James Harden’s not worried, but Rockets’ historic 0-3 start sure seems worrisome
Giving up 65 points in two quarters is bad. Losing a 21-point lead is really bad. Doing both of those en route to logging your third 20-point loss in three regular-season games… well, that’s the wrong kind of historic, my dude:
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After opening the season with a surprising 105-85 loss to a Denver Nuggets team many expect to finish the season with a high lottery pick, and following that up with a 112-92 defeat at the hands of the defending champion Golden State Warriors, Sunday’s 109-89 collapse against the Miami Heat led to many of us to wonder: Hey, what the heck’s going on with the Houston Rockets?
Coming off a 2014-15 campaign that saw them win 56 games and advance to the Western Conference finals for the first time since 1997, and an offseason in which they added troubled near-All-Star point guard Ty Lawson for next to nothing, the Rockets entered the season looking deep, dangerous and capable of contending for the NBA championship. Thus far, though, they’re a shambling shell of the squad that made it to last season’s final four, turning in the league’s second-worst offense and fifth-worst defense through three games, looking more discombobulated than deadly.
The most glaring issue to date: All-NBA First-Teamer James Harden, last year’s NBA MVP runner-up and NBPA MVP winner, and Adidas’ newly minted $200 million man, just can’t buy a bucket. Like, even Kobe thinks he’s struggling right now.
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He’s made only 12 of his 54 field-goal attempts (22.2 percent) and a scant three of his 32 3-point tries (a sub-Lanceian 9.4 percent success rate) through three games. That includes an 0-for-10 mark from long distance against the Heat on Sunday, which featured this chopped-and-screwed disaster in which Harden teases out a switch against Miami center Hassan Whiteside before stepping back and raising up in slow motion, almost as if he forgot Whiteside was allowed to contest:
Harden’s early-season shooting slump seems almost contagious. Lawson’s 6-for-21 in his maiden voyage as a Rocket. Swingman Trevor Ariza’s 8-for-32. Corey Brewer’s 9-for-31. Patrick Beverley’s a comparatively scorching 9-for-22.
With the exception of sophomore center Clint Capela and rookie power forward Montrezl Harrell — who are a combined 26-for-33 from the field, with all of their buckets coming within 8 feet of the basket — and veteran wing Marcus Thornton, who got the start in a small lineup Sunday for a Rockets club missing bigs Dwight Howard (rest for his ailing back), Terrence Jones (cut on his right eyelid) and Donatas Motiejunas (still working his way back from April back surgery), nobody seems capable of putting the ball in the hole right now. Houston ranks 29th among 30 NBA teams in made field goals and field-goal percentage, 28th in 3-point percentage, 28th in total points, 29th in points per possession and dead last in team True Shooting percentage (which takes into account 2-point, 3-point and free-throw accuracy).
On top of that, the Rockets’ defense — a legitimate strength last season, finishing sixth in points allowed per possession — has offered minimal resistance to opposing offenses, allowing a whopping 51.3 points per game in the paint. You could point to Howard’s absence — Sunday’s scheduled rest, plus the one-game suspension he served opening night for his transgressions last postseason — as the reason for the interior leaks, but the Rockets also gave up 50 paint points to the Warriors with Howard around, albeit in limited minutes, on Friday, including a couple of very loud ones to Harrison Barnes:
(Never fear, Houston: Chuck Hayes has come to the rescue. No, wait, scratch that.)
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The result: the NBA’s single worst net rating through three games. No team’s getting outscored on a per-possession basis quite like the Houston Rockets right now — not the barely-trying Philadelphia 76ers, not the injury-decimated New Orleans Pelicans, not the hopeless Brooklyn Nets. That’s a problem, one exacerbated by Monday’s date with the rampaging Oklahoma City Thunder on the second night of a back-to-back, and one that Rockets coach Kevin McHale knows he needs to solve pronto. From Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle:
“It’s not James,” Rockets coach Kevin McHale said. “It has nothing to do with James. It’s our team. We’re 0-3. (It is about) us playing better on the defensive end when our shots don’t go.
“We’ve got to get better as a team. We’re not where we need to be in many, many areas. That’s just where we’re at.” […]
“I’m just shooting my shots that I normally shoot,” Harden said. “I’m not really trying to think about it too much. As good a shooter as I am, I’m going to have struggles throughout the season. Obviously, [coming in] the first couple games, it’s tough. Just stay with it. Stay in the gym and always have confidence in myself.”
It’s reasonable, of course, that someone with the kind of confidence to proclaim himself the best all-around player in the world, then go out and get pretty close to proving it, would exude calm after rolling snake eyes three times in three tries. And yes, you’d expect Harden to eventually regress to the mean on stuff like success on jumpers where no defender’s within 4 feet of him — he shot 44.3 percent on those “open” looks last season, according to NBA.com’s SportVU player tracking data, and he’s presently at 12 percent (just 3-for-25) on them this year.
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Harden’s still assisting on more than 30 percent of his teammates’ buckets, a number that’ll be closer to last year’s career-best 34.6 percent if other Houstonians can start finishing. His turnovers haven’t spiked amid the struggles, and he’s still getting to the free-throw line 10.3 times per game and making 87.1 percent of his freebies. Even on as 3-happy a team as Houston, you’d figure that triple-tries will become a smaller part of his overall diet (40.6 percent of his field-goal attempts for his career; 59.3 percent through three games this season) as he gets better acclimated to life alongside Lawson, and as the Rockets set about the task of not being down double-digits for the bulk of their contests. Things should level out.
Still, McHale’s contention that Houston’s struggles have “nothing to do with James,” however, seems like either wholesale denial or a determined attempt to change the conversation. Yes, Houston has plenty of contributors capable of doing damage, and yes, the team should look a lot different once it’s got more healthy bodies, and no, he’s not the only one who’s off to a slow start. None of that really matters right now, though.
Right now, the Rockets are staring at Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook and 0-4, and while you can’t win a title in the first week of the season, you sure can make the pursuit an awful lot harder. You needed 55 wins to get a top-four seed and home-court advantage in Round 1 of the Western Conference playoffs last year; take too long to get rolling, and you could find yourself locked into a lower-reaches spot before you know it. Harden’s the one who has to kick the Rockets into gear, and the sooner, the better.
To hear the hirsute Harden tell it, the shift’s coming soon, even if he doesn’t quite have a feel for when just yet. From Israel Gutierrez of ESPN.com:
“We haven’t had a rhythm yet, from training camp or preseason at all,” Harden said. “We have guys in and out the lineup, bigs, guards, whatever. We’ll find a rhythm, we’ll catch a rhythm. We just have to continue to play hard, continue to stick with it, continue to have positive energy. We’ve lost three in a row, but we’re not really worried about it. […]
“We stopped moving the ball, we stopped cutting for each other,” Harden said. “Obviously, they made a run, and we just never regrouped. We’re right there. I mean, we’re right there. Tomorrow we just have to bounce back. We’ll be all right.”
He’d better hope so. As he knows better than most, KD, Russ and the gang have a way of making opponents look all wrong … not that Houston’s needed much help in that department thus far.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
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