We all saw this coming. We knew it would happen. But here’s what no one saw with the reconstructed Rockets: It’s taken only a handful of games for James Harden to master Mike D’Antoni’s speed-ball offense.
Finding teammates in rhythm and taking what the defense gives him, Harden looks like the second coming of Steve Nash in the Houston Rockets’ new offense, according to no less than D’Antoni, Nash’s old coach in Phoenix. There have been times when Harden has been at such a high level, D’Antoni has made a conscious effort to refrain from calling plays.
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“I could mess it up, and I don’t want to mess it up,” D’Antoni said after Harden easily dismantled the defense-less Knicks on Wednesday in the Garden. “James has a unique ability to be able to play one step ahead. Nash was like that. The great players are like that. LeBron is. They just see the game in slow motion.”
Harden’s hyper-fast adjustment to D’Antoni’s offense is not even the best part of the Rockets’ early-season.
Are you sitting? A noted slacker at the defensive end at times, Harden is now trying to play defense. There’s a commitment. And, for the first time since D’Antoni broke out what has turned out to be the offense-of-the-future back in the mid-2000s with the Suns, he’s in charge of a team that at least is talking about stopping the other team — even if results aren’t showing it. The Rockets are 3-3, and they have the 28th-ranked defense (by points allowed per possession) in the NBA, but the wheels are in motion for something different from a D’Antoni team.
Houston’s commitment to defense appears to fly in the face of a few things: The Rockets re-stocked their roster in the offseason by signing offensive-minded players in Ryan Anderson and Eric Gordon. Their former team, the Pelicans, let each walk because they decided that they needed to upgrade their sieve-like D. Now they’re with Harden, giving the Rockets an offense-heavy lineup, especially as their top perimeter defender, Patrick Beverley, is sidelined with a knee injury.
There’s an even larger issue than the roster. Historically, D’Antoni’s system isn’t defense-friendly. When his best Suns teams went to the Western Conference Finals in 2005 and 2006, they could match anyone basket for basket. Firepower was never the problem. But where they inevitably came up short was in their inability to get stops in the final minutes of games. Not that it seemed to bother D’Antoni. After his team scored 32 points, but surrendered 43 to the Spurs in the fourth quarter of a Game 1 loss in the 2005 West Finals, he famously observed, “We just ran out of possessions.”
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Now, D’Antoni is singing a different tune. From his days in New York and Los Angeles, he knows that his offense will take the Rockets only so far. To get this team into the playoffs, they’ll have to defy the critics who say that a Mike D’Antoni-coached team can’t get stops.
“When they hired Mike, I understood that we were going to score a lot of points,” said Trevor Ariza, the Rockets’ 13-year small forward and one of their top defenders. “But in our first conversation, he told me, “we got to play on both ends.’ Those were his first words when he called me up after getting the job. He said, “our offense is going to work. We’ve got a lot of shooters. We have a lot of guys who can make plays. But the defensive end is something we have to pay more attention to. That’s all of us.’ And, that’s what we have been focusing on.”
D’Antoni is still doing what he does best — teaching an offense that looks every bit as powerful as the one that turned Nash into a back-to-back MVP winner. There’s not much that Harden couldn’t do before, as an MVP-caliber player who finished second to Stephen Curry in the 2015 voting. But now, he’s even better because he’s a better scorer than Nash. As for the other end, he’s shown a renewed commitment, which is critical. As the Rockets’ leader, more than anyone else, he has to buy in.
“He is buying in,” Jeff Bzdelik, the veteran NBA assistant and Houston’s new defensive guru, told Sporting News. “James kind of personifies what we have to do at both ends. As we say around here, ‘Do it hard, and do it right.’ ”
The mantra hasn’t translated to the stats quite yet. Even with their pace down, the Rockets have struggled to guard 3-pointers in particular. But there is no doubt that they’re giving a better effort on defense, as opposed to what Houston fans had to endure when the team ranked 25th last season in points allowed (106 per game), as opponents made 46 percent of their shots. That contributed to the team’s decline from a Western Conference finalist to a 41-41 eighth-seed that was an easy out for the Warriors in the first round of the playoffs.
Harden was justifiably criticized for his sleepy, flat-footed approach, but he seems to be with the program.
“We’ve got to continue to play the way we’re playing every single night, no matter who we’re playing,” he said. “Bring that intensity. Defensively, we have to make sure we’re locked in.”
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That’s the message from above. At halftime, the Rockets now watch tape of their defensive mistakes from the first 24 minutes.
“We spend a whole lot longer in practices and pre-game talking about defense,” Anderson said. “Obviously, it’s where we need to focus. The offense will come. We’re talented offensively. We have a bunch of guys who can score. Defense is our main focus and emphasis. We all know we need to play a complete 48 minutes of defense. The number one thing is effort. It’s a will. You want to stop your man for your teammate. Everybody has each other’s backs around here. There’s a real defensive emphasis on this team.”
That’s because the Rockets brought in Bzdelik to run that half of the court. It’s not the first time a team has insisted D’Antoni hire someone to coach defense. In New York, the Knicks brought in Mike Woodson, who eventually slid over to D’Antoni’s seat when his run in the Garden ended in the final stages of the 2011-2012 season.
Unlike Woodson, Bzdelik has a true defensive background, cutting his teeth as an assistant coach in Miami under Pat Riley from 1995-2001. He doesn’t sugar-coat what he’s up against. He was in Memphis as an assistant to Dave Joerger last season and saw the alarming videos that exposed Harden’s refusal to even try to stop his man. He’s also well-aware of the challenges of installing a defense in a system where the offense wants to get off a shot in seven seconds or less (or close to that), and wants to average more than 100 possessions per game.
When someone told Bzdelik he had the most impossible job in the NBA, he laughed.
“I don’t think it’s impossible,” he said.
But this is complete opposite of the kind of defense-first system Bzdelik remembers from his first time on an NBA bench. Under Riley, the Heat took pains to walk the ball up the court and purposely limited possessions. Consequently, they ranked near the bottom in points per game and pace but always had a top defensive ranking.
“It’s a real challenge because there are so many more possessions in this system,” Bzdelik said. “We can’t be one-way runners. It takes great discipline and a great mindset to sprint both ways and to give great effort, both ways. That’s the challenge. We have to learn to compete on every possession, because I know our schemes work because of where I’ve been and who I’ve learned from, and it’s proven. But to get back and to set our defense and to be disciplined and to rebound the ball and then to sprint the other way — for over 100 possessions every game and over 82 games — that takes tremendous will. So there’s no resting, on either side. Our guys truly want to win. They understand this and they’re buying in.”
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But can it last for the entire season?
“It can be done,” Bzdelik said. “Stay tuned.”
