Lackadaisical effort has no place on team with title aspirations
While it seems as if last season just ended, Halloween is around the corner, so the calendar says it is time for the NBA year to begin.
Thus James Harden grabbed the microphone, held it near his impressive beard, welcomed what crowd there was in the house, and proclaimed that this Rockets season will be amazing.
Amazing must be using Ryan Mallet’s alarm clock, because it never showed up. And neither did most of the Rockets.
Good thing there is a lot of basketball left — 81 regularseason games, to be exact — because the Rockets didn’t look particularly interested in the sport on this night.
The Nuggets blocked three
shots before the Rockets made one and led the entire way as they cruised to a 10585 victory at Toyota Center.
When Nicholas Connors hit the “rockets’ red glare,” the house was barely half full, and the Rockets never gave the crowd anything to get excited about.
This is what it feels like to have a team make a deep playoff run and perhaps is indicative of a team that knows its season will be judged more by what happens in the spring than in the fall.
“We better worry about October, you know what, and we better worry about November,” Rockets coach Kevin McHale said. “We had a lot of guys hurt (in preseason), but it’s not like you’re just going to get everybody back in February and go 35-0.
“You’ve gotta come out and you’ve gotta play well from the get-go in the Western Conference. That is one game, but that was just a terrible, flat-out bad effort by our team.” Effort not present
A single game, even a season opener, isn’t likely to be particularly memorable against a foe like the Nuggets, who won only 30 games last season and lost all four meetings with the Rockets.
Of course, when defending champion Golden State passes through town Friday night, it will be a different kind of party.
When the Rockets last challenged the Warriors to come out to play, Golden State dispatched Houston 4-1 in the Western Conference finals.
Top-tier teams don’t have to play their best every night to win games, but they do have to play better than the Rockets did Wednesday.
“We did not play up to a level that’s even remotely what we have to do to be the type of team we want to be,” McHale said.
Montrezl Harrell and Pat Beverley were high-energy, as you might expect, but the rest of the Rockets seemed willing to coast, as if looking for a magic energy switch they never found.
At least The Beard showed up. Dallas Keuchel was seated courtside with Astros owner Jim Crane.
Harden, on the other hand, led the Rockets with 22 points but needed 21 shots to get them as he set the pace for Houston’s 34.5 percent brickfest. He also misfired on 10 of 12 shots from beyond the 3-point arc, helping the Rockets to an 8-for-35 night from long range.
Meanwhile, Denver drilled 13 of 27 treys as Houston defenders were slow to react throughout the night.
The Rockets were without important members of the rotation in Dwight Howard and Donatas Motiejunas — Howard served a well-earned one-game suspension for bad behavior in last year’s playoff run, and Motiejunas is recovering from back surgery — but not being at full strength is hardly an excuse for the effort, or lack thereof.
The first-game boost one would expect from playing a home game in a season with such high hopes wasn’t even there.
McHale says there is no such thing as supernatural first-game energy.
“You bring your own energy,” McHale said. “You bring determinedness to the game and how you’re going to play. You bring a willingness to fight for 48 minutes. You bring all that with you or you don’t. And we didn’t bring it.”
The highlight of the night was a touching halftime video tribute to the late, great Moses Malone, who passed away last month. Former teammates Mike Newlin, Robert Reid, Calvin Murphy, John Lucas, Thomas Henderson and Major Jones were on hand to honor the Hall of Famer and three-time MVP.
The current Rockets should have been embarrassed to put in such a lackadaisical effort on a night when a legend and one of the hardest-working players ever to wear Rockets Red was honored. Expectations sky-high
Maybe in a week or two we’ll consider this putrid effort a bad night at the office.
We will hear the marathon cliché from the Rockets throughout the season as they grind their way through the NBA campaign.
But expectations won’t change.
That’s what the NBA season is like for a contender. Especially one that got a taste of success after nearly two decades of early playoff exits.
Criticism and praise will compete nightly in the race for attention, but indifference should never sneak into the running. Not with a team that has championship aspirations.
Good thing it is only October.