets made no moves to make any type of adjustments to address the needs from this roster or to even address um the

Fact that you know we have these glaring holes in our in our play Styles and it’s not all just on the front office obviously email Oka his lineups have left a lot on the table I personally don’t think he’s maximized uh the best uh way to use the current roster that he

Does have right yesterday in the Atlanta game there was a lineup that featured Aaron holiday Nate Williams uh it featured Jon Tate it featured Jabari Smith Jr and it featured Jeff Green in the year 2024 I thought we were back in a pandemic because that looked like a pandemic lineup y’all remember those

Random lineups from the pandemic that we used to watch that it would just be random dudes that you don’t even know Kyrie Thomas and race balding and all these random dudes that that is kind of where my mind went when I was watching that game and it just kind of makes you

Think that what is the um direction of the Rockets organization at this point where are they going where they currently stand with OKC owning our pick um for this year it is top four protected in order for them to get in the top four they would have to pretty

Much just tank every single game for the last 27 or however many games are left and even in that as we know that doesn’t guarantee anything and that would be antithetical to what the state of goals were if the Rockets tank this season it would be embarrassing it would be

Embarrassing to tomman fatita it should be embarrassing to Rafel Stone it should be were embarrassing to um to Emil Oka as a coach who made the remark that he’s never missed the playoffs right it should be embarrassing to the players uh for some of these guys for

Fred Van vet to be a guy brought in here um to be able to do a serviceable Ser serviceable job that he’s done they so tanking is not an option because more than likely what you’re going to end up doing is giving a in-conference rival in Oklahoma City another Elite Prospect or

Another Elite asset to be able to trade with so that’s not an option another reason that just being all out bad is not an option is because one of the things that we’ve learned from them during this um trade deadline is that they valued being a cap flexible in

Order to chase a star this summer you ask yourself I’m a star player what team do I want to go to to compete for Rings because if it’s a real star and not some like Terry rier or one of these like guys just that are just chasing a bag

They want to win in a substantive way so if I’m a team that has hopes of learning a Paul George or or a player that I know wants to win why the hell would I be bad that’s really not going to get a guy

To say yeah I want to go down there and play in the lottery and draft again in the lottery I want to be down there again and be on the worst shooting team in the NBA I want to be there and be on a team that you know can’t defend the

Rim or we don’t they only have one big man and if if one of the guys goes down our season is cooked right I want to be on that team that’s not an option so losing is not an option then it just begs the question again why not improve this

Roster you saw the kns that you had you saw the team was overperforming and to me they were correctly performing looking at those records They went 0 and3 in February 8 and5 in November 7- seven in December s and 10 in January so that’s not an overperforming team that’s

Not an overachieving if they were overachieving to me they’d be above 500 this is what we expected them to be at a point in time in the season they were on Pace to win about 44 45 games and to me what we’ve seen is almost self-sabotaged by the Rockets is it

Salvageable possibly I mean there are some things on the buyout Market they could get um there’s some players out there uh some people have named chimzi metu a guy that was just released I think he was on the Suns as a possible kind of a alternate big man to bring in

Um obviously getting guys healthy tar eing being out uh Fred being out and alpr being out that’s that’s pretty much unsurvivable so guys coming back is is going to be a big big thing for us I think the allstar break is going to be our friend we have a couple games till

The All-Star break comes it’s going to be very important for the Rockets to be able to get guys healthy and bring them back and then Coach adoka just has to play smarter lineups right let’s avoid all these bad spacing lineups and and utilize some of the skill sets of our

Players and let’s play cam Whitmore more let’s get a man Thompson more out there and let’s bench Dylan Brooks if he’s acting crazy on the court at certain times this is a time to have real conversations about this team right because regardless of what they want to

Do all they can do to improve their situation right now is win games losing is not an option so you have to put the best product on the court and that involves playing some guys more playing some guys less and just having tough conversations with certain players about their roles on the

Team but this is what it’s going to have to be going forward and I expect them to be able to play better after the allstar break I don’t think that it’s in the DNA of any of the guys we brought in to this franchise to quote unquote just tank the

Season I think they’re just hurt I think the roster is bad I do think that we need to have a conversation about Rafel Stone’s future as the GM of this team and I’m going to keep an eye on that now I’m not a one to call for people’s jobs

And da da da da da but I think that you have to grade people on their performance and what the state of goals are of your of your supervisors and your organization Tilman fatia says he wants to start making the playoffs he hasn’t delivered the roster or made the moves

To facilitate that so I think that conversation is going to be be had y’all know I made a video a while back about you know when Steven Silas was still here about you know the length of time that people that are within tanking teams whether it’s the GM or the coach

GMS only get about two years bro like if you’re on a team that tank that means you’ve been bottom third for two or more years usually after the second year they get fired but he’s been here you you know for this is going to be on year

Four a lot of pressure is going to go into next year I don’t think that they make a move on the front office this current season um but I do think that you know what they put out next season is going to be kind of make a break for

For for this front office um but a bit disappointed in how the season has kind of taken a turn with the injury l and a lot of people say like oh they’re just injured well every team has injuries if you’re prudent especially with a young team you would have over emphasized

Having depth because you’re going to know guys are going to get injured guys are going to play bad they’re going to have ups and downs if your state of goal is what it was then you should have built the better product but it just kind of leads back to all the things

That we’ve seen over these past few years with this organization but y’all let me know what do y’all think do you think the Rockets have a chance to make the plan this year I’m still going to hold out hope I think that if we get healthy I think after the All-Star break

You know what I mean guys come back refresh renewed young guys usually play really well I I see that second break like as a second season for them so year two year three for for some of our guys coming back off of that break it’s going

To be good for them to get their legs under them um then I think they can make a run the guys just need to get healthy coach doku needs to coach better um hopefully we get a couple of guys in the bio Market to add to some depth um but

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In this video I ask the question, can the Houston Rockets save their season after injuries and making no moves to improve the roster. #nba #houstonrockets #alperensengun #jalengreen #nba

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