Switching style has backers
When coach Mike D’Antoni said after Friday’s loss that the Rockets would back off their switching defensive style, his players were all for it. When he opted over the weekend to largely stick with the plan the Rockets brought into the season, he had to convince them of that, too.
“You sell them on everything you do,” D’Antoni said. “That’s major. I always learned as a coach — I was a player — if the player does not want to defend somebody, he’ll show the coach, this doesn’t work. Everybody’s got to be on the same page or it doesn’t work.
“Just showing film and talking and trying to make a case for it. There are valid points. We’ll try to tweak when we can, but we don’t want to chase our tail. We’ve got to defend better. We’ve got to play better.”
To make the case, Rockets coaches showed video not only of the corrections that needed to be made to make the strategy effective, but the times this season in which they had executed it successfully.
“We show both, what we have to improve on, why it didn’t work,” D’Antoni said. “It’s sometimes not the scheme. Sometimes, we’re not quite there. A lot of it comes down to playing guys a lot of minutes, they get tired. They get tired being shorthanded. That puts a big burden on guys. You could see (Friday) night, the first seven minutes we were good. Then we erode.”
When it comes to convincing players to stick with the plan, the video session seemed to have worked.
“We’re trying to make it right and sometimes, when you are playing the game, you don’t realize what you are doing is effective,” said Rockets center Clint Capela, who initially favored the idea of limiting the switching. “We saw the film and we realized when we do it right, it is effective. It gave us confidence, ‘OK, we can do it,’ because we did it sometimes. We just need to do it more. The video, it really, really helped us. We saw we can make this work.”
Blazers show some stability
While the Rockets have generally called on five players that were not on the roster last season, the Trail Blazers have had greater stability than most teams, with only Nik
Stauskas and Seth Curry playing regularly among the Portland newcomers.
Though the Blazers have changed things up, the roster stability has made that smoother, especially compared to the Rockets, who have had to repeatedly change their rotation throughout the season. The Blazers have had the same starters for all seven games, the Rockets in no more than two.
“We enjoy the continuity that we’ve had,” Blazers coach Terry Stotts said. “This is the third year in a row we’ve had continuity and we’ve gotten off to poor starts in two of those years. We’re hoping to break that trend. There is a familiarity. There is a certain level of comfort that everybody is on the same page. But along with that, you don’t want to take that for granted and have complacency with that.
“I’ve always looked back at the San Antonio teams with Coach Pop ( Gregg
Popovich) and the Utah teams with Coach ( Jerry)
Sloan. There is that continuity, but at the same time, they go into each season like it’s a new team, a new season.”
For all his changes over the years, Popovich has often cited “institutional knowledge” for making the revisions in his system and offensive style go more smoothly.
“We’ve changed some things,” Stott said. “We’ve put the emphasis on different things offensively. We’ve changed the rotation, put in some sets that emphasize passing and cutting. Even though there is some personnel continuity, you look at the second unit with Seth and Nik that’s been pretty effective for us, they weren’t with us last year. Evan (Turner) has a new role in that second unit.”
Chriss has rust to knock off
Though Marquese
Chriss returned to practices after weeks rehabbing a sprained ankle, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said his young big man might need more practice work to make up for lost time.
“He’s an option,” D’Antoni said. “He hasn’t practice for … almost three weeks. He’s ready to go.
“He looks like he hasn’t played for two or three weeks. It’s going to take a lot of conditioning and other things.”