This loss was bad. But no one quit. The emotions in the moment are making some of y'all very dramatic. We lost in six games to a team better than us. Just like we proved we were better than OKC by winning more games in the regular season and proved it again in the playoffs, Spurs won more games during the season and then took care of business. It's Popovich and the Spurs. Yeah I know they were missing Parker and Kawhi, but they can survive injuries; we were missing Nene which led us to very poor strategies. When OKC was defending our three ball well Nene almost single handedly won us a game by going 12-12 and punishing them inside. When he went down that led us to play with only one style with absolutely no option to alter or adjust. Do you know how easy that is for Pop when he knows that we're basically going small all game. I would have tried to add someone to the rotation but D'antoni has earned the right to do what he wants. The strategy just failed this time, as should have been expected seeing we were playing a team clearly better than us. With regards to Harden, he had a bad game, and the game strategy whether it was his call or the coaches is what doomed us. Having Harden guard the big man, especially when its guys like Aldridge and Gasol, was a horrible decision. It's obvious all these stars get tired from carrying such a heavy load that they get gassed in the fourth (Westbrook showed this in the first round), but you want to add the whole aspect of having your point guard defend the big on top of that?? Throws everything off. After the last game, I think he came out this game trying to conserve energy in the beginning, which was clearly not the way to go. Fell too deep in a hole, couldn't find his rhythm at all. The coaches have also talked to him about how he tires himself out too early, but I really think for a team that always claimed "we're just going to go out and do what we do", we just overthought this one. Harden is still the man. F**k the haters. He had a bad game, and we ended up losing the series to a better team. Same with D'antoni. Don't agree with how he went about a few things, but he did a hell of a job all season, and clearly knows a lot of things we don't so who's to say what actually happened. Disappoing end BUT.........3rd best team in the West, in our first year together.
Well James said " I made some passes and for whatever reason, we didn't hit shots".... So I take his word for it, except he should've said " We didn't hit shots and for whatever reason I made some dumb ass passes"! He had it backwards...
Spurs are old, man! We could at least put up a fight and make it a 7 game series. Alot of us agree we had it in us to make it close.
I'm having a hard time accepting the Spurs without Kawhi and without Tony Parker are a better team than the Rockets without Nene. Kawhi and TP are both finals MVPs with tons of playoff experience. We got destroyed by a d league player in Jonathan Simmons. This is the guy who was the leading scorer of Game 5, Jonathan Simmons. Manu Ginobli dunking and driving in at will, at age 39 after starting the playoffs the way he did. Houston by far had more talent than the Spurs. They under performed tremendously, and that is why people are upset. Houston was a 8/9 point favorite and got blown out by 30 points, they under achieved.
Suffice to say this season actually ended in Game 5... The barbarians had tunneled under the gates when Ginobili, deked off his feet by Harden on the last play of OT, did what practically no one else in the league did in the '16-'17 season; recovered in the air with a block of Harden's shot, inconsequential contact with around 1.5 secs. left. Harden must have felt something akin to Hermann Goering's realization that seeing Mustangs (P-51s) over Berlin meant the jig was up; consequently his season was over with a game left to play. Admittedly I thought the early wins were fool's gold, but the strings of victories became intoxicating in the regular season. Hey, MDA has good company in this Houston tradition of fun-n-gun; John Jenkins and the spirit of Jack Pardee must have loved this Rockets style of play themselves. Unfortunately, the professional golf maxim always wins out in the end; Drive for show, putt for dough. This series showed who knows something about greens in regulation and short game. There- I mixed both war and sports analogies. The Astros beat the Yankees... Will I do it all again? ...
I'm not saying with injuries that they're still a better team. But we really didn't have any room for error or changing strategy when Nene went down, and when we are that predictable and we are going up against a team coached by Popovich, they're going to be able to still win games. Look, if we played them in a 7 game series without Kawhi and Tony I guarantee you we would win 4 first, but we wouldn't sweep. We lack discipline for sure, and our strategy failed us.
"Yeah I know they were missing Parker and Kawhi, but they can survive injuries; we were missing Nene which led us to very poor strategies." Nene>>>>>>>>>kawhi, tony Parker
You're delusional if you think we lost simply because the Spurs are a "better team." They certainly have a better coach and more mature players that play on BOTH ends of the floor. However, James Harden is VERY MUCH the main reason we got crushed last night. He played atrociously on BOTH ends of the floor. I don't know how anyone could say otherwise. Was he injured? Did he have a concussion? I don't know. All I know is how he played and how he looked. BAD. Hopefully this stews in his head all off season and he comes back more motivated than ever to play harder on BOTH ends of the floor.
Happened to be scanning channels and went past bspns the jump. One former Houston bum lecturing a present Houston bum on how to act after quitting on a team. LULZ to tenth power.
Were they "better than us"? At most it was pretty even. As Clutch pointed out in his front-page blurb: the Rockets lowest output on the season was 92 points. This was an abomination of the highest degree, and we're not even talking about the lack of intensity evident in their body language or the fact that Kawhi Leonard wasn't playing. Although I think the loss of Nene hurt us more than the loss of Parker or 1 game loss of Leonard did them - but nowhere near enough for what we saw last night.
Same here. I also quit watching game 6 midway through the 2nd qtr. The show just happened to display something that caught my eye and then wonky eye starting talking. Thought it was be hysterical to see what he was going to say and it was.
People like OP still don't understand that the general disappointment is not Why the Rockets lost but How and When the Rockets lost and gave up.
