Subscribe Feed (RSS)A few thoughts after a rather embarrassing opening to the playoffs in the Rose Garden:
– One thing that happened right off the bat completely puzzles me. Portland had held Yao Ming to 42 percent shooting this season in three games. He really hadn’t hurt the Blazers much. Portland played in front of him and got weakside help.
But here we are in Game 1 of a playoff series and the Blazers are playing behind him. Folks, Bill Russell himself couldn’t survive playing behind this behemoth. He’s just too damn big. And he’s got the feathery shooting touch of an all-star off-guard. You’ve got to keep him from getting the ball. Or at least make him work harder than that to get it.
In fact, lately that’s the way everyone has been playing him. Dallas did it in the last game of the regular season. Yao doesn’t move well side to side. He doesn’t have quick feet. It’s tough for him to get the ball when he’s fronted.
But Portland opened the game playing behind him — letting him have it where he wanted to have it. This was sheer craziness and I’m positive not what Houston expected, either. But what a gift.
– Please, I don’t want to hear about officiating. The Blazers did nothing to deserve to get to the foul line Saturday night. You don’t get fouled on 22-foot jump shots. That’s about all they took in the final three quarters of the game.
– Please, I don’t want to hear about inexperience in the playoffs. Go tell it to the Bulls, who took a rookie point guard and a bunch of guys who’d never played a playoff game into Boston and whipped the Celtics. There are no excuses in the playoffs.
– I can go all the way back to the first NBA coach I covered, Dr. Jack Ramsay, and remember him preaching to his players, “Against a shot blocker, you’ve got to take the ball right at him. Don’t take it away from him, take it AT him.” When Portland had success against Yao, Roy was taking the ball right into him. Don’t worry if he blocks a shot or two. He’s going to foul or let you go most of the time.
– Just about every little thing that’s troubled the Blazers this season showed up Saturday — and you have to give the Rockets’ coaching staff credit for that. Defending the pick and roll? A nightmare again for the Blazers. Not getting inside? Yup, here we go again. Talk about a great scouting job . . . Luis Scola had a devil of a time containing LaMarcus Aldridge in the regular season but in this game he beat Aldridge to his spot time after time. He seemed to know exactly what the Portland forward was going to do all night long.
The Rockets were PREPARED. The Blazers were not, and they admitted as much afterward.
– It seemed the Blazers didn’t get an easy shot through the first 44 minutes of the game. Not a one. Nothing inside and but two fast-break points. Meanwhile, in the first half the Rockets feasted on the Blazer defense. I mean, Houston had SEVEN layups or dunks in the first quarter. The Rockets were 15 for 20 in the first quarter and four of the five misses were three-pointers. So Houston missed just one two-point shot in the first 12 minutes.
That was not because they were hitting difficult shots. It was because they were getting great shots — either at the basket or wide open from distance.
– Along those lines, if you think Houston’s due to cool off, I would say this: Not if they keep getting easy shots. They’ll keep shooting nearly 60 percent if they continue to get wide-open jumpers, dunks and layups.
– Likewise, unless the Blazers come up with some sort of inside game, they’re going to have a tough time scoring.
– Don’t forget what I said previously — whoever wins the last game is always the immediate favorite. But the points don’t carry over into the next game. Part of having the homecourt advantage is this: If you lose a game at home, you have to win only one on the road to get it back. As we saw in Saturday’s games — when three of the four road teams won — getting a win on the road is not as tough in the playoffs as you might think.
Tags: Houston Rockets, NBA playoffs, Portland Trail Blazers, Yao Ming
Well said, Dwight. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote there.
I think you can simplify the analysis to this:
Brandon Roy was the only guy who didn’t have deer in the headlights…
Aldridge, Blake and Outlaw especially need to step up.
I suppose to be fair Pryzbilla and Oden actually were ok.
you’re the man Dwight
I was surprised at how quickly the Blazers conceded that their regular offense wasn’t going to work. What was it? 90 seconds into the game? They could get the shots off sometimes but they were under more duress than usual. It wasn’t the sets we’ve been playing since….well, since the last time Houston beat us.
Sometimes a team can grind through these situations ’til the defense wears down when they see it’s not working, but in this case we quit our regular offense in record time, saying, “Here Brandon…do your best.”
It was as if Brandon’s many solo drives to the hole, were deemed as our only real option. That felt sort of desperate. Everything else was clamped down
mere seconds into the game.
Then you got your snowball effect where open shots became rarer and harder to hit because the pressure was on, but I couldn’t believe how fast we abandoned our game plan – or to put it better, how quickly Houston forced us to play differently.
In that sense, it looked like what Cleveland did to us earlier this year, or what Boston did last year. We sort of wilted under the defensive pressure. Part of it was Xs and Os but part of it was their will and our inability to make shots under more difficult circumstances.
This is going to be tough.
Dwight – the reason they didn’t front Yao was because Joel told Jason Quick after Wednesday’s game that he wanted to play Yao straight on. He said he wanted the responsibility of shutting Yao down on his shoulders.
What an absolute failure that was not only on Joel’s part but with the coaching staff for going along with it.
For game two Joel needs to let go of this pride issue and have LaMarcus help front Yao and make the rest of the Houston players beat us first, and not let Yao start out. That only helped the Houston roster relax once they saw that Yao was here to play.
On a side note I found it humorous that the only player to have any success in the post and seem at all comfortable in this game was the one player who missed Nate’s first practice for this series on Friday – Greg.
Is Brooks that good, or did Blake play him lousy? And why isn’t somebody hacking him? Frye should have fouled him four times.
The other day it was asked who was going to step up and surprise in this series–so far, it’s Brooks. He didn’t play like a 2nd year point guard. That was a great all-around game by the young man.
I agree that the Blazers seemed to give up their offensive game plan way too easily and that they’ll need to adjust their defensive game plan.
It aint over till it’s over–don’t panic. The time to panic will be if the next game looks like this one–I don’t believe it will.
I like Channing Frye, I just think he’s not a great fit for this offense. I bet he has set a league record for shots taken with a foot on either side of the three point line. Its the lowest percentage shot in basketball, and it seems to be his favorite.
Other than that, my worst fears were realized in this game. I had Houston as a worst case scenario for just that reason. Oh well, thats why its a seven game series!
I have concerns about both Aldridge and Roy. LaMarcus scored 7 points and the team was down negative 24 points while he was on the floor last night. Brandon’s offense was much better than that – he scored 21 points – but the Blazers were down a net of 23 points while he was playing. And this is not a new phenomenom; it’s been a pattern for at least the past 10 games. (In games the Blazers won, L & B’s net points while they were on the floor were positive, but not as positive as you’d expect given the margin by which the Blazers won.)
Although LaMarcus and Brandon are generally good scorers, either they play very poor defense or the whole team’s defense suffers greatly while they’re on floor. I’d be interested to hear what others think of this pattern and why it is happening.
Funny, the only player who played well besides Roy was Greg- who didn’t even attend practice. This team will only go as far as how they develop Greg.
Boys against Men….. And that’s what it was tonight. Houston scored a first round knock down and the Blazers stumbled on boat legs, blindly throwing up jump shot after jump shot like wild desperate haymakers… If this was a fight, it would have been stopped mid way through the third quarter.
Sergio was terrible…… Wait, let me restate that…. Sergio resembled a blind drunk monkey thrown onto a frozen lake. It was disturbing to see a profesional go to pieces so easily and not be able to ever right the ship and make a single positive play…..
All that being said the true shift in the game came when Yao got his fourth foul, something Portland had spent 7 game minutes trying to accomplish while Roy drove mercilessly straight at China’s great genetic experiment. And it worked……..
Portland, even with Oden eerily resembling a young Shaq while he bashed his way using nothing but force and size, did the unthinkable in the playoffs and reeled off missed jumper after crooked jumper….. It was maddening to watch; they had spent so much effort forcing their way into the paint and then immediately abandoned it when they should have been trying to chip away at the lead by getting easy baskets….. Wow….
Speaking of Oden, this is the first time this year I have seen him resemble the agile physical freak that had everyone drooling like they had just performed a home labodomy…… He was actually moving his feet showing quick reactions on help defense, moving off of picks…. didn’t think he was physically capable at this point of plucking a ball off his shoe laces and going straight back up….. But he pulled it off tonight, which is extremely encouraging….
So the Blazers got their nuts ripped off with rusted pliers tonight, who cares? The playoffs are funny that way, and did anyone really think they would come in and thump Houston?
It is a long series, and we’ll find out a whole lot about the coaching staff on Tuesday if they decide to let Joel get schooled going mano y mano once again and accept the team chucking up dumb jump shots at every crucial moment; if that becomes the case they might still have a long way to go on the sudden brutal learning curve. The playoffs are about playing every posession like it’s the last play of the game. Five missed 23 footers can swing to a 12 point run in 90 seconds.
And why oh why must we hear this constant babble about the refs…. Believe me, Tim Donaghy couldn’t have given the rockets twenty points even if he had taken Houston by 15 and put his first born up for colateral. No that would Portlands fault for playing disgustingly soft and avoiding the paint in the second half like it was a pit filled with angry wolves…..
There were many terrible things about last nights game and they are start with McMuffin.
-The Blazers were NOT prepared.
-Where was the offensive game plan? It wasn’t like we were shook 100% of the game and had no plays. This looked like street ball at best.
-Why would McMuffin decide after an ENTIRE season that tonight, he would change the lineup? If that is not stupidity, I don’t know what is. You don’t gamble with your lineup like that in the playoffs.
-McMuffin thinks the entire team will be fined if a player fouls out. Yes, we were starting to get in foul trouble….. but did you see the Rockets pull Yao out when he got into foul trouble? What happens if they had played?
-What was our defensive scheme? Seriously? Once we saw it wasn’t working we went to zone and played terrible defense. Why didn’t I see Nate screaming up and down? He looked like he had no heart.
-Why did Channing even get one minute? Why did Rudy get less minutes? Why did the Sergio rotations come at different times? Why were LaMarcus and Brandon out AT THE SAME TIME?
-Over the last month Steve Blake has turned into a shoot-first point guard, slow setup, crappy passes and unexcusable defense….What happened? Please note that if watching ESPN, they commented on how terrible Blake was playing.
-I don’t care Dwight, the Blazers were being picked on REALLY BAD by the offials the first half. The second half they improved…. but GOOD COACHES AND CAPTAINS WILL PICK UP A TECHNICAL TO MAKE A POINT. Something you will never see McMuffin do.
I could go on and on from here, but let’s be realistic. I made about 20 points of McMuffin off the top of my head. Did he share the Blame?
The officiating in Game One didn’t cost Portland the game, but it was terrible officiating nonetheless. Contact, especially on dribble penetration, was allowed by the refs when Houston was on D, especially in the first quarter. Blazers were being called for fouls in the same situations.
When Battier pushes off, on defense no less, to sell an offensive foul, blow the whistle out of principle.
Hey Dwight, while I agree with a lot of your analysis, points in the paint were 50-32 Portland. And that wasn’t something the Blazers padded in garbage time, they were ahead by 20 points near the beginning of the fourth. Does that contradict your analysis at least a little?
the thing that interests more than anything about this series is who on the Blazers will step up. Because this off season it seems like we don’t have room for everyone on this roster and now is the time to find our TRUE weak spots. From last night:
Aldridge didn’t show up (doesnt matter cause he isnt going anywhere)
Outlaw didnt show up
Blake didnt show up
I cringe every time Frye is in the game
Batum didnt play bad, but was hardly noticed
Overall thoughts…same thing we’ve seen all season: Blazers need more at the point and the backup PF.
Here’s an anecdote about changing what you’ve been doing because of an important situation. In this case, it was the strategy of Brandon to the hole in the first few minutes – something that has happened late in games, but in the first few minutes? When the team needs to get in the flow? You could smell the desperation. Here’s the anecdote:
Okay, I worked in a hotel that served excellent cheeseburgers. I personally got one of them for Michael Jordan once and he was fine with it. I witnessed many waiters ordering these burgers instead of eating a fancy salmon entree leftover from the banquet.
Great bun, great toppings, great burger.
One day a big boss flew in on a corporate jet and among other things he ordered a burger. The chef said this has got to be different. This has got to be better than any burger we ever made. Let’s do it differently. He took a steak and ground it up into hamburger. He did several other things differently.
When it was over the big boss wrote a memo saying he had eaten a better burger as a prisoner of war.
I learned that it is wise not to change things up at the last minute for a special occasion. Not the shoes, not the plays, nothing.
Especially when you’ve been serving up the hoops equivalent of a great burger all year.
It had nothing to do with refs. The defense wasn’t playoff quality. If Brooks(10pts/g) can drop almost 30 pts and take almost 20 field attempts(mostly layups) with only 2 free throws, then it’s not playoff defense.
Steve Blake can’t contain Brooks by himself. The Blazers need to communicate on defense. There needs to be somebody to back up Blake. Blake just needs to funnel Brooks to the middle.
I kept waiting and waiting for a tunnel of elbows, hip checks, and some contact. There wasn’t any! That’s why the refs only gave Brooks 2 free throw attempts. The refs can’t stop the Brooks drive with a foul call, if there is no attempt made to touch him. The guy is like 150 lbs. What where they afraid of?
Marc -
You probably forgot one of the biggest failures of the team last night. Steve Blake.
Bill -
Excellent post.
As a long time Blazer fan who now resides near DC (“inside the Beltway”), I’d like to throw in my $0.02…
We can learn a lot from the recent (and future?) beat downs at the hands of the Rockets. As marc stated earlier, these losses really expose our weaknesses (e.g. lack of a speedy point guard; need for more low-post scoring, better coordination on team defense, and for someone else to score double digits consistently in big games besides Roy), and will help KP and the Blazers evaluate the team’s needs this summer.
Second, a loss like this brings us down to earth and reduces our sometime stratospheric expectations that come hand in hand with our ongoing love affair with the Blazers. We knew that Houston would be a tough match up for us, and that we lacked playoff experience. So why was last night’s thumping such a big surprise? I just hope the Blazers learned something from last night.
Lastly, I want to say that I am proud of this team. The Blazers had a great season, and one terrible loss (or three more terrible losses to Houston) will not undo the magic of the this past regular season. And as someone who had to read all the terrible press in the East Coast media about the Jail Blazers, the current Blazers are a breath of fresh air. And I mean this: I would strictly prefer a team full of “winners” off the court and “losers” on the court than the reverse. But with this team, I think we’ve going to see “winners” both on and off the court for a long time to come.
Last night I showed up for a hamburger and got a fish sandwich. Bill, do you mind if I call you Ronald?
Bill — I am still looking at this series as a seven-course meal.
The Blazers were simply not prepared and Nate couldn’t make adjustments. The organization needs to thank Nate for helping to develop these young guys and then bring in a real coach this summer. My fear is, four years from now we’ll still be talking about this teams potential because they still haven’t done anything.
I am okay with the refs letting play be a little more physical in the play-offs, more is on the line, the games are more intense. However, that doesn’t explain the touch fouls called on Pryz and Oden that were a joke compared to what was going on at the other end of the floor.
I am season ticket holder in the 3rd row and can say that the refs were blatantly bad on a number of occasions. The crowd started getting on them. They were harassed like I hadn’t seen all season. my wife was in the hallway where the refs walk off the court, she said they were extremely angry as they left the floor. One ref tried to kick out a fan that yelled at him (I didn’t hear what was said) but he pointed at the wrong fan. Telling that they couldn’t even get that call right. That same ref threatened to toss a fan sitting in front of me in the 4th quarter. Couldn’t blame him for that one.
On the one hand, you would think refs would be professional enough not to get rattled by the crowd. They weren’t however. Did it change the tenor of the game? Yes. Did it cause the Blazers to lose? Probably not, we were down 10 points in the first 5 minutes. However what little chance we had was snuffed out by the touch fouls on Oden and Pryz and the non-calls on Roy and Aldridge. Have to give Houston credit though for establishing a higher level of physical play out of the gate. The refs used that as their baseline on that end of the court.
On the other hand, I worry that Portland fans are increasingly getting a reputation with the league. The way those refs were being razzed, they weren’t going to make any call in our favor unless they had to (and even when they did, people still yelled at them, “thanks for getting your head out of your ass on that one… etc”). This doesn’t help our home court advantage one bit.
We still have around a 25% chance of winning the series, if I heard the numbers correctly on losing Game #1 at home. I’ll take that. I’m sure Phoenix would.
Yes Bill, I believe the number is the team that wins the first game wins the series 78.8% of the time. Yes we still have a chance… 21.2%, and I’m sure Phoenix would take that. However, I would much rather have the Rockets number right now.
For the Record, I’m a Rockets fan!
I’m ecstatic of how the first game went and I’m very happy.
However, for all you Blazers fans out there, don’t worry too much. As a Rox fan, I’m very weary and I’m not going to get cocky because of one game. The Rockets are known to blow big Playoff leads and have crumbled after a great start to both the Jazz and the Mavs in the past 4 playoffs.
Good Luck guys.
I think the Blazers need to make the following adjustments and they’ll be fine:
1. Front Yao. This is obviously the better way to defend him. When he gets the ball bring weak side help and rotate better to prevent the easy bucket.
2. Push the ball up the court hard every time. If you can get to the rim before he gets back or as he is rushing back you are better offensively. This will also make him less effective on the offense end of the court.
3. Play more physical defense specifically on Brooks and Yao. Use Bayless and Frye to take some hard fouls late in the quarter when they have fouls to give. Brooks doesn’t have
I also think they should sporadically trap Brooks near half court with Aldridge. You are going to occasionally give up an easy bucket or open 3 when you do this, but with Brooks size, it should create some turnover / fast break opportunities as well. This should also pick up the pace of the game and making Yao less effective.
I think the percentage is actually higher of the team with home court advantage coming back to win the series after losing Game 1. Not that any of that really matters.
Couple things:
1. I agree with fronting Yao. I was expecting Nate to try to throw them off with Aldridge fronting him, bringing help when he gets the ball, and forcing others to beat them.
2. I agree that the officials did not cost the Blazers the game, but after watching the first half again, I still think the game was called unevenly at a crucial time. The Blazers were being aggressive, LaMarcus and Brandon both were taking it to their defenders (Joel too) and not receiving the benefit of the doubt. The Rockets on the other hand got those calls. The Blazers should have kept the pressure on the refs to even it out instead of backing out of the fray at the end of the second quarter and into the second half.
I found some evidence for that statement about a higher percentage of teams with homecourt coming back from a Game 1 loss.
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-39-101/Losing-Game-1–Inside-the-Numbers.html