After that Mothers Day massacre the media quickly asked the question, can the rockets keep scoring? Can brooks keep lighting it up? Can the Shane keep hitting open threes? I believe that question is almost irrelevant because something that has seemed overlooked with Brook's spectacular offensive game is the defense the rockets displayed. 36 points allowed at half time and 54 by the end of the third quarter! If the rockets keep this kind of defense in game 6, even if they dont score a ton of points, they can keep themselves in the game and give themselves an opportunity to win. The loss of yao not only opens up the paint for the rockets on offense but it also closes it up on defense as chuck hayes at 6'6 is strong enough to push the lakers bigs away from the paint and agile enough to stop penetration from the lakers guards. Lets face it, if yao was a great defender Rick wouldn't be replacing him with Hayes at the end of important games for defensive purposes. Yao is still the greatest center in the world but he lacks the foot speed to keep up with kobe and recover on defense at times. We may be playing 4 on 5 on offense but if we cant keep the lakers anywhere from 85 to 95 points in the next game we will find ourselves in this game and able to escape from LA with the win.
Had we kept the intensity up in the 4th they would have struggled to score 75. For a team as offensively gifted as the Lakers, thats frakking impressive. I see no reason why we can't continue this effort in game 6. A few more open shots will fall, sure. But those shots are gonna be the hardest shots they've taken all year.
and yao weakness on defense is the PnR. Remember when we had jvg and chuck haye was a starter. The defenders would leave him and rafer to go double tmac and yao. Now that rafer is gone and we have RA to use chuck properly on offense which is to pass and cut so defenders can't shy off of him. Jvg offense was a stand still inside out while RA has the motion offense. Chuck will get double double tomorrow.
