Official Game Thread: Rockets at Hawks -- The Season Opener!

[sturt]

20 minutes ago, JayBirdHawk said:

JHol - 3 assists, 1 steal, 1 block

JHol - 3 points on 1 of 5 shots, 1 reb, 2 TOs

That's "playing his role well?"

Need to give the man a different role, then.

Think the opium of a win makes everyone who played "meh" seem to have played "well." That's all I can figure.

[terrell]

48 minutes ago, bleachkit said:

I liked what I saw last last night, especially defensively. Early returns on Dejounte are excellent. The main downside from last year is without Kevin, Gallo and Bogi we are missing a lot of shooting. Hope we don't come to regret the Kevin trade, he played good in Sac last night.

Regret the trade? Murray is our starting 2 now.. lol. And Huerter sucked off the bench.. That's why he was starting over Bogi...

Edited October 20, 2022 by terrell

[Final_quest]

I like this team.  We made good investments in the roster, DJM is premium.  This is a game we likely lose with our personnel from last year.  We would have needed Gallo, Huerter, and Bogi to hit their shots.

A bad shooting night for Trae with virtually no lobs and we win by ten.  For a guy that averages 29 and 9, we still have people throwing sticks at him for any flaw detected.  Trae is gonna be fine.  I agree with Jeff on the lobs, will be interesting to see if that part of our offense changes.  Trae shooting better for the rest of the season is the easiest thing to predict.

If anyone remembers last year, Collins was a bright spot for us during the first 20 games.  Hope that trend continues, but Collins was great.

We got good Hunter on offense, would love to see him continue to grow as a multi-dimensional scorer.  He's off to a strong start out performing his contract. 

This is the second year in a row I circled Capela as one to watch get back to form.  He did not show much last night.  

Surprisingly when I dove into the advanced stats, Trae had one of the best defensive ratings on the team and Murray had the worst.  At least for this game Trae was a plus 16 and DM a plus 8, which means in spite of his poor shooting the bench played better with Trae than Murray.  By other measures, not defensive rating, you would be surprised to find out who had the worst defensive performance, ie who got scored on the most and what his opponents FG% was.  

Good news overall.  The high assist and low turnover dimension to this team will cover a lot of bad shooting nights.  Excited for what is to come including Bogi coming back.  

[sturt]

1 minute ago, Final_quest said:

This is a game we likely lose with our personnel from last year.  We would have needed Gallo, Huerter, and Bogi to hit their shots.

But what's missing from that equation imo is... they would have done that. They would have hit their shots.

My take is we'd have had essentially the same outcome, but a higher scoring game because the tradeoff was that our defense would have been the culprit.

[sturt]

5 minutes ago, Final_quest said:

I agree with Jeff on the lobs, will be interesting to see if that part of our offense changes. 

Think the story there is simply that teams aren't going to respect the kick-out 3 when Trae drives until we make them respect that, and given the choice between Trae shooting a teardrop and JC or CC getting a lob, they're going to slack back and let Trae shoot it instead of allowing the dunk.

Iow.... they had to respect the kick-out when you have Gallo and KVon on the perimeter... so until we get BogBog back and until AJ asserts himself as an asset, I think that's just how teams are going to defend us as a rule.

[shakes]

11 hours ago, Peoriabird said:

Forget the 3's or the offense. Bad team rely on inconsistent shots to win games...The good team focus on the fundamentals like securing your defensive boards.  This game would not have been this close if we did not get out rebounded by 16!

yep, I did not like what I saw with our rebounding.  major red flag for this team.

[bleachkit]

Not to be too dismissive of last night. But a rebuilding Houston team was basically in the game up until the very end. Let's see how we fare against Milwaukee and Toronto on the road next week. 

[MarylandHawk]

44 minutes ago, sturt said:

Every championship contending team has that guy.  Scrappy veteran who knows all the right buttons to push at the right time. The one willing to do all the little grimy things to get wins. Sometimes it’s a starter like Draymond but other times it is role players like Bobby Portis. We shall see. 

[MarylandHawk]

19 minutes ago, shakes said:

yep, I did not like what I saw with our rebounding.  major red flag for this team.

If you think this is going to be a bad rebounding team, you should not worry long. I think the reason the rebounding was so lop sided in the game was the poor shooting and uncharacteristic misses from our guard play tonight including Young. It generated a lot of rebounding opportunities. Granted our defensive rebounding wasn’t great either but we have really good rebounders on this team. 

[MarylandHawk]

43 minutes ago, Final_quest said:

I like this team.  We made good investments in the roster, DJM is premium.  This is a game we likely lose with our personnel from last year.  We would have needed Gallo, Huerter, and Bogi to hit their shots.

A bad shooting night for Trae with virtually no lobs and we win by ten.  For a guy that averages 29 and 9, we still have people throwing sticks at him for any flaw detected.  Trae is gonna be fine.  I agree with Jeff on the lobs, will be interesting to see if that part of our offense changes.  Trae shooting better for the rest of the season is the easiest thing to predict.

If anyone remembers last year, Collins was a bright spot for us during the first 20 games.  Hope that trend continues, but Collins was great.

We got good Hunter on offense, would love to see him continue to grow as a multi-dimensional scorer.  He's off to a strong start out performing his contract. 

This is the second year in a row I circled Capela as one to watch get back to form.  He did not show much last night.  

Surprisingly when I dove into the advanced stats, Trae had one of the best defensive ratings on the team and Murray had the worst.  At least for this game Trae was a plus 16 and DM a plus 8, which means in spite of his poor shooting the bench played better with Trae than Murray.  By other measures, not defensive rating, you would be surprised to find out who had the worst defensive performance, ie who got scored on the most and what his opponents FG% was.  

Good news overall.  The high assist and low turnover dimension to this team will cover a lot of bad shooting nights.  Excited for what is to come including Bogi coming back.  

Yeah Porter was cooking last night. But it was mostly coming off screens. Dre always gets screened off of the best player. 

[kg01]

21 minutes ago, bleachkit said:

Not to be too dismissive of last night. But a rebuilding Houston team was basically in the game up until the very end. Let's see how we fare against Milwaukee and Toronto on the road next week. 

I hear you (negative) Nelson, but I harken back to something I said pregame.  This wasn't gonna be a blowout.  It's game 1, HOU still believes (FWIW), and we're still sorting our new roster out.

It was gonna take a professional effort to win.  To their credit, since they're not in tank mode yet, HOU didn't go away.  Recall what this same HOU did to us last year when our effort waned?  Also recall HOU was a team that weirdly won games inexplicably last season.  There is random talent there.  They can beat even good teams some nights.

The game was generally under control from the 2nd quarter on.  A narrow(ish) victory is a fine result.

We all see the warts you saw, so I'll respectfully ask that you not mistaken post-win euphoria for blindness.  There'll be plenty of time for critiquing.

[sturt]

8 minutes ago, MarylandHawk said:

Every championship contending team has that guy.  Scrappy veteran who knows all the right buttons to push at the right time. The one willing to do all the little grimy things to get wins. Sometimes it’s a starter like Draymond but other times it is role players like Bobby Portis. We shall see. 

I agree with the premise. I just think you're hoping against hope that, for us, that guy is that player. I don't see that guy on the roster yet. I think that's part of why Schleilds evidently took an interest in Crowder.

[Peoriabird]

6 minutes ago, MarylandHawk said:

If you think this is going to be a bad rebounding team, you should not worry long. I think the reason the rebounding was so lop sided in the game was the poor shooting and uncharacteristic misses from our guard play tonight including Young. It generated a lot of rebounding opportunities. Granted our defensive rebounding wasn’t great either but we have really good rebounders on this team. 

Houston had 15 offensive rebound and that doesn't concern you?

[kg01]

1 minute ago, Peoriabird said:

Houston had 15 offensive rebound and that doesn't concern you?

As a one-off, probably not.  As a trend, yes.

[Peoriabird]

2 minutes ago, kg01 said:

I hear you (negative) Nelson, but I harken back to something I said pregame.  This wasn't gonna be a blowout.  It's game 1, HOU still believes (FWIW), and we're still sorting our new roster out.

It was gonna take a professional effort to win.  To their credit, since they're not in tank mode yet, HOU didn't go away.  Recall what this same HOU did to us last year when our effort waned?  Also recall HOU was a team that weirdly won games inexplicably last season.  There is random talent there.  They can beat even good teams some nights.

The game was generally under control from the 2nd quarter on.  A narrow(ish) victory is a fine result.

We all see the warts you saw, so I'll respectfully ask that you not mistaken post-win euphoria for blindness.  There'll be plenty of time for critiquing.

Agreed! Plus I saw just as much critiquing as Euphoria with most of the Euphoria being specific to a select few aspects of the game and/or player's performances

[Peoriabird]

3 minutes ago, kg01 said:

As a one-off, probably not.  As a trend, yes.

Maybe it was just Houston's atletecism which I thought would be the case after I saw them in preseason

[JeffS17]

So I went back and looked at our games from last year... we won a single game where we made fewer than 8 threes, and it was a Covid-19 game that Trae did not even play in.  So yesterday's win is basically unprecedented in the Trae era -- we either shot well from the arc or lost.  Trae either balled out of his mind or we lost (and sometimes we lost even we he did, see ATL:POR game).

A couple more of those threes will go in on average and we have a lot of room to develop our defensive chemistry.

[kg01]

35 minutes ago, Peoriabird said:

Maybe it was just Houston's atletecism which I thought would be the case after I saw them in preseason

Yeah, let's check back in on this after a few games.  Rebounding should be a strength of ours, imho. 

[marco102]

38 minutes ago, Peoriabird said:

Maybe it was just Houston's atletecism which I thought would be the case after I saw them in preseason

Houston was sending three guys to crash the offensive glass. It's also why they out rebounded us. 

They were punished with fast break points because of this.

[Peoriabird]

8 minutes ago, JeffS17 said:

So I went back and looked at our games from last year... we won a single game where we made fewer than 8 threes, and it was a Covid-19 game that Trae did not even play in.  So yesterday's win is basically unprecedented in the Trae era -- we either shot well from the arc or lost.  Trae either balled out of his mind or we lost (and sometimes we lost even we he did, see ATL:POR game).

A couple more of those threes will go in on average and we have a lot of room to develop our defensive chemistry.

The Hawks only shot 16 non Trae 3's and 6 went in which translate to 37.5%. Can we stop obsessing over 3 point shots at some point? The offense will be more efficient without the team taking so many 3's.