The Houston Rockets came up disappointingly short with an opportunity to secure a trip to the NBA Finals on their home floor against the Golden State Warriors in Game 7. Monday night's loss was largely due to the Rockets' porous shooting performance from beyond the arc.
What makes this type of atrocious outing even more frustrating is that a significant bulk of that came from what were deemed to be open looks from beyond the arc, according to Drew Shiller of Warriors Outsiders.
The Rockets went 7-for-44 from 3-point range in Game 7. According to the player tracking, the Rockets went:
-1-for-16 on "open" 3s
-4-for-14 on "wide open" 3s— Drew Shiller (@DrewShiller) May 29, 2018
This demonstrates that the Rockets had more than an ample opportunity to win the game had they hit their shots from 3-point range given that just over 60 percent of their attempts had enough airspace from a defender. This underlines struggles that Houston had from their primary shooters in James Harden, Eric Gordon, and Trevor Ariza combining for 4-of-34 shooting from deep.
Ariza was the biggest culprit of the bunch missing all nine of his shots from 3-point range that pushed him a 0-of-12 shooting night in such a pivotal game. What appeared to be a factor is that the Rockets looked to be the more fatigued team on the floor as the game wore on while the absence of All-Star point guard Chris Paul also played a notable part of their offensive shortcoming.
Regardless if that was the case or not, Houston had plenty of opportunities to come out on top in Game 7 had they made a decent amount of their 44 three-pointers on the night. This send the franchise back to the drawing board to make tweaks to the roster to help them finally get over the top against the Warriors in the playoffs. Until then, the sting of this loss will likely linger for the next several weeks given how close they came to reaching the NBA Finals.
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