An Almost Perfect Play To Close It, But Not Quite
A narrative for this game is difficult to craft. It felt more like a bunch of parts that don’t much make sense.
So to describe this game in some way that might be helpful I’m going to resort to Bullet Points: The Lazy Man’s Friend(tm).
- The Rockets started out great. In fact they were burying Milwaukee. Burying them so much that two things happened, perhaps unrelated. The Rockets started getting called for a lot of touch fouls, and Milwaukee got called for basically no fouls, in the first quarter.
- The Bucks, perhaps with more room to roam away from what began as stifling Rockets defense, started making threes. The Bucks have mostly spend the season not making threes, but tonight Robin Lopez, for one, almost couldn’t miss. I’ll predict this will be his best game of the season, at worst top three.
- The second quarter was a patented Rockets Disaster Quarter(tm). After narrowly winning the first quarter 28-27 as a barrage of Bucks three pointers from basically every Buck went in (well, went in to the tune of 50%), the Rockets offense collapsed in the second quarter. They were outscored 30-17.
- These sorts of quarters defy our understanding of the team that reeled off six wins before tonight. The Rockets missed bad shots, they missed middling shots, and they missed bunnies and layups. This sort of thing just seems to…happen to the Rockets. I wish I could find some sort of culprit, but the culprit seems to be “They miss damn near everything, and just can’t buy a shot, almost, for entire quarters.”
- Perhaps in these disaster quarters the team is pressing, trying to right the ship. Perhaps a greater change of cast would help. But sometimes you put in the bench, and the bench is awful. Particularly awful tonight were Reed Sheppard and Steven Adams. It made sense to to try the Painfully Slow Adams against Painfully Slow Lopez. We learned that Lopez is quicker than Adams. This isn’t a great thing, nor something I like to say, but right now there basically aren’t any good Adams minutes. Jock Landale is outplaying him in pretty much every respect, except catching the ball.
- The Third Quarter saw a Rockets run of 35-26 to bring the game within reach. It was basically the Fred VanVleet show. Fred had a good night, comparatively, with 21pts, 9rbs. 5ast, 1stl, 1blk. But he also went 9-23 overall. It was that kind of night for most of the team. The Twin Terrors did good work in the quarter, especially since Dillon Brooks was in foul trouble all night (off some seemingly specious calls).
- The Fourth Quarter was a rock fight, one the Rockets won 20-18. The Rockets took a six point lead, and then familiar nemesis Damian Lillard scored a bunch of points. He had an ok night, but he’d had about a week off with a mild concussion. I’m not downplaying concussions, far from it, the time off might have been too little, but I am saying, he won’t look as spry on a regular NBA calendar.
- The Rockets had a chance to win it on a beautifully drawn up last second pass into Alperen Sengun from Fred VanVleet (who was fouled on the in bounds pass) but it wasn’t quite perfect for Alpie to flip the shot into the basket, so a one point loss.
That’s kind of how the game went down. These are my own thoughts.
- The review of Tari Eason’s clean block of Damian Lillard that lead to three free throws was one of the worst cases of NBA Referee Legal Gibberish I’ve heard. It amounted to “You blocked him so well, he couldn’t even get the shot up, and you touched him because you totally, cleanly stonewalled the shot. Therefore, free throws.”
- We have had review go against us where Sengun was struck, forcefully, in the head, but because the defender touched the ball first, to block it, it was fine to smack Sengun in the head. How do that call, and the stuff we heard tonight exist in the same rules universe? If you go by this logic, Tari Eason could not have fouled Lillard, because I can’t see how a “block” must result in the ball going elsewhere to be valid.
- Those free throws were, in some ways, the margin of the game. How can we have such tortuous legalism when the referees miss this:
This is Rockets ball.
Well, it should be. Of course it wasn’t. Not with this ref crew.
Twenty seconds left. Another possession. Another chance to get the win, where Milwaukee MUST FOUL. How can you have the hairsplitting of the video challenge call, and then miss this? Finding out they blew it in the “Last Three Minutes Report” is utterly meaningless. Unless you benefit from a bunch of soft calls the next time…
Final Thoughts
The Rockets, on a terrible shooting night, with an, at best, sub-optimal, ref crew held a desperate Bucks team to 101 points. Sometimes SEGBABA gets your legs, and you miss bunnies, and you miss open looks, and even your very fine defense and effort isn’t quite enough.
All that said, this is a schedule loss that the Rockets very nearly won, despite really not being good at anything offensively. Long term, that’s a good sign. Tonight? I’m vexed.