Led by Clippers head coach Doc Rivers, reserve guard Austin Rivers says his father’s team showed the NBA how to best defend the small-ball Rockets in their March 5 meeting.
Houston had lost four of its final five games before the 2019-20 season’s COVID-19 hiatus, and Rivers said the Clippers game — which was the second of a four-game losing streak — was the biggest problem.
“We weren’t in a good place as a team, I can tell you that,” the Rivers said Thursday in a Facebook Q&A session. While the first loss of the losing streak was in New York, Rivers attributed that loss to a lack of focus, rather than the Knicks figuring out a schematic advantage.
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As far as Houston’s downturn, Rivers explained that the team was initially on a high following its permanent switch in February to a smaller lineup without a center. With the floor spaced and driving lanes open thanks to capable shooters at all positions, the Rockets went 9-2 that month — including statements wins over the likes of the Lakers and Celtics.
We win the first game [after the Clint Capela for Robert Covington trade] versus the Lakers, and everybody’s on a high. That gives you momentum. We start beating everybody. We beat Boston, and then we go into Boston and beat them.
But it was the blowout loss to the Clippers — a game in which the Rockets scored just 65 points in the first three quarters and shot 7-of-42 (16.7%) on 3-pointers — that brought them back down to earth. Harden scored just 16 points on 4-of-17 shooting (23.5%), including 0-of-8 on treys.
“It wasn’t something that was detrimental to us where we think it’s not going to work,” Rivers told play-by-play broadcaster Craig Ackerman on Thursday. “We knew what we have is going to work. We still believe in our small-ball, we believe in what Mike [D’Antoni] and Daryl [Morey] put in place. I think what we realized is that it’s not perfect. Nothing’s perfect.”
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From there, Rivers went into the Xs and Os of what the Clippers did to make Houston’s offense significantly less prolific than usual.
The Clippers defended us in a way that no team has guarded us yet, and teams took note. They played this boxes and elbows strategy, kind of like a zone almost. Two guys at each wing, and then two guys down low in each box, and then the one guy goes to guard James. Because they know, no one is cutting to the basket.
They know that there’s no cutting, there’s no big man down there. They know everybody is around the perimeter, so everybody can zone up and guard the perimeter, and just have one guy chase James around.
After the March 5 loss to the Clippers, Houston (40-24) then suffered back-to-back disappointing losses to Charlotte (23-42) and Orlando (30-35) — two teams that the Rockets were clearly superior to on paper. According to Rivers, the Hornets and Magic succeeded by utilizing many of the same principles shown in the Clippers game.
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“It was definitely something we were trying to adjust to,” Rivers said. “Those four to five games was us learning that even though the small ball is going to be effective and we still believe it can win us a championship, we were learning that teams were going to throw different things at us.”
It [the system] is not perfect. We’re going to have to figure this out. We didn’t just figure out the cheat code to winning a championship. There’s still weaknesses to everything.
We still believe in it, but at the time we were figuring it out. When this season resumes, we’re going to see the same thing again, and we’re going to have to continue to work through it. Which we will, because we have too good of players, and Mike and the guys we have — in our eyes — we believe are great. So we’ll figure it out.
The Clippers (44-20) were the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference when the 2019-20 season was suspended, while the Rockets were the No. 6 seed. Should the season eventually resume and go quickly to the playoffs, that makes it a potential second-round matchup — and thus, a defense that the Rockets will need to adjust to.
Houston did beat the Clippers in two of the teams’ first three meetings, but all of those games featured Capela as a traditional center.
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