Different strokes
Rockets: Spread the floor and let James Harden and Chris Paul do what they do best
Stephen Curry will dash around screens. P.J. Tucker will stand in the corner. • Klay Thompson will make hard backdoor cuts. Trevor Ariza will be stationed, and usually stationary, in the other corner. • The Warriors will dart and move and pass. The Rockets will spread the floor and empower James Harden and Chris Paul to rapid-fire crossover dribbles and one-on-one moves. And they will each do what they do best and most often with no regrets, no thoughts of changing anything now that their collision course pits them against teams that do things so differently.
“There’s more than one way to win,” Rockets forward Trevor Ariza said. “I guess this season proved to us there’s more than one way to move. What we’ve been doing has been working. We just have to continue to do the things we do well.”
The Rockets have been the top-rated offensive team, per NBA statistics, in the postseason, the Warriors fourth. The Warriors edged the Rockets for the top spot in the regular season on the final night.
No team has had more passes per game, collected more assists or racked up more secondary assists (the pass that leads to the assist) than the Warriors in the postseason. The Rockets have had the second-fewest passes of the playoffs, the fewest in the regular season.
The Rockets, however, have been off the charts with their one-on-one play, with Harden leading the league by a wide margin in one-on-one scoring and Paul third.
“That’s Mike, man,” Rockets forward Luc Mbah a Moute said of coach Mike D’Antoni. “Mike is a genius, the way he … thinks the game … to make guys play to his philosophy and also adjust to guys’ games and make it work successfully. We have James and Chris, two of the best to ever play the game. But the way he puts guys in those positions and how he does it is unbelievable.” One-on-one the way to go
The Rockets in the postseason have gone one-on-one on 14.1 percent of their possessions, the Warriors on 6.6 percent of theirs, roughly mirroring their numbers from the regular season, when the Rockets ran isolation plays more frequently and more successfully (averaging 1.12 points per possession and scoring nearly twice as many points going oneon-one) than any other team in the NBA.
As much as the Warriors consider the movement that is so central to their offense a strength, the Rockets in no way view their style as a shortcoming.
“Everybody talks about how much we play one-on-one,” Rockets forward P.J. Tucker said. “We play one-on-one because we have great one-on-one players. And we play one-on-one because some games people aren’t leaving shooters. We’re going to adjust to how you’re playing, and we’re going to figure it out.
“Everybody talks about that so much now. You can switch if you want, but we feel … no matter who’s on them, on James, it doesn’t matter. James, he can give anybody problems one-on-one.”
This is in many ways the evolution of D’Antoni’s offense, making it fit with the talents his team and the current NBA’s extensive use of switching defenses (a trend led by the Warriors’ success). But as much as D’Antoni has always believed in taking open 3s and the value of pace and spacing, he also has said his offenses with the Suns were based on using the talent on hand.
“You just figure out how the defense is going to guard you and use the best weapon,” D’Antoni said. “We just have so many weapons now, we can kind of counteract whatever they’re going to do, hopefully.” ‘Trust your game plan’
With the Rockets, that often means shooters around Harden and Paul don’t move and don’t get touches until it’s time to drain 3s. The Rockets’ 15.2 3-pointers per game in the regular season were an NBA record. They averaged 15.3 in three games against the Warriors.
“It is hard, but we’ve done it all year,” Mbah a Moute said of hitting 3s when otherwise relatively uninvolved in the offense. “I think we’ve had pretty good success at it. It’s something we got accustomed to doing. That’s how we play. Guys know you have to be ready to make the shots when the ball comes to you.”
The adjustment for Harden and Paul is more natural. Though Paul has said he had to get accustomed to shooting more 3s — the 6.5 3s he took per game were the most of his career — he said adapting to his one-on-one role came easily.
“Some systems you play in, they require this, they require that,” Paul said. “Here, we just hoop. We don’t overthink it. We have sets. But if you get a mismatch, just go at it.”
Most of all, neither team will change now. The Rockets on occasion have Eric Gordon cutting around weakside screens. The Warriors isolate Kevin Durant at the elbow. But more than any other team, the Warriors move without the ball and pass, the Rockets turn to ballhandling magic, and both rely on doing what they do better than anyone.
“You have to trust your game plan, trust your teammates, trust everything that it took to get to this point,” Ariza said. “Continue to stay ready, continue to do things that got us to this point.”