The Houston Rockets celebrated Christmas in style, delivering an overwhelming and dominant outing in a 119-96 thrashing of the Los Angeles Lakers on Thursday.
Amen Thompson led six Rockets in double figures with 26 points in the win, which ended a brutal six-game road trip — three overtime losses plus a 20-point blowout at the hands of the woeful Clippers — on a strong note to improve to 18-10 on the season. Luka Dončić scored a team-high 25 points for the Lakers, but also committed six of their 16 turnovers in a game L.A. never led, and in which Dončić, LeBron James and Co. only briefly even appeared competitive.
Advertisement
Here are three takeaways from the Rockets’ commanding performance at Crypto.com Arena:
So, about that Lakers defense …
After consecutive blowout losses to the Clippers and Suns, L.A. head coach JJ Redick offered a curt reply to an inquiry as to whether his Lakers — who entered Christmas ranked 25th in defensive efficiency — had shown enough of a willingness to dig in and grind it out on the less glamorous end of the floor:
L.A. brought a similar flavor of indifference for much of its Christmas Day matchup with Houston. The Lakers repeatedly allowed Rockets ball-handlers to beat them at the point of attack, get into the paint and generate good look after good look, seemingly whenever and wherever they wanted:
Houston barely needed five minutes of game time to build a double-figure lead that it would never relinquish, ending the opening frame with 37 points on 24 possessions — a torrid 154.2 offensive rating. For reference, the best offense in the NBA, the Denver Nuggets, scores 125.6 points-per-100.
Advertisement
“The two words of the day were ‘effort’ and ‘execution,’” Redick said after the game. “I feel like when we’ve done both of those things at a high level, we’ve been a good basketball team, and when we haven’t, we’re a terrible basketball team. And tonight, we were a terrible basketball team. And that started, legitimately, right away.”
When the Lakers briefly made a push midway through the second quarter, cutting the deficit to four at 48-44 following 3-pointers by Dončić and Jarred Vanderbilt, the Rockets calmly stuck to their guns, scored 15 points in the next three minutes and pushed the lead back to 10 at halftime. After the Rockets opened the third quarter with buckets on four straight possessions, Redick shifted tactics and dialed up a zone, which resulted in a pair of stops … which Houston promptly rendered irrelevant by grabbing offensive rebounds, scoring second-chance points and extending its lead even further.
Redick rifled through his Rolodex in search of different combinations that might offer a level of physicality and defensive activity that could short-circuit Houston’s smoothly operating machine. The combo of Vanderbilt and Marcus Smart helped key an 11-4 second-quarter run that constituted L.A.’s best basketball of the night; a unit flanking Dončić and whisper-quiet center Deandre Ayton with Vanderbilt, Smart, gap-plugging connector Jake LaRavia (one that had played just 10 possessions together all season prior to Thursday) showed intermittent sparks.
For the most part, though, the Lakers’ Christmas fizzle looked remarkably similar to their Emirates NBA Cup quarterfinals loss to the San Antonio Spurs: a team top-heavy with scoring skill but light on size, athleticism and defensive steel proving unable — or unwilling — to hang with a younger, stronger, more physical and more relentless opponent.
Advertisement
“We don’t care enough right now,” Redick said. “That’s the part that bothers you a lot. We don’t care enough to, like, do the things that are necessary. We don’t care enough to be a professional. We had it. We had it. I always say this about culture, I always say this about a team being a functioning organism: It can change like that. We don’t have it right now.”
What the Lakers do have, in Dončić, James and Austin Reaves (who sat out the second half with what the Lakers called left calf soreness, a worrying note considering he just missed three games with a calf strain) is enough high-end scoring and playmaking to produce a top-flight offense. If they can’t provide a higher class of resistance against similarly skilled opponents, though, that won’t be enough — especially not if the goal is to make a deep postseason run in this Western Conference.
“It’s a matter of making the choice, and too often, we have guys who don’t want to make that choice,” Redick said. “And it’s pretty consistent who those guys are. I told the guys: Saturday’s practice is going to be uncomfortable. The meeting is going to be uncomfortable. I’m not doing another 53 games like this.”
Possession is nine-tenths of the law
Coming into Christmas Day, the Rockets were the NBA’s sixth-best team at winning the possession battle on a night-to-night basis, according to analysis by Jared Dubin at Last Night in Basketball, averaging three more offensive trips per game than their opponents. They pressed that advantage early and often Thursday, pulling down four offensive rebounds against some lackadaisical Lakers boxouts and forcing six turnovers in the first quarter alone.
Advertisement
That allowed them to take five more shots than L.A. in the opening stanza — a key factor in the Rockets opening that early double-digit lead and keeping the Lakers at arm’s length.
The Rockets finished with nearly as many offensive rebounds (17) as the Lakers had defensive rebounds (18) and monster edges in second-chance points (24-10), points off turnovers (23-11), points scored per possession in transition (1.33 to 1.13) and total field-goal attempts (90-77). Getting that many more bites at the apple, and capitalizing on them so effectively, is how the Rockets can shrug off 25 from Luka and the Lakers shooting 50.6% as a team overall — and how a Houston team that takes fewer 3-pointers per game than any other squad in the NBA can still boast one of the league’s most potent and efficient attacks.
Many hands make light work
When they’re at their best, the Rockets come at you in waves on the offensive end. It’s Thompson (26 points on 12-for-19 shooting with five assists) repeatedly getting downhill into the paint, and Alperen Şengün (14 points, 12 rebounds, four assists) meanspiritedly pirouetting his way into all manner of infuriating flip shots and needle-threading drop-offs, and Kevin Durant (25 points on 8-for-14 shooting, eight assists) barely seeming to break a sweat as he gets to his preferred spots in the midrange or pops a trail 3 in an unsuspecting defender’s eye.
When they’re really scary, it’s because those headliners have help: Jabari Smith Jr. (16 points on nine shots) drilling jumpers spotting up and running off pindowns, Reed Sheppard (13 points, 5-for-10 from the floor) snaking the pick-and-roll to get to CP3-style elbow pull-ups in rhythm, and Tari Eason — an absolute menace on both ends of the court, just fully Grinching it up — ripping and running and terrorizing.
On some nights, the lack of a proper half-court organizer of a point guard will rear its ugly head; on others, though, the sheer tonnage of Houston’s athleticism, ferocity and talent will dispense with any such concerns. On those nights, these Rockets can straight up run you out of your gym. Ask the Lakers. They can tell you all about it.
