Here is a backhanded compliment: The Houston Rockets have been one of the most fascinating teams in the league all year. The competitive dynamic of basketball is changing, and the Rockets epitomize the trajectory of that shift, with their deep rotation of committed hellraisers and one of the game’s category-busting Thompson twins. What fascinates is that they won 52 games with depth, cussed determination, and an objectively bad half-court offense.
The Rockets have built an incredible roster, stocked with all the sorts of players needed to win big except for the most important one. That deviant style stuff is fun and cool and has not tended to work in the playoffs, where defenses lock in and erase a lot of easy effort buckets. What matters here, to be reductive, is how good your best perimeter offensive player is. How relieving for Houston then that Jalen Green had himself a fantastic Game 2.
Green was the best player on the court on Wednesday against Golden State, with 38 points, six assists, and three steals in 35 crisp minutes. In his second-ever playoff game, he terrorized the Warriors defense, comfortably pulling up when defenders ducked screens and snaking past all three lines of help when they restricted his operating space further out. Green read the game well, throwing four of his assists in the first half of the first quarter after opening up Golden State’s defense with his dribbling. Watch him work like this, and it all looks easy.
The problem is, it rarely does. Green was horrible in Game 1, when he admitted “the lights were bright,” shooting a putrescent 3-for-15 en route to seven points. He does that sort of disappearing act all the time, especially against the best teams in the league. Athletic as he is, not just as a leaper but as a balanced and graceful mover in three dimensions, he nevertheless takes tons of bad and baffling shots (see below) and simply does not pass enough. The ball sticks in his hands. He doesn’t consistently punish mismatches and switches. He doesn’t commit that many turnovers, again because he doesn’t pass, but when he’s out of it, you don’t feel his athleticism at all. He is a great spot-up shooter who mostly takes pull-ups.
In Game 1, the Rockets made their big second-half run when Green was resting, opting instead for a total abandonment of normal offense for a series of lineups built around Steven Adams and Tari Eason. Their half-court offense was horrible all night, toggling between Alperen Sengun laboring in the post or Green doing stuff like this:
Sengun had a good game, but there’s a hard ceiling on how good your offense can be if he’s tasked with creating all the shots. The Adams groups were not explicitly set up to score exclusively on offensive rebounds, but they may as well have been. They could only score at the rim, and they could only get the ball there by first missing a shot. That’s an alarming state for the two-seed to be in, at home in its first playoff game, and yet Houston might actually have won Game 1 had Ime Udoka not brought Green back in to finish, but he did.
He trusted Green to be better in Game 2, because the Rockets absolutely need him. With Fred VanVleet mostly responsible for dribbling the ball past half-court then spotting up, Green is the only guy on the team who can both create and—theoretically—make his own shot. If he isn’t doing that, Udoka has to either slide players up into more demanding roles than they’re capable of—if you think Green’s a poor passer, watch Jabari Smith Jr. anytime he gets the ball and you will see the worst tunnel vision in the whole league—or play neolithic hoops.
Green benefited from a reduced difficulty setting in Game 2, because Brandin Podziemski was limited with tummy trouble and Jimmy Butler suffered an ass injury in the first quarter. The going won’t be as easy as the series moves to San Francisco, and Warriors coach Steve Kerr can try out some different stuff to stop Green, but the Rockets’ immediate fortunes are tied to his. Which might be just as scary for Rockets fans as it is exciting for everyone else.
