00:00Something about the Rockets, man, they can't get up to do it twice.
00:03You know what that's like, man, when you go one round and you're supposed to go the next one,
00:07they want you to get up to do it twice, and they can't do it twice.
00:10Sometimes you just lose it. You're not as interested the second time around.
00:14It's like, yeah, there's other things in life.
00:18I realize now that I lost perspective on things.
00:22I was placing too much importance on that first thing.
00:25Yeah, man.
00:26It turns out there's more to life than just this.
00:30So this is what the Rockets are, man.
00:32They can't win back-to-backs.
00:34They can't just do it again.
00:35You do it once, do it again.
00:37What is it now, though?
00:39Is it four of the last five games?
00:41They have now lost four of their last five games.
00:44They are now 0-3 on the back end of a back-to-back.
00:47That, of course, happened on Sunday when they lost to the Sacramento Kings.
00:52That was the back end of the back-to-back.
00:53But if you include last night's loss to the Clippers,
00:56that is them now losing four of their last five games.
01:01And I looked this up the other day, but now if I'm doing the math correctly,
01:05just off the top of my head, I believe that makes them now 4-6 for the month of December.
01:12So out of the ten games that they've played, they've won just four of them.
01:16And then talking about this, like losing the four of the last five,
01:20three of those are against some of the worst teams in all of basketball.
01:25The Clippers have not been good this year.
01:27A couple of nights before that, you lose to the Sacramento Kings.
01:30They were the worst team in the West.
01:34The only thing that made them the worst team in the Western Conference
01:37was the fact that the Pelicans a few nights before that beat you
01:41because they were the worst team in the Western Conference.
01:43But since they beat you, that made the Kings the worst team.
01:47But then they beat you.
01:48So that's back-to-back, or let me say it like this.
01:52Sandwiched in between losing to the worst team in the Western Conference
01:57at the time or at the moment,
02:00they put in there in between a win against the Nuggets
02:03where they have one of their better defensive performances of the year,
02:06hold the Nuggets down to some of their season lows for the year
02:10in terms of points for a quarter, a half, and a game.
02:13But all around that is a bunch of losing to a bunch of losers,
02:17and I, for one, am sick of it.
02:20I need the Rockets to get it together.
02:22An overtime loss to the Nuggets where maybe it's just I'm too much
02:26in college football mode where I'm giving credit for quality losses
02:30because they've had some quality losses this year.
02:33Yes, they have.
02:33Even as they struggle to consistently put away good teams,
02:36they've had some quality losses against some of the best teams.
02:39No more victories in the NBA, sir.
02:40No, no, no, no, no, yeah, look, 100%.
02:43I think that it's not like we're in the doldrums or anything of the NBA season.
02:49It's that when you look in the conference and where they are,
02:55there's a little bit of a glass ceiling on just how good can these guys be
03:00and how much can they be the best version of themselves consistently.
03:05I'm just trying to figure out, all right, at what point do I start pushing the panic button
03:09on some of these things that you're, all right, like their fourth cushion and Shang-Goon
03:15and some of his decision-making in play in the fourth quarter in overtime.
03:19Like at some point, does this guy who's made such an incredible, you know,
03:24he's made progress in leaps and bounds over the last couple years,
03:27does that continue to extend on all of the game management type stuff at the ends of games?
03:33Or just does the defense for the team in general, does that get more consistent?
03:40You've got Udoka as your head coach.
03:42You've still got these young guys in your core that are adjusting their new roles.
03:46Is that something that we can depend on consistently?
03:49And I very much see that where the improvement can be made, you just, you know,
03:54we've been through this with the Texans where you go through the first three weeks,
03:58obviously they got off to a much different start than the Rockets.
04:01But there's things that you're trying to be patient with, but like, all right, enough is enough.
04:06My patience has run out.
04:08Yeah, it's only but so much.
04:09So it's like if it's just a one-off or if it's early in the season
04:14or before you have enough data to deem it a trend or like this troubling pattern, if you will,
04:22when it's just the one-off, you can kind of say, oh, well, the defense wasn't good.
04:28Or like earlier in the season when they played their first NBA Cup game.
04:32Well, the Spurs, a scrappy, young, scrappy team in their own right,
04:36beat the Rockets at their own game by out-offensive rebounding them
04:40or getting all of these timely offensive rebounds.
04:43You're like, you know what?
04:44The Rockets are still a really good rebounding team,
04:46and they usually win the rebounding battle,
04:49especially the offensive rebounding battle.
04:51So that's not going to nightly basis or be a trend.
04:56And then sure enough, I've seen at least, I don't know,
05:00three or four teams since then beat them at their own game.
05:05Or how about the Kings, the worst rebounding team at the time,
05:10the worst rebounding team in the league going up against the Rockets,
05:13the best rebounding team in the league,
05:16winning the rebounding battle against the Rockets.
05:19Those are the types of things that are like, okay, this is –
05:23I believe in what this team is about and what they have going for them.
05:26They've got some troubling tendencies, some troubling trends where they will
05:31lack focus and will flat out just not execute on the defensive side of the floor.
05:35Yeah, and that's on the defensive side of the ball, which you just –
05:39sometimes that is just a matter of focus and playing your style of basketball.
05:44There's been – and a lot of Rockets fans, I don't want to say they saw this coming on offense,
05:52but this is what they were concerned about was that for the whole first part of the season,
05:56you could say, wow, look at this.
05:58Look at how impressive the Rockets' offense is.
06:00They're, you know, they're number two in offensive rating,
06:04or now they've slid down to like fourth or fifth in offensive rating.
06:07But you're saying simultaneously, but they really got to fix their offense.
06:11You know, like they're like – these numbers are really impressive,
06:14but I need to see something more than a whole bunch of iso.
06:18I know I want to see something start to congeal over time because it will get –
06:23it's going to get stagnant and it's going to get predictable if you don't advance.
06:27And I guess that's the – I trust that Udoka is going to get them playing the best defense
06:32they're capable of.
06:35It's offensively just what are you going to be and what is your identity.
06:39It's so funny because they're different sports,
06:42but both of the Houston pro sports teams that we're talking about
06:46kind of have a similar critique with their offense.
06:49Like I was listening to Clinton Run yesterday.
06:51Yeah.
06:51And Run's asking Clint about, you know, what is it about this offense that makes them –
06:57it's got to be the easiest offense to defend in the league right now,
07:00which is a pretty strong statement from Clint.
07:02And so, Ron's like, hey, why?
07:04Why do you say that?
07:04And he's like, hey, because they don't move.
07:08It's for the most part – and I think that we've seen a little bit more of it,
07:11but I get Clint's point.
07:12Like for the most part, it's stagnant.
07:14There's not a whole lot of motion.
07:17The pre-snap motion.
07:18The pre-snap motion.
07:20And especially like even within that pre-snap motion, it's a guy that's moving,
07:25but then he gets set somewhere else.
07:27They're not snapping it while the guy's moving and that sort of thing like other teams do.
07:31Whereas, okay, so that's football.
07:33You look at the basketball side of it.
07:35What's wrong with their offense?
07:37They don't move.
07:38Like they just give the ball to Kevin Durant or just give the ball to Alper and Shingun
07:44or their best action is when they're involving the two of them, right,
07:48some kind of pick and roll type of thing with the two of them.
07:50But then what's everybody else doing without the basketball?
07:54Yeah, it's that whole, yeah, like give me something to get excited about.
07:57Move around a little bit.
07:58Move around a little bit.
07:59Make some sound or something.
08:00Get yourself open so you can take a shot.
08:03Don't just be sitting up here as an observer.
08:04The rest of us are watching the game.
08:06You're supposed to be playing in it.
08:08And so that's kind of the issue there is like they don't have what Fred VanVleet
08:14don't have like a clear like brain trust or brain source like the coach on the court,
08:21so to speak, that Fred VanVleet is that gets them into their sets,
08:25that gets them into their spots and where they're supposed to be
08:27and kind of gets them to understand, hey,
08:29what we're trying to accomplish on a given possession.
08:31They don't have that.
08:32And then they also just aren't not like schematically the type of team
08:36that's, take a look at Golden State.
08:38Those dudes are running around all the damn time.
08:40You can't get them to be still.
08:41You don't have that here.
08:42You just got guys, get a ball to this guy and it's your turn, my turn.
08:46But what is everybody else trying to do?
08:48The only person that moves without the basketball a little bit is like a Min Thompson,
08:52you know, because he's kind of in that dunker spot and he's athletic as hell.
08:56But like they just don't do a lot.
08:57They just go out there, roll the ball out and play.
08:59Let's go out there.
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