The Houston Rockets lost their last three games, and have dropped five of their last 10 overall. But, they’re still clinging onto the 8th seed out West, and they’re still a team who’s overachieved to get there after being hosed out of Pau Gasol to start the season. If they end up making the playoffs by year’s end, with a first year coach navigating his team through the competitive Western Conference, they’ll still be a feel-good story in this year’s NBA too. In an effort to make that a season’s end reality, the Rockets held a players only meeting this week to talk about effort.
This from Fox Sports Houston yesterday afternoon:
Players were allowed to air their grievances and make suggestions. Samuel Dalembert said it was an open, honest discussion among a group of players that care about getting better.
“I just felt that we had to have a talk,” Dalembert said. “Coach watched film with us and the film looked terrible. We had to do it because the film was horrible. Every single possession on the film something was wrong.”
Dalembert said he, Kyle Lowry, Luis Scola and others spoke during the meeting and Dalembert included critique of himself during the discussion.
I can’t classify something like this as a bad move by any stretch. In the professional world of NBA basketball, it’s refreshing in some ways to hear that the players fans pay to come watch play actually do care if they win or not. Whether this meeting has any lasting effect on winning remains to be seen though obviously.
Following the meeting, the Rockets lost to the Clippers in Overtime, but they did play hard enough to take a playoff team to OT I guess. On the flip side, Coach Kevin McHale is also right when he was quoted as saying yeah, but talk is cheap, essentially.
“I know one thing,” said coach Kevin McHale. “Talking doesn’t win games. I told our guys we have to get past working on effort in practice. If it’s March 4 and you’re working on effort in practice, you’ve got some issues. It has to be all execution at that point. We’re trying to mature as a team and get to that point.”
I’d give Dalembert and Lowry the benefit of the doubt though at this point. Part of trying to be a mature team is also having young guys like Lowry step up and be a leader, which he is doing here along with Sammy D and Scola. I personally hope it helps them string some wins together, I’d like to see the Rockets in the playoffs for some reason. We’ll find out in a couple months if they’ll play hard enough to get there.
