The Los Angeles Lakers are the most veteran-laiden team in the league and the Houston Rockets are among the youngest. So when the Rockets pulled into the Staples Center on Sunday, excited about their first NBA road trip, one could have easily predicted how the matchup would go.
“It's possible,” said coach Stephen Silas when asked if playing in Staples Center for the first time contributed to nerves offensively. “I'm not sure. I didn't get a feel from the guys that they were tentative or nervous at all. It's very possible that that could have contributed to our uneven play. I don't really know what to attribute the free throws to. You lose a game by 10 and you miss 14 free throws. That's not great. We clean up the free throws, we clean up the turnovers, and it's a whole different ball game.”
Silas had talked to the young group before the road trip about the trappings of playing in Los Angeles, but even so, there's something different about playing in the league's signature market and arena. On Saturday, players talked about how excited they were to play under the bright lights of Staple Center. While it's possible that contributed to the loss, more likely was the experience gap between the two teams. Yes, the Lakers are an old team, but the team has a combined 57 All-Star appearances between it's cast that includes LeBron James, Anthony Davis, Russell Westbrook, Carmelo Anthony, Dwight Howard, and Rajon Rondo.
It's a battle-tested group and they forced the Rockets into some tough positions as a defense.
“Turnovers,” said Eric Gordon on the root cause of the loss. “Of course, we're going to make runs. That's going to happen throughout the game, but we just continuously beat ourselves. You turn the ball over, that gives a lot of people a lot of points from the other team.”
The Rockets turned the ball over a season-high 25 times and allowed 20 fastbreak points against the Lakers on Sunday. Houston already leads the league in turnovers and points allowed off turnovers, but this game crystalized how bad the problem is.
“The turnovers wore us out tonight,” continued Silas. “And it's been a problem for the first part of the season. When you're playing against the good teams, we have to understand the reads that we need to make. We need to understand our spacing. We need to understand a lot of the things that go into turnovers. Some of them were just careless, but others were forced. And forced ones aren't necessarily as bad. But the careless ones we're gonna have to watch as a group and hopefully rectify that situation because it's becoming a problem night after night.”
As Silas alluded to, the Rockets also shot the ball pretty poorly. In addition to missing staggering 14-of-29 free throw attempts, Houston only made 6 of their 28 three-point attempts. Christian Wood, who shot 1-of-6 from three-point range and 1-of-7 from the field, took the weight of the loss on his shoulders.
“I have to be better and shoot the ball better, especially at the free-throw line and the three-point line,” said Wood. “I had a bunch of looks that I usually make and they didn't go in today. I'll just be better next game,”
The Rockets actually started to figure some things out offensively in the second half. They managed to score 50 points in the second half after only scoring 35 in the first half. They also brought the game to near-striking distance before the ultimately Lakers pulled away late.
“We're good enough to be in games,” said Gordon. “That's no question, but I would like to see how good we can be when we have fewer turnovers and [we're] really attacking. I think we could be much better. To me, it's all about trying to overcome whatever obstacles that we can to try to win. But we can't be just down 10-15 points throughout the whole game.”
Gordon has done a lot of winning with the Rockets over the years, so this season has understandably been tough on him.
“I knew we were gonna have growing pains this season, but we're beating ourselves,” said Gordon. “You can't get better by beating yourselves. We're turning it over. Sometimes we take a lot of bad shots. And those are things that are natural instincts to where you're not supposed to do.”
Houston plays the Lakers again on Tuesday so we'll see if they can make that game more competitive.
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