Chron: Injuries take the edge off Rockets

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/sports/3443214

Injuries take the edge off Rockets
Team misses Sura's doggedness, T-Mac's excellence
By JONATHAN FEIGEN
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

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SOUTHWEST CONFERENCE STANDINGS
Team W L PCT GB
Dallas 2 1 .667 ---
San Antonio 2 1 .667 ---
Memphis 2 1 .667 ---
Houston 1 1 .500 0.5
New Orleans 18 64 .220 41
As of Nov 6 2005 11:11 p.m. CT



Losing such an important player to injury had to leave a void. That much was a given. The Rockets knew they would have to adjust. Injuries can change everything.

The Rockets also miss Tracy McGrady.

But two games into the season, the Rockets might actually miss Bob Sura — or more specifically, the mania for bruises and floor burns Sura brought them after last season's similarly dispassionate start — as much as they also now miss McGrady's excellence.

For now, the Rockets are working on the minimum requirement toward being good.

"We played poorly in the first game with McGrady," coach Jeff Van Gundy said of the second-half comeback to beat the Sacramento Kings. "We want him to get better, obviously. When we start to try harder, his greatness will help us. But until we can gain a level of intensity that is even respectable, it doesn't matter who you play if you're not going to play all-out.

"I don't think we have an edge as a team right now. I have not liked what I've seen since the first week of training camp. I don't think we have an edge to us individually or as a team."

Last season, that edge came from getting Sura off the injured list and trading for David Wesley and Jon Barry. This season, help from the injured list is not coming any time soon.

To paraphrase Rick Pitino, Tracy McGrady is not walking through that door. Bob Sura is not walking through that door. For that matter, Hakeem Olajuwon, Vernon Maxwell and Mario Elie are not walking through that door.

But when Van Gundy was asked if that "edge" will, like last season, have to come through that door from outside the Rockets' active roster, he said he didn't know.

"It's interesting," Van Gundy said. "That's a great question that I'm not yet prepared to answer. But certainly I am concerned.

"Instead of doing a little bit more, we seem content to do a little less than it takes — and have for a while. I'm concerned about individual players who I thought played very, very hard last year who maybe don't have that same edge to them this year."

Van Gundy would not say whom he had in mind. But the notion of the Rockets lacking a willingness to go through walls for a loose ball or to mercilessly move in for the kill with a lead is not new.

Last season, McGrady praised Sura as "a dog" for willing to take on anything to win. Last week, when asked if the Rockets still have "a dog," McGrady said: "I don't know. That's going to be a big key. Can somebody step up and be that dog?"

So far, no one has.

"We have to do more, do better, let all that stuff people are talking about — championships, good team, great team — let all that go," Wesley said. "We have to ... defend better, help better, rebound better, run the floor better, just play with more intensity, play more like the games at the end of the season as opposed to, as Coach would put it, bored with the process and thinking these games don't mean as much because they're early in the season."

The Rockets have had their moments. They seemed pretty intense when the Hornets' Desmond Mason flipped Yao Ming on Saturday or, for that matter, when Yao blocked seven shots. But the Rockets started and finished the game as if they wanted to be somewhere else.

"I don't think it has anything to do with us being too nice," forward Juwan Howard said last week. "Mentally, we have not got it in our brains to be out there in the game for 48 minutes performing. ... We perform well for seven-minute stretches and then have a bad five-minute stretch that comes back and haunts us.

RESOURCES
MISSING PIECES

The absence of Tracy McGrady and Bob Sura has taken a considerable chunk of the Rockets' offense off the court. Key 2004-05 stats:

Tracy McGrady




Pts. Reb. Ast. Min.
25.7 6.2 5.7 40.8


Bob Sura




Pts. Reb. Ast. Min.
10.3 5.5 5.2 31.5


"We had games in the regular season last year (in which) we had those same problems. We have to put those teams away. We have to develop a killer instinct."

Until then, it cannot be a good thing for the most competitive Rockets employee to be the team's 5-foot-9-inch coach.

"I'm worried," Van Gundy said. "Our problems ... are not three new guys trying to fit in; it's everybody just getting up to a level of intensity that's respectable."

jonathan.feigen@chron.com


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Rockets Summary

Tale of the tape
Other than a few players putting themselves through voluntary shooting drills, the Rockets stayed off the practice court Sunday. Instead, they spent two-plus hours in a tape session.

"It was very long, educating," forward Stromile Swift said. "We got to see a lot of things we did wrong. We got to see they (the New Orleans/Oklahoma City Hornets) didn't really beat us. We beat ourselves. The effort wasn't there."

As long as two hours with coach Jeff Van Gundy and tape of Saturday's game might seem, it actually could have been much longer.

"You think it was long; we didn't watch the whole game," guard David Wesley said. "There was more to rake us over the coals with. He looked at certain parts of the game he deems more important to be in control of those situations. We just watched maybe 25, 30 minutes of a 48-minute game. There was a lot to be said."


'Dumb coaching'
As often as Jeff Van Gundy blames himself after poor efforts such as Saturday's, this time he was more specific than merely taking responsibility.

"A lot of that is coaching," he said of the Rockets' lack of intensity. "Think about it. We got no effort, and I don't play the one guy I know will play hard, which is Ryan (Bowen), but two seconds. That's dumb ... coaching."

Van Gundy said he did not know if Bowen's role would change for Tuesday's game against the Orlando Magic. He has often said he would use Bowen and even start him against small forwards who post up inside or perimeter-shooting power forwards.

With Grant Hill out, the Magic start 6-foot-10 Hedo Turkoglu at small forward, though they generally don't post him up. But Van Gundy said he does need to find a way for the Rockets to get off to better starts.

"We were down 13-6 in the first five minutes against Sacramento, down 17-8 in the first five minutes last night (vs. the Hornets)," Van Gundy said. "We're obviously not ready to play. I just don't like how hard we're playing at all."

JONATHAN FEIGEN