After the Rockets uncharacteristically shot 15.9 percent from three-point range in their 101-92 Game 7 loss to the Warriors on Monday, head coach Mike D’Antoni both laughed off the notion Houston is overly reliant on the three while doubling down on his trigger-happy offensive system.
Mike D’Antoni literally laughed off the idea the Rockets shoot too many three-pointers
Well, we know which way D’Antoni’s leaning on the three-point spectrum.
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Does a game like this make you lose some confidence in relying on three-point shooting?
D’Antoni: [incessant laughter] “No, because the other team’s doing it. It would be different if they were, no not at all. That’s what you do. That’s where the game’s going. Now, I lost confidence in, you know, we should have made some more. But hey, no, I don’t lose confidence in that. We’ve got the right formula. We’ve just gotta execute it and do a little bit better. It would be nice if they’d help out a little bit, but it seems like they’re not. So, we’ll get better.
The Rockets shot 7-of-44 from three-point range in their eventual loss to the Warriors. At one point, they missed an NBA playoff record 27 straight three-point attempts. But this is what the D’Antoni Rockets do. They isolate, penetrate, kick out and shoot threes. They live and die by the formula that won them 65 regular season games, that got them past the Timberwolves and Jazz with relative ease, and that got them one game away from their first NBA Finals appearance since the Hakeem Olajuwon era.
Houston just needed to hit a few threes. The worst possible thing was to miss 37. D’Antoni admitted, it didn’t work out this time. Those missed threes were the difference.
“But if we miss a few layups, I don’t hear anyone saying, ‘Oh, quit settling for layups. Take threes.’ You know, it’s just the way we play and we didn’t have it,” D’Antoni said. “I thought we had good looks, obviously not everyone was good, neither was theirs. But they just made a higher percentage. We did a pretty good job at the turnovers. We did everything well except they out-shot us. They were 16-for-39, we were 7-of-44. That’s kind of the tell of it. When they make their runs, we have to make the threes to keep them at bay, and we didn’t do it.”
I guess we know which way the Rockets are headed with respect to the trey ball next year.
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