Rockets Reign Supreme Over Clips

Strong second half propels Houston to 102-85 win

Jason Friedman
Rockets.com Staff Writer

Los Angeles - The turning point seemed so obvious, so overt, it almost came accompanied with the feeling that it was not to be trusted. It felt, in a way, like a trap. For the Los Angeles Clippers, that’s exactly what it was. And they obliged the Rockets by falling for it hook, line and sinker, allowing Houston to cruise to a 102-85 victory.

The lure was cast late in the second quarter when Rockets’ Head Coach Rick Adelman decided to assign Aaron Brooks - all 6-foot, 160 pounds of him - the task of defending the Clippers’ 6-7, 205 pound Rasual Butler, while sliding Shane Battier over to cover Baron Davis.

Seeing the obvious mismatch, the Clippers couldn’t help themselves. The Brooks-on-Butler matchup was simply too enticing not to exploit and the fool’s gold of early success they found only strengthened their resolve to do so. But like any good trap, it also simultaneously tightened the noose around the Clippers' collective neck. And by the time they knew what hit them, the damage had already been done as the Rockets eventually turned a close game into a full-blown rout.

“We just told Aaron to make (Butler) take jump shots,” explained Adelman of the defensive switch. “It left our bigs on the boards; they were hurting us on the boards in the first half because of that. We just felt it was worth a try and they were trying to milk it. We just had to do something different.”

Beginning late in the first half and on into the third quarter, Los Angeles repeatedly fed Butler the ball, especially after he managed to convert a few turnaround jumpers over Houston’s diminutive point guard early on in the matchup. But then the shots stopped falling. The well ran dry. And suddenly the Clippers’ offense, so devastatingly efficient in racking up 52 points on 58% shooting in the first half, was completely out of sync, disintegrating into little more than forced jumpers begotten from one-pass possessions.

To be fair, the aforementioned matchup itself didn’t prove to be the Clippers’ undoing so much as it set the tone for everything Houston wanted to accomplish defensively in the second half. By acquiescing to the Rockets’ will, Los Angeles established a fatal pattern of doing precisely what Houston desired them to do: take the ball out of their best players’ hands, become utterly predictable offensively and stand around and watch while antsy players force jumpshots in an effort to make up for lost time. The end result: Houston outscored LA 50-33 in the second half, while limiting the Clippers to an anemic 31% shooting from the field.

“If you’re an offensive team and you just try to attack after one pass, the defense is set and it can help more,” said Battier, shedding light on one of the keys to the Rockets’ second half success. “It’s much tougher to score 1-on-5 like that, versus moving the team around, making a few passes and then going to the mismatch because then the defense is moving. The percentages go way up when you make three or four passes before you try to attack the mismatch. So what we try to do is we encourage every team to attack the mismatch after one or two passes because it’s easier to defend.”

This sort of defensive effort surely comes as a breath of fresh air to a Rockets team which has been below average on that end of the floor this season. Houston understands it won’t be its usual stingy self without Yao Ming but that hardly means the club is satisfied simply sticking with the status quo. The Rockets needed a game like this to boost its collective defensive confidence, especially since it poses such a lethal combination when paired with the kind of firepower Houston displayed offensively Wednesday night, knocking down 12-of-23 from downtown, while getting 22 points from Aaron Brooks and a career-high 19 points from rookie Chase Budinger.

“We have to keep working at it,” said Adelman. “We know we’re not the same team we were last year, we know we’re going to give things up the way we’re trying to play but we shouldn’t give up the things we did in the first half and I think that’s the thing you have to understand: if they make jumpers and play solid and beat us, they beat us. But if we give them easy opportunities that they don’t have to work that hard for, then we’re just hurting ourselves.”

QUOTES

RICK ADELMAN

It was a great team win. Different people stepped in at different times of the game. That fourth quarter was terrific.

(switching Brooks on to Butler): We just told Aaron to make him (Butler) take jump shots. It left our bigs on the boards; they were hurting us on the boards in the first half because of that. We just felt it was worth a try and they were trying to milk it. We just had to do something different.

(defense of the second unit): That group was playing great. They got that little surge there where went up 11 and they were really playing well as a group. We had Carl inside, Kyle was playing terrific and David spaces them out and make the long shots. I just like the way that group was playing. I was going to bring in Shane if we needed or Aaron, but the way it was going I was just going to finish with that team.
I think what we did is we kept them from getting shots at the basket. When Shane was guarding Thornton he did a great job of making him take jump shots and not letting him get to the basket. And we did a good job of not getting Kaman easy shots at the basket, we surrounded him pretty good. We wanted to make them a jump-shooting team and in the first half we didn’t do that. They got layup after layup on cuts and drives and offensive rebounds. We had a solid second half.

We have to keep working at it. We know we’re not the same team we were last year, we know we’re going to give things up the way we’re trying to play but we shouldn’t give up the things we did in the first half and I think that’s the thing you have to understand: if they make jumpers and play solid and beat us, they beat us. But if we give them easy opportunities that they don’t have to work that hard for, then we’re just hurting ourselves.

(comfortable with sticking with second unit): I just feel that’s the way we have to play. If guys are playing well then they deserve to be out there. I’ve always been somebody who usually goes with my main people but when that team had it going and we got up 11, why not? I think we’re a team with 9, 10 people right now and that’s who I’m playing and we might as well use them.

TREVOR ARIZA

We never got down on ourselves. We always stayed confident and didn’t give them any extra shots. We pressured, gave them one shot and then took our time and executed our plays.  In the second half we came out more focused and played our game.

AARON BROOKS

You know, post defenders like me, Chuck Hayes, Anthony Mason… I belong (in that group). (laughs) I don’t know, I did my best.

I thought it would be Baron Davis but I knew somebody was going to post me up. Coach made that adjustment, Shane did a good job on Baron. I did my best. I’ve got a new respect for post guys banging in there. That’s a lot of energy.

CHASE BUDINGER

That’s what coach drew up. Coach wanted to throw them off and get Aaron on someone different and I think it kind of disrupted their offense. They kept on going into that guy which kind of screwed up their flow of the game.

SHANE BATTIER

I think we protected the paint a lot better in the second half. They had a lot of shots in the paint and offensive rebounds (in the first half) and we forced them into a lot of two-point jumpers. Our mantra has to be to don’t overreact to two-point jumpers. We believe that over the course of the game if you force into a high number of two-point jumpers the odds are going to go in your favor because they won’t be able to hit them at a high enough rate to hurt you, and that’s what we did.

With them having Eric Gordon out, which I believe is a huge game changer for them because he spaces the floor, we were able to pack the paint much better in the second half and just make them take a lot of low percentage two-point jumpers.

They have a lot of aggressive guys, a lot drivers. Thornton is a pretty aggressive driver, so you just try to give him space to shoot. Same with Kaman, when their big guys shoot that takes one more offensive rebounder out of the play. That’s usually how we have success as a team defensively.

It’s tough. It’s something we run into a problem with when we have a huge mismatch with Luis or Carl. It’s tough to survive unless you have a superduperstar, unless you have a Yao Ming, if you’re going to just exclusively feature that guy after one pass. Sometimes you get so eager to take advantage of a mismatch that you forget about running your offense. We’re as guilty as anyone of doing that. What it does is, if you’re an offensive team and you just try to attack after one pass, the defense is set and it can help more, it’s much tougher to score 1-on-5 like that, versus moving the team around, making a few passes and then going to the mismatch because then the defense is moving. The percentages go way up when you make three or four passes before you try to attack the mismatch. So that’s what we try to do: we try to encourage every team to attack the mismatch after one or two passes because it’s easier to defend.

Clippers Head Coach Mike Dunleavy

Clippers’ lack of toughness: “I’m disappointed by our mental and physical toughness. When the ball is not going in the hole for us, that’s when we need to become more focused and more determined defensively. We need to put bodies on people, dig down, get your lunch pail out and go to work. We beat them by 12 rebounds in the first half, and got outrebounded by 14 in the second half, that just shows they were tougher than we were. The Rockets scrapped better than we did and because of that they came out with 8 offensive rebounds and they hurt us off of that.”

RE: Chris Kaman’s recent shooting struggles: “I don’t have the answer for that, sometimes it’s the confidence thing with players. When he gets good looks, there are nights when he goes 9 for 11 and there are nights when he’s not getting good looks. He gets frustrated when he gets fouled and things are not called and that’s one of the things he has to do better. He has to be able to harness that energy and put it to work someplace else as opposed to letting it bother him. ”

RE: Emotional letdown due to Eric Gordon’s absence: “Eric brings a lot to the table for us, but it becomes an opportunity for somebody. It is an opportunity for somebody to step up and do things that are necessary. That is something we haven’t been able to get in a consistent basis.”

Clippers Guard Baron Davis

Re: Clippers Overall Performance: “We made a run tonight but it wasn’t enough. As our offense got stagnant, we were shooting against the shot clock. We were missing our open jumpers and we didn’t get ball movement or player movement. We didn’t score the ball and that’s why we lost. We definitely didn’t do a good job setting the screen. We have to do a better job not turning the ball over. We have to do a better job.”

Re: Playing Without Injured Eric Gordon: “This is definitely not how we want to play in the fourth quarter. We need to find other ways to dig deep. We started to put our head down and we started to miss some shots. We are all professionals so we have to step it up. We need to seize this opportunity, because other teams suffer injuries so we all have to take it upon ourselves to step up when one of our guys is injured.”

Clippers Center Chris Kaman

Re: Play of Clippers: “The whole second half we did not play. They were all getting the loose change. We had a solid first half our second half we gave up easy opportunities that hurt us throughout the game. We didn’t execute terribly or do anything different from other nights. We just gave them easy shots.”

Got a question for Rockets.com? Send it to Jason Friedman. And for up to the second news and injury updates follow the Rockets and Jason on Twitter.