The Houston Rockets are an incredibly fun team; can they make playoff waves in 2025?
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10 Comments
Showtime Rockets with Wizard Sengun. Incredibly fun team. Extremely creative offensively and defensively. Amen is a defensive maestro.
I agree with you on Amen has thr greatest leap but diasgree with you on Sengun. He's much more defensive, poweful, quick and vertical this season. He's another beast. Moreover, Jalen seems to increase variations in his game ij the last two months.
Good conversation. I feel like national media perception lags reality by two months when it comes to the Rockets. Jalen Green hasn't had a rough stretch since December. And they're currently in 2nd.
They're getting healthy and it's starting to show. Jalen will get more calls when the national perception gives him more credit.
I do disagree about Sengun. The jump he's made defensively has been huge.
The Terror Twins are becoming excellent two way players. Throw in the ascension of Adam’s leading the new 3 big rotation is why they were winning without Fred. Their problems and questions are simply upside of a growing team. The fun part is they have a great coach, great chemistry and are hungry. They will be better by the end of the season.
If the suns really won’t trade Booker then should the Rockets trader for Durant? And what is a realistic package look like?
I hate the subterfuge created by media, and watching and misunderstanding numbers because of lack of proper context. The biggest reason for their success this season has been jalen and alpi drawing so much attention and controlling the game.
People want to look for a single simple reason, and go on to the next thing, and claim stars. When over the course of the season they have won different ways. And the only constants were the pressure and focus jalen and alpi had on the opponents.
Vary early they won off defense, but then their defense fell off. They started building an offensive rhythm with the fvv jabari starting lineup, and started to get by on their very standard offence.
After that quickly got adapted to by the opponent they began moving and passing more while running it through jalen and jabari, jabari found his shooting arch and was playing great but hurt his hand.
Amen stepped up and fit well with jalen and alpi providing someone who could play up tempo with jalen, and play underneath with sengun. This is when amen as the hot new item got honestly too much hype, because it negatively effected how udoka was using him.
When fvv got hurt it put way more pg duties on jalen, and at the same time amen was given more scoring control. But it compounded and amen was getting put in worse positions to score, and jalen was gaining more control but less opportunities. While the whole group was trying to learn how to close out games without the vets, and while they were missing jabari very much.
Udoka makes it hard for their offense, because of his biasas and struggles offensively. But jalen was already better than he had been but fvv's absence actually helped jalen improve quite dramatically at controlling the flow of the game. As he got better at it they started winning more, even when he wasn't scoring he made it extremely easy for his teammates to score. That has been how they have been winning recently, amen got hurt a little bit after jalen 'leveled up' so to speak, but it hasn't been a problem because they have been riding jalen's control of the game. But they are also slowly starting to get back to were they were in other areas on top of it.
Their defense isn't as good as it was at it's best, but is better than it was. And they are moving the ball more than they were after tari came back, tari unfortunately really hurt the movement but is getting better at passing. They are getting healthier injured guys are slowly coming back, and alpi's back injury seems to be bothering him less. And jalen continues to be a work horse.
They win as a team, but jalen and alpi are the ones most critical to their success. The biggest concerns really are udoka's offensive capability and understanding, and if udoka will actually play their best lineups which involves jalen, alpi, amen, and jabari.
For the actual playoffs their experience and composure is their biggest weakness, and if they lose will be most likely reason. That lack of experience has been their primary weakness and area of focus for improvement this entire season. And they have improved a lot in that area compared to the start of this season.
Damn this didn’t age well. They jumped back to 2nd
Rockets are back at the #2 seed and one of the constants has been Jalen Green. He gets a bad rep for the 2 tanking years under Silas, but has actually been really good overall these last 2 seasons under Ime. National media only looks at the stat sheets and are only moved by players with high touches. But JG has been the leading scorer on a balance offensive approach, while being hounded by the #1 perimeter defender every game. His gravity and pressure he puts on defenses opens the game up for everyone else. Guys like Dillon have had their best offensive year, Amen gets wide open dunks/layups while seeing the 3rd/4th best defenders, Sengun gets easy buckets when teams double team or blitz the pnr, etc. Not to mention he’s been an iron man and played every game leading to some of those wins when multiple key contributors were out. FVV and Sengun has been fairly inefficient for most of the season except as of late, Adams/Tari have missed back to back (Rockets lead the league btw), and Bari has missed significant time…yet we’re still #2 in the stacked West and people in the media still find a reason not to give Jalen his credit lol. Many will see and become believers soon though.
You two are a broken record with underestimating these talented rockets players. Cant wait for them to make you two reverse course when they go to WCF this year