ROCKETS WIN 16TH STRAIGHT
How winning streak was extended becomes a point of pride
OKLAHOMA CITY — The Rockets had spent too much time rolling in the usual way for the Thunder to allow that to last.
Much of the Rockets’ winning streak had been built with the same attack that had taken over the game, if without the waves of turnovers that got in the Rockets’ way. The Rockets set screens. The Thunder switched. James Harden or Chris Paul lit up whomever ended up trying to stop them, usually Carmelo Anthony. JONATHAN FEIGEN
The Thunder knew a bad thing when they saw it and changed things up, trapping on the ball to force the Rockets to try something different. But if anything had marked the Rockets’ run, it has been that there is always another way and another shooter to lead them. They picked apart the Thunders’ defense as Paul had one of his best shooting games of the season, taking the winning streak to 16 games with a 122-112 win different from most of the others along the way.
The victory Tuesday night gave them the second-longest winning streak in franchise history and matched the Celtics’ early season run for the longest in the NBA this season. But the Rockets were more encouraged about how they did it.
“We know what we have to do,” forward Trevor Ariza said. “We know we have to keep the floor spaced. When the floor is spaced, it’s like reading a little book, a little ABC book.”
When the Thunder trapped the ball out of Harden’s or Paul’s hands, the Rockets had P.J. Tucker or Luc Mbah a Moute flash to the middle and moved the ball. The Rockets had assists on 25 of their 38 field goals. Ranking 23rd in the NBA in the percentage of buckets that come off assists, the Rockets had assists on 65.8 percent of their field goals, a rate that would trail only the Warriors if that was their norm.
Offense adjusts
“We’re so good offensively that every single night, teams are going to throw different coverages at us,” Harden said. “We just have to figure out ways to attack them. Tonight was no different. We found something we could go to.”
The win was the Rockets’ third straight against a team that had beaten them in their only meetings. But like the losses to the Clippers and Celtics, the Rockets were without one of their backcourt stars in the loss to the Thunder on Christmas. On Tuesday, Paul lit up the Thunder, making five of his six 3-pointers, scoring 25 points. Paul — who had shot 22.9 percent on 3s in his previous nine games — joined Eric Gordon for some game-day shooting and then made shots he said were tougher than the ones he had been missing. But he was encouraged by how the Rockets could tweak their offense in the heat of the moment.
“It’s a big step,” Paul said. “Everything with us, being a new team and coming together, has been figuring things out on the fly. I remember a game a while ago, P.J. was setting a bunch of screens. We discovered that, ‘Oh, boom, you roll, you see everything happening.’ He just made plays on that.”
The Rockets made 53.5 percent of their shots, 51.5 percent of their 3s on their way to a lead that reached 19. But they also matched their season high with 22 turnovers, leading to 33 points to help keep Oklahoma City in the game.
The Rockets have been committing 11.5 turnovers per game in the streak, but rarely could they so often get good shots.
Careless with the ball
“We were a little cavalier with the ball,” coach Mike D’Antoni said. “Take back what I said, the key to winning is less turnovers. We have to do a better job. It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t pretty. But I thought our defense was really good for three, 3½ quarters until the game was our game.”
That worked well enough for seven players to score in double figures, with six hitting at least half their shots. With that, as different as the game was from the others in the streak, it did have one thing in common.
“We try to dissect every team that we go against. It’s been fun,” Gordon said. “We’re just a tough team to stop when we’re clicking on all cylinders.”