Harden, defense pull out all the stops in rout of N.Y.
Anderson adds 21 as team snaps two-game skid
NEW YORK — The Rockets at last found the remedy to the illness that had afflicted their shooting touch. It was there all along, but perhaps not the solution that came first to mind.
They just needed to defend better. The win in Charlotte should have offered a clue, but if it was not clear then, their 119-97 blowout of the Knicks on Wednesday made it readily apparent.
When the Rockets cranked up the defense, they slowed the Knicks long enough to catch them from behind. But the defense that took over and turned around the game did more than that. It allowed the Rockets to fire away with impunity that they usually find from Mike D’Antoni’s green light.
“It’s a lot easier to make a 3 when you’re up seven instead of when you’re down seven and you’re trying to make every shot,” D’Antoni said. “Our defense has to lead to shooting good in the sense that you feel better about yourself. You feel better about your team and things will come easier. It’s not life or death. It’s just one shot because you’re stopping some people.”
Once the Rockets were no longer burdened by a sense that they had to be marksmen just to keep up with the scoring on the other end of the floor, they rolled easily, going from an eight-point deficit to a 29-point lead that made it difficult to imagine that they had arrived in Madison Square Garden just 29th in 3-point shooting.
That all changed when they began the second quarter with the Rockets’ second unit applying defensive clamps. After Tim Hardaway Jr. made a 3-pointer for a six-point New York lead, the Knicks missed their next 16 shots as the Rockets rolled through a 16-0 run.
The Rockets led by 12 heading into the second half, then had their most dominant offensive stretch of the season. Feeling no pressure from a sense that the Knicks could catch them, the Rockets made 70 percent of their shots in the third quarter, including 8 of 13 3-pointers. The Rockets put up their first 40-point quarter of the season, as if they wanted to spend the rest of the night sneaking peaks at the World Series on the courtside monitors.
“It felt good,” Rockets guard James Harden said. “It happened because of our defense. We got stops and shot the ball and shot it with confidence. That’s all you can ask for.
“It’ll happen. It’s a long season. The last couple games, we haven’t been shooting the ball well. It’s part of basketball. Now, hopefully we can start shooting it better and catch a rhythm.”
Harden scored a season-high 31 points, his first 30-point game of the season after reaching 30 39 times last season. With nine assists, he is the only player since 1983-84 with nine straight games scoring 20 points with seven assists to start a season, having done it last season, too.
“You got that primary ballhandler and they don’t even have Chris Paul out there,” Hardaway Jr. said. “They’re not even at their peak where they want to be right now and they’re a dangerous team. It gets scary when you’re playing a team like that. A guy that can get to the lane whenever he wants and he’s able to find guys on the perimeter and all those guys are able to knock down 3s.”
That is the idea, although D’Antoni guessed — emphasizing that he was only guessing — that Paul could be out another two weeks.
Without him, Eric Gordon took on the secondunit point guard duties for a second-consecutive game, scoring 17 points with four assists in just 29 minutes.
Ryan Anderson showed the Knicks what they could have had if they had been willing to deal Carmelo Anthony to Houston for him, scoring 21 points, his third game in the past four with at least 20 points after not scoring more than 14 in any of the season’s first five.
“We just needed a win,” Anderson said. “It feels good to play good in Madison Square Garden any time. We found ourselves in stretches (where) the ball kind of sticks. We’re at our best when we get stops and run and get open looks. It took us a little bit of time last year to get going. This was a good way to start a trend for us.”