RealGM

Hey guys!! LONG time no see, busy summer for me, moving to Sweden for the year, father's operation, but now everithing is right and good, and truth be told, I'm pumped for the comeback of Rockets basketball, even with Yao and probably Tmac's absences. I wanna see the team play.
And I hope everything's fine for all rockets fan on the board

Anyways, I made this topic in regards of shoots and pace.
What do you think is gonna be the number of shoots everyone takes?
Finally, in your opinion, what pace should the Rockets play at?
All of this question, assume without McGrady back, and with him back, if you want to give two different opinions.

And I'm also going with the surefire players being on the roster.
That means

PG Brooks and Lowry
SG Ariza and Taylor
SF Battier and Budinger
PF Scola Landry and Hayes
C Andersen Dorsey (I would assume Joey to be the backup C)

That's only 11 players, I know. But no other is sure IMO. And I make a different thing everytime, including McGrady.

So, shoot distribution.
Last year we were at 79,6 shoots a game, while being 19th in terms of pace.
Do you think without Yao it's gonna be up? The thing is, we don't have Yao, yes, but we don't have a lot of players for the fastbreak.
Brooks, Lowry. Landry can be a good finisher. Scola is ok I guess but not a great fast break player, that's for sure. Ariza will do wonders if we fastbreak more. McCants and Tmac,if they're there could also help.
But here's why I don't think we will shoot really more or have more pace. Both Artest and Von took an awful lot of shoot first intention, witheout waiting or something, they're not here anymore. They meant 23 shoots last year.

So let's assume pace is not that different( you're of course free to disagree), and we take roughly 80 shoots a game.

Here is IMO my shoot chart, with and witheout Tmac, and with 6 shoots being undefinided, which is I guess for the guys who makes the team.I'm therefore going with 74 shoots available per game.

Also, I will put into parenthesis the number of shoots per game for last year.


Brooks 15(9,7 last year)/ Lowry 5 (5,7 LY)
Ariza 9( 7,3 LY)/ Taylor 5
Battier 7,5 (5,9 LY)/ Budinger 4
Scola 13 (9,7 LY)/ Landry 8 (6,05 LY)/ Hayes 1, 5 same as LY
Andersen 6/ Dorsey 1

That's 75 shoots per game.
Of course if Tracy's there...
well, I think it's more 12 per game for Brooks, 11 per game for Luis, 1 for Taylor, 7 for Ariza, and a little less for Battier...and all in all, 12 or 13 shoots per game for Tmac.

Long and tiring post.
Please give me your toughts.

I would hope that Brooks is not taking more shots per game than Scola or Ariza. I'm not knocking Brooks - he will likely be one of, if not "the" main offensive threats; but I prefer my PG's to distribute before shooting.

Hopefully Andersen is a good passer out of the paint - that will help us tremendously. We don't need him to take a lot of the scoring load, but a few cheap buckets here and there would be expected.

Ideally, I'd like our offensive focus to be Scola, then Ariza then Brooks.

I would hope too.
But I'm nearly sure Brooks will be very free this year, and that he'll have the ball a lot of times, hence shooting a lot.
That also depends of Lowry, if he's good, Brooks won't play as many minutes.

I'm kind of excited that this team could be running some old Aldelman Kings' style ball this season. If that's the case then we'll have plenty of running, and I don't know of many in the league who can keep up with Aaron Brooks.

Some observations.

In the two yrs McGrady has missed most of season the Rockets had 2 FEWER shot attempts than the previous yr. Prob a combination of his relatively high assist/turnover ratio and his ability to get off a shot when the 24 second clock is expiring. Last yr the Rockets routinely had 2-3 shot clock violations each game.

The success of the Rockets on offense will lie in how disciplined they are. While Adelman wants the team to run at every opportunity(fast pace),he also wants the team to run his half-court offense properly,which requires patience as the options unfold(slow pace). Late last yr I charted the offensive possession for a couple of games and it was astonishing how the team scored nearly every time there were 3 or more passes in the half-court sets.(Going off memory it was something like 75%+ Limited samples to be sure.)

Brooks doesn't get enough FTs. To really boost his scoring he has to figure out how to get foul calls and go to the line.
Brooks increased his scoring per minute approx 3% last yr. Chris Paul increased his 5% in his second yr,Parker and Deron Williams all had much better improvements. All three had huge increases in points per minute played in their 3rd yr.

I think that we're still going to be running at of 95-96 ppg, but will likely have a few more possessions per game (without Yao) and possibly a slightly lower FG% (unless ball movement and cutters can somehow make up for Yao).

For the distribution, obviously Scola needs to be, if possible, taking the most shots (much like Yao really needs to be, but we'll see if this actually ends up happening).

I expect the "creating shots" (i.e. taking bad shots because the play broke down) role to be split primarily between Brooks and Ariza. Really not sure how the scoring load will settle in between those 3, but I think it's a safe bet to say that they'll be our 3 leading scorers, barring JT or Budinger stepping in. It's really hard to say if Brooks is going to take this opportunity and use it to step in and dominate the ball (that doesn't seem like his personality, but it could happen), Budinger will be able to put up 50/40 shooting percentages (he'll get some serious minutes if so), etc, etc. Given that we're mainly the same club that was in the playoffs against the Lakers, I'm still expecting us to put up 42-45 wins, but how we'll end up pacing and distributing points and other little specifics are impossible to tell at this point. Also what I'm more curious about is whether Scola's rebounds will go up without Yao around to clog the paint, if they'll go down without the extra presence down low, or if neither thing mentioned there matters at all and they stay about steady.

Wasn't really going to answer because of massive levels of conjecture that are still involved.

moofs wrote:I think that we're still going to be running at of 95-96 ppg, but will likely have a few more possessions per game (without Yao) and possibly a slightly lower FG% (unless ball movement and cutters can somehow make up for Yao).

For the distribution, obviously Scola needs to be, if possible, taking the most shots (much like Yao really needs to be, but we'll see if this actually ends up happening).

I expect the "creating shots" (i.e. taking bad shots because the play broke down) role to be split primarily between Brooks and Ariza. Really not sure how the scoring load will settle in between those 3, but I think it's a safe bet to say that they'll be our 3 leading scorers, barring JT or Budinger stepping in. It's really hard to say if Brooks is going to take this opportunity and use it to step in and dominate the ball (that doesn't seem like his personality, but it could happen), Budinger will be able to put up 50/40 shooting percentages (he'll get some serious minutes if so), etc, etc. Given that we're mainly the same club that was in the playoffs against the Lakers, I'm still expecting us to put up 42-45 wins, but how we'll end up pacing and distributing points and other little specifics are impossible to tell at this point. Also what I'm more curious about is whether Scola's rebounds will go up without Yao around to clog the paint, if they'll go down without the extra presence down low, or if neither thing mentioned there matters at all and they stay about steady.

Wasn't really going to answer because of massive levels of conjecture that are still involved.

A lot of good points IMO.

As for Brooks, I just think it's that much easier for a guard to get shoots going. He won't have Yao or Mac( if we go with the hypothesis Trayc doesn't come back), who would have the ball every possession. I think and hope I coulb be wrong, I just don't see Brooks taking less shoots than Scola. He'll IMO try to force things a bit, and take a lot of 3.I also agree with Tisbee about the need for more FTs.

Obviously, our 3 best scorers should be these guys. McCants as a 4th option would IMO be nice.
And obviously again, as for your last sentence, there is a lot of variables, and things can happen in so different ways. I just wanted to see how you felt with the team as it is right now, and how we would fare.

I would say that it depends on who is in the game for the Rockets that would determine the pace. If Shane, Scola, and Chuck are in the game, then the fast breaking would few and far between. Adelman isn't going to be playing any of his Kings style. Plus you don't want to get an entirely different style of play while you wait for TMac and Yao to come back. You have to keep close to what you've been doing so that it stays smooth.

I would guess that the up tempo style would be more for the 2nd unit, when the other teams best defenders/runners aren't in. Let Brooks, Lowery, Carl, Ariza etc, run a bit and see how they play together at a faster pace. But if their defense slips then they will be forced to slow it down.

Bump now that we've seen the majority of the preseason games.