I mean it's a factor but it isn't the entirety of the story. As a team the Rockets were 10th in the regular season, with a 3% of 36.4%. (nba.com) The NBA league average 3% by team was 36.0%. (basketball-reference.com) As a team, the Rockets are not only one of the better three point shooting teams, they're above league average. 3's made and 3's attempted show a bit of a hole - 11.5 made per game (25th - nba.com) on 31.5 attempts per game (28th - nba.com). They just don't shoot a lot of them, despite an efficiency suggesting they should shoot more of them. Eye test - I wouldn't even have guessed 30 attempts per game. Put a pin in that. Not counting Capela's end-of-year extravaganza from 3, or Newton's 5 attempts, the Rockets have 5 players shooting over league average. Durant, Holiday, Sheppard, Okogie, Smith Jr. Tari missed that mark by .2% - after absolutely blistering the nets for like 3 months to start the season. The rest of your roster is Tate/Sengun who don't take many but still shot over 30%, Jeff and Finney-Smith who both have topped that mark a handful of times in their careers... and then Amen somewhere near the bottom. All in all, this team isn't necessarily a bad lineup of shooters. I mean...quite the opposite really. This team shoots from range well. FG%, 47.9% good for 10th in the league and a jump from the previous season ranked 21st (nba.com). Then from the stripe - a paltry 76.3% (25th - nba.com) good for 16th in the league, well under league average 78.3% (basketball-reference.com). So what gives? I don't think there's a whole lotta people about to show up and argue about how smoothly the offense operates. "Ugly efficiency" is pretty on the nose for me. There's certainly a boost from offensive rebounding that we gave up losing Adams. We had Durant doing Durant things in the mid-range too. Your other two higher usage options are downhill finishers. Unpin - I think the answer is to quit pretending like this team is bad at shooting threes, quit pretending basketball offense is stuck in a time warp. The last time league average would support 31.5 3PA was 2017-18, nearly a decade ago....when the Rockets lead the league in 3 point attempts with 42.3 a game, which only would've made them 3rd in 2025-26 (nba.com/basketballreference.com). The last season 31.5 attempts per game would lead the league would be 2013-14. Gross. Now, I'm not saying go out there and relentlessly hoist bad shots. *I AM* saying you've got more shooters than we, as a whole fanbase, are crediting. Freaking out about a couple players shooting threes when truly - we just ran an absolutely dated, dogshit offense that didn't prioritize three point shooting as much as it seemed to prioritize KD's quest to be the all-time mercenary. Ok, ok, bias, I'll stop. Would it help if Amen, Alpe stepped up? If Tari, Jabari, Reed found some consistency? If KD stopped being a ballhog (I'll stoppp)? Well yeah, it would help. Steph Curry is the greatest 3 point shooter of all time and if he added 5% to his career % it would help him too. Yes, we'll checkmark player improvement why not. It would also help if they ran plays for these guys. Ran an offense that didn't rely on one guy to just be better than the defender(s) in front of him. Literally just offense where the guys barely shuffle around like elderly folks at the yearly dance-off instead of running down the court, planting two feet and standing stiller than Ben regardless of what happens. A simple down screen weakside forces those defenders to react. Maybe they make a mistake? Open look. Maybe you cut off it, open bucket. Either way, with their attention occupied now you have more vertical spacing. Now you've capitalized on mistakes, you've punished inside and you have guys selling out - spray it back out to open shooters drive/kick. And when that all gets accounted for, your fallback is now a KD ISO on a defense that's been scrambling around for 15 seconds. Haven't changed the roster a bit - just the offensive intention. TL;DR - Shoot three pointers when you're good at it.
Not sure about this logic. When we shot more, we shot way worse. When we shot around the fewest in the league, we were just above average. That's the definition of a bad shooting team. The actual result of this is that our efficiency is dragged down on drives. Drives are the most important shot in basketball. The whole point of spacing is to get drives. Unfortunately since Udoka all 3 years and Silas all his years allowed our paint to be packed, there's no comparison point. I can't tell you how good Amen is at drives because we've never seen him in an average-spaced floor. We've never seen any of our wings in average spacing. We take the 4th fewest drives in the NBA. That's why the spacing problem is a compounding problem. It's not only the fact that we're limited in shooting. It's also the domino effect of being forced into fewer drives and a lot of unnecessary midrange jumpers. We also average the 4th fewest passes off those drives because teams never have to scramble when they know to stay home on everyone but Amen/Sengun. This team sucks at midrange jumpers outside KD. There's no way to fix having 2 non-shooters on the floor. Some people say they "believe" it's possible but that's really idiotic. There's no way it can result in a good enough offense to go as far as we want to go in the playoffs.
...but we never used a Durant, Holiday, Sheppard, Okogie, and Smith Jr. lineup. It was rare to have more than 2 of those guys on the court at once. No matter what the team's overall 3pt% was, the average percentage of the actual 5 guys on the court in any one moment was likely awful, especially considering the ridiculous amount of minutes given to Amen who was the worst of them all. Also, there needs to be huge asterisk next to whatever 3pt% Okogie and Tari shot. Those guys are left wide open. There's no way you can compare what they shot to KD and Sheppard who always have guys running at them.
Looks like no trend to me. Granted, I think the Rockets just took the threes they could. If the Rockets actually set out to shoot more threes regardless of the defense, there would be more misses.
Spacing is a function of individual gravity across the lineup and scheme - creating space between players / defenders to operate in. When one player has little to no gravity, its a difficult situation, one more than one has little to no gravity, it's an impossible situation.
Oh, no disrespect but I'm not going to do that. You might as well be asking me to pull up proof that the moon isn't flat.
Ime and Stone just letting 6-10 36% shooter Jabari and 7ft 40% shooter KD shoot only 6 3s a a game (1.5 a quarter) each is a fireable offense by itself should have made sure both shot 10 threes a gane (2.5 a quarrter) each
Yeah I don’t disagree, but I think too many folks are focused on the lineup instead of the scheme. We had several above average range shooters. The team as a whole was very efficient from three. I don’t think Amen or Adams or Sengun completely turn the basket over, in any combination. I think they just don’t aim to shoot threes, and teams packed the paint because they know our focus is paint points/boards.
It’s just a discussion board, plenty of hot take threads for everyone to not bring something to the table.
Spacing is about defense respecting your shooting. Both percentage and volume matter. If you take only 1 attempt per game shooting at 80%, the defense won't respect you. If you take 10 attempts per game shooting 20%, the defense won't respect you. But if you take 8 attempts per game at 40%, the other team will make sure they have someone stick to you at the 3pt line. We are one of the lowest 3pt attempting teams.
KD has attempted significantly fewer threes than he should for his entire career, under many different coaches and team situations. That's a KD thing. He wants to shoot middies. Which gets to OP's point. KD does not improve spacing as much one would think, because the defense knows he doesn't really want to shoot a 3. Same with our entire team, except our small guards. 3PA rate is a rare and important trait. Players who can dribble, are 6'4+, and get up 3's at volume and a reasonable percentage are kinda required in the modern NBA to play modern offense. We don't have any.
Yeah, for KD specifically, relative to his usage and especially relative to his talent as a shooter, he should be taking 25% to 50% more three pointers, and he just never has throughout his whole career. That's not a coaching problem. Where I see a potential coaching problem though is with Sengun. It seems pretty clear to me that the coaches are not encouraging him to take three pointers. (We even have that one oft-cited example where Udoka was visibly furious at him for taking one late.) I think a different head coach would probably recognize that he has the potential to knock them down and encourage him to take them whenever wide open. My impression is that they only want him to do that in low leverage situations in the latter half of the shot clock. And I do suspect that's the coaching staff, because Sengun has had these occasional stretches where he was letting it fly, and then it always goes away afterward.
I said no disrespect, it was just weird request you made. Everyone knows taking more attempts means efficiency goes down.
Spacing is about shooting reputation, plain and simple. No one treated Tari like a 44% when he was on fire, and no one treats FVV like a 34% when he’s going cold. We had 3 respectable to great shooters around Amen and Sengun and our spacing was dog ****. If you’ve only watched rockets, you won’t get it. Pretty much everyone else gets easier drives than us. The defensive pressure on our wings is more than most teams in the NBA.
This gets to a larger point, which is all the problems are interrelated, so it's hard to fully evaluate any component of the team. Although in those circumstances, to me blame always must fall to the top, which would be Stone and Ime.
The problem isnt overall efficiency - its consistency. You can shoot 50% in a win - but then shoot 25% in a loss... and overall your numbers prob arent that bad... werent we leading the league on 3pt efficiency - on the fewest attempts - through the first few months of the season? Then we started posting all of these sub 30% games... Tari went to sh*t... from leading the league to among the worst... Bari had a drought for a few weeks where he looked horrible... Reed was streaky as hell... DFS never did show up... Sengun and Amen hit one occassionally... but overall were putrid from the arc... Okogie had a career year from 3 - but limited opportunities... Our teams woeful 3 pt shooting was masked by KDs efficiency....
