You really don’t appreciate a point guard until you don’t have one. Just ask the Houston Rockets, who lost to the Oklahoma City Thunder, 125-124, in double overtime on Tuesday in a game it felt like they would have won had Fred VanVleet been on the floor to organize composed, consistent offensive sets.
But they didn’t have VanVleet, and they’re not going to for the rest of the year due to his torn ACL. To whatever degree one game can be any sort of reliable future indicator, they’re going to need to figure this out.
First, some qualifiers:
- Despite their offense looking equals parts chaotic and cramped for the better part of the game, the Rockets still managed to convert enough tough buckets, and secure enough offensive rebounds (16!), to lead for most of the game against the defending champs. Alperen Sengun was out of his mind with 39 points. Kevin Durant made a bunch of highly contested shots look easy, as he does. Amen Thompson looked terrific getting downhill and initiating leveraged contact to create comfortable finishing space, especially when he was provided a runway. Jabari Smith Jr. made a number of high-stakes/bailout shots.
- The Rockets were playing against the best defense in the basketball world. Sure, Jalen Williams was out, but all that meant was more Cason Wallace, who is an absolute dog on the ball. Houston is not going to face this kind of pressure on a nightly basis, and as such, it surely won’t look this out of sorts moving forward.
- It was the first game of the season (this warrants constant repeating) and they’re trying to integrate a brand-new superstar in Durant, who likes the ball in particular places and in stationary positions that don’t necessarily lend themselves to full-floor space creation. The Rockets are not going to be a great movement offense and will, generally speaking, have to do their damage ugly — with sheer size and difficult individual shot-making.
Still, Houston turned the ball over on an abysmal 22% of its possessions (24 total) and scored just 109.7 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning the Glass, which would’ve ranked as the fourth-worst offense in the league last season. Starved for basically any breathing room all night, they found themselves operating out of a phone booth into which three people were seemingly crammed.
This is why you need a point guards. They relieve their teammates of pressure they’re generally not equipped to handle over the course of full possessions. They create initial advantages, forcing the defense into rotation out of pick-and-roll or just their own skillful ball-handling, and then the domino effect takes over as the defense finds itself, well, on defense.
Without a point guard to get the car out of the barn and onto a clear stretch of road, a defense like Oklahoma City can turn offensive and start to attack the space of secondary ball-handlers forced into primary positions.
Look how much trouble Houston has simply getting a regular possession started in the clip below. Sengun, a 7-foot center, is the initial ball-handler, but as soon as Alex Caruso presses up on him in the backcourt, he can’t get rid of it fast enough to Tari Eason. He looks totally overwhelmed by the pressure he’s facing and nearly loses his dribble before flinging a desperate pass backwards to Reed Sheppard, who finds himself pinned on the half-court line.
By the time Sheppard gets it back to Sengun 40 feet from the basket, the shot clock is at 10 seconds and they haven’t even started the possession. From there, nothing gets any easier. Watch how hard Durant has to fight just to catch the ball at the 3-point line with Caruso suffocating every inch of space and just four seconds to figure out a way to pull a shot out of thin air — which he does because he’s Kevin Durant, but this is not a shot even one of the greatest shot-makers in history can survive on consistently.
It’s true, this is why the Rockets got Durant. To make shots like this. Which he’s going to have to do plenty of on a Houston team that started two centers on Tuesday and generally lacks for shooters. Spacing is not going to be a luxury in Houston. Still, it can’t be this hard to initiate basic offense. These guys are fighting for their lives just to wind up with a 27% 3-point shooter flinging up a corner 3 as the shot clock is about to expire.
Sengun, as mentioned, was brilliant. And as big men go, he’s a supremely skilled ball-handler. But he’s not a point guard, and if you’re going to ask him to handle the ball and create advantages at the top of the offense against good defensive teams off the dribble, you’re going to end up with a lot of this.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Sheppard is supposed to be one of the guys to step in for VanVleet, and he was having genuine trouble even getting the ball past halfcourt cleanly.
Here again, with less than a minute to play in double overtime and the game tied at 122, Sheppard dribbles from side to side without ever creating any forward progress. Finally, he’s stuck 35 feet from the basket and has to lob a pass even farther from the basket to Durant, who is being mugged by Lu Dort. Turnover.
This was literally the first pass of the possession. We’re not talking about a situation where the ball moved side to side and a couple guys attacked closeouts and the OKC defense just kept rotating and moving its feet cutting it all off. This was the first pass. As an NBA team, if you can’t even get a possession started, you’re signing up for bailout shots at the end.
And again, Durant and Sengun are capable of making a lot of those. Durant can shoot over anyone and Sengun is a bull in a china shop against mismatches. The fact that they converted over 50% of their 40 combined shots in the opener, given the difficulty of their diet, bordered on miraculous. And the Rockets still functioned like a bottom-five offense.
It bears repeating they were playing one of the best defenses ever, and a lot of the credit goes to the Thunder. But what happens when Sengun and Durant aren’t rescuing these clunky possessions? It’s early, of course. Houston is going to be very good and can probably use a lot of the regular season to figure some of this stuff out without compromising too much playoff positioning.
But at the end of the day, barring a trade, the Rockets are without a natural point guard. And that could be a serious problem for a team that expects to contend for a championship.