All systems are misfiring
Bad shooting persists while defense lapses long enough to ensure another home rout
One solid punch.
That’s all it took. The Rockets were in the game. They were not playing well. They were shooting horribly. But they were in the game.
Then the Trail Blazers hit them with one good shot. It was not even a great run, not by the Blazers’ standards. No one challenged the latest scoring barrage claimed by the Warriors. But that’s all it took.
The Rockets crumbled again, taking their latest beating as if they had no real belief that they could do anything about it.
There was little reason to think that they were wrong as the Blazers rolled to a 28-point lead and easily dropped the Rockets to a shocking 1-5 with a 104-85 pounding on Tuesday night.
The Rockets have home losses of 19, 11, 20 and 19, making them if not the NBA’s worst team of the opening weeks of the season, in the neighborhood and unques-
tionably the most stunningly disappointing with as many losses before the end of October as they had until Dec. 20 a year ago.
“Last year, we played well. Right now, we’re playing like crap,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said of following a 5-1 start one season to a 1-5 start the next. “We’ll look. We’ll fight it. Not making shots, not making foul shots, not making layups.”
The defense, the primary shortcoming of the first five games, was much better for about 19 minutes. The Rockets could not make shots, hitting on just 27.1 percent in the first half with Chris Paul, Carmelo Anthony and Gerald Green a combined 3 of 21. But they were tied at 28 with five minutes left in the half.
Then the Blazers put together the most predictable of runs, the Rockets collapsed and when the second half began, they surrendered until Portland began pulling its starters.
“The games we’re losing, once it goes bad, it goes bad,” Anthony said. “We have to change that. We have to have some sustainability out there. We have to have some force and some fight.”
The Blazers scored on 13consecutive possessions to end the first half and start the second, scoring for 6½ minutes worth of trips down the floor to take a six-point lead to 22. The start of the second half was so bad for the Rockets defensively, the Blazers alternated between wide-open jump shots and dunks.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out, why it goes so south so fast,” Rockets forward P.J. Tucker said. “Played better defense, probably our best defensive half the first half. Just couldn’t score the ball. The start of the third quarter, defense like that is unacceptable. It’s embarrassing.”
The Rockets were spectacularly poor offensively until the Blazers, playing the second half of a back-to-back and their fourth game in six nights, gave their starters the rest of the night off.
The Rockets made 32.3 percent of their attempts with Anthony, Chris Paul and Eric Gordon — their most important scorers with James Harden out — a combined 12 of 49. That was with Paul going 4 of 5 in the fourth quarter while Toyota Center emptied early again.
The Rockets had their fewest points at home in D’Antoni’s three seasons driving what had been among the league’s top offenses. But with the now familiar collection of missed layups, missed wide-open 3-pointers and missed free throws, there was little surprising about another collapse.
“It’s hard to explain,” D’Antoni said. “We lost our swagger. We’re on our heels. When you’re desperate, it’s good on defense because your hair should be on fire, but it’s bad on offense. Tonight, it was like we were pretty good defensively for most of the game, but offensively, we weren’t calm and didn’t have that poise and didn’t hit anything for a long time.”
When the defense was improved on Tuesday, the offense was dreadful. When the Rockets had even just a flurry of scoring, the Blazers answered and the Rockets fell apart.
It was a familiar pattern. In a three-game homestand, the Rockets have trailed by 17, and 28 twice. In the other home game, the season opener against the Pelicans, they trailed by 29.
“We have to all hold ourselves accountable,” Anthony said. “I think we’re a high-confidence group. When you’re losing, it can go two ways. You can keep it or you can lose it. It’s simple as that.”
The Rockets lost it, and another blowout in a spectacular crash to start the season.