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Referee Assignments
Thurs. May 14
L.A. Lakers @ Houston: M. McCutchen, T. Washington, M. Wunderlich
Los Angeles at Houston Preview
Game info: 9:30 pm EDT Thu May 14, 2009
TV: ESPN
By Chris Duncan
The shots stopped falling, the passes that worked in Game 4 were turnovers in Game 5, and every loose ball or whistle seemed to go the Los Angeles’ Lakers way.
Two days after one of the most stirring victories in franchise history, the Houston Rockets suffered one of their worst postseason defeats and now face elimination Thursday in Game 6 of their Western Conference semifinal series with the Lakers.
“We know it’s time to man-up or else it’s going to be golf time,” said forward Shane Battier, held to five points in Game 5 after scoring 23 in Houston’s 99-87 win Sunday.
The Lakers’ 118-78 win on Tuesday matched Houston’s most lopsided playoff loss. The Rockets say don’t count them out just yet, pointing to their propensity for bouncing back after embarrassing defeats.
Houston dropped 11 games by double-digits during the regular season and won the next game 10 times. The Rockets lost 95-84 to Dallas in their regular-season finale, then beat Portland 108-81 in their playoff opener.
“Our margin for error is very slim, so when you have foul trouble and a lot of turnovers it makes our job really tough,” Battier said. “But we’re going to keep shooting 3s and we’re going home and we’ve historically responded very well to double-digit losses this year. That’s our team.”
At this point, the series may hinge more on how the top-seeded Lakers play.
They came out flat and uninspired in Game 4, and the Rockets built a 29-point lead playing without Yao Ming, who broke his left foot the previous game. Kobe Bryant called the Lakers’ mindset for the game a “dumb mistake,” and Los Angeles left nothing to chance in Game 5, marching to a 25-point halftime lead.
The Lakers have been criticized for failure to sustain mental toughness throughout playoff series, and Bryant said he’ll demand that younger players come out focused in Game 6.
“Every game, you’ve got to rebuild your momentum,” he said. “It doesn’t carry over. You’ve got to re-establish what you’re trying to do out there on the floor. The energy and effort we played with (in Game 5) is not going to be enough on Thursday.”
Then again, it might be.
Without Yao, the Rockets are forced to use an undersized lineup, with 6-foot-6 Chuck Hayes starting at center. Lakers coach Phil Jackson started 7-footers Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum to take advantage.
Gasol scored 16 points and Bynum, mostly ineffective in the playoffs, added 14. Lamar Odom, who bruised his back in Game 4, came off the bench to score 10 points in 19 minutes and the Lakers scored 56 points in the paint.
“We can throw over the top,” Jackson said. “We don’t have to use penetration off the dribble when we’ve got that kind of size. We were effective right off the start.”
The Lakers also found a way to handle speedy point guard Aaron Brooks in Game 5, holding him to 14 points on 4-for-11 shooting. Brooks scored 34 points in Game 4, slicing through the Los Angeles defense for layups or hitting open 3s.
Brooks went 0-for-3 from 3-point range in Game 5, part of Houston’s dismal 5-for-29 night.
“We had active hands and active feet,” Jackson said. “We got back and helped each other defensively and made them make tougher passes.”
So how can Houston extend the series?
The first step is getting off to a good start. The team winning after the first quarter has won all 11 of their postseason games.
“That’s a strange stat everybody keeps throwing out there,” said Houston coach Rick Adelman. “I guess we better pay attention to it. That’s very important. We need to get into the game early.”
Adelman said his team played poor offense from the beginning of Game 5, even though they led 18-12 in the first six minutes. The Lakers finished the opening quarter with a 23-6 burst and the Rockets never challenged again.
“We made some shots early, but I didn’t like the way we were playing. It was fools’ gold,” Adelman said. “We need to have more movement and patience.”
Adelman dismissed the 40-point loss as an anomaly for the Rockets, and he expects a much better performance at the Toyota Center, where they’ve won 10 of their last 11 games.
“It’s very important for us to get our crowd into it and realize that the team that played (Tuesday) is not who we are,” he said. “We’ve got to come out and get ourselves ready to go at the start of the game.”
Referee Assignments
Thurs. May 14
L.A. Lakers @ Houston: M. McCutchen, T. Washington, M. Wunderlich
meaning? a 7 game?
Wunderlich can suck my ing !
I think LA ends it tonight. Houston is just too short handed and LA doesn't want denver sitting on their asses resting for too long. (and having extra time to study film)
small ball it's on you Artest, Brooks, Battier, and Barry
Live or die by the three
Honestly, I haven't the faintest clue as to which Laker team will show up. Really, I don't. I won't be a bit surprised if it goes 7 and if it does this Laker unit is made up entirely of' s.
It will be close...but I think it ends tonight.
It ends tonight for the Lakers. Rockets will win and the Lakers will forfeit game 7.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page...14&sportCat=nba
hey call it resilience; we call it something else.
The Houston Rockets weren't supposed to reach this stage. Weren't supposed to see a Game 6 against the Lakers. With a roster looking more like the set of "Nurse Jackie," they've found a way to do something practically no one thought was possible.
I'm not talking about winning Game 4 -- anyone who knows these Rockets well knows they believed they could win. But discovering who they really were as a squad? That came out of nowhere.
Shane Battier kept referring to the Rockets' 12-point win in Game 4 as a testament to the resiliency of this team.
Honestly, he was selling his team short.
The Rockets searched for an iden y in Tracy McGrady. Then they searched for one in Yao Ming. They found none. And it wasn't their fault because that's the M.O. of sports: Find yourself in your star players. The Rockets -- like all teams -- were conditioned to do this. But just like when peeling an onion, you have to dig through several layers to get to the core of a team. And those layers can make you cry.
Losses in back-to-back-to-back-to-back first rounds. Injury after injury after injury after injury in March and April. Never a full, healthy roster come playoff time, never a true opportunity to win … to find themselves. Tears.
But then it happened.
Ironically, it happened via injury. When team trainer Keith Jones forced Yao to reluctantly come off the court at the end of Game 3, only to find out later that the foot he was playing on during the entire fourth quarter was broken, the Houston Rockets finally experienced their epiphany.
Now, everyone knew the Lakers would bounce back and beat the Rockets handily in Game 5. That was as inevitable as Michael Vick's getting a reality show. But by then it was too late. The Lakers were exposed as being inconsistent. And the Rockets … well, they've finally figured out who they are and what they're made of.
Two stars down, the old Rockets would have called it in, gone through the motions, left themselves for dead. They would have conceded -- in their minds, without T-Mac and Yao, they would have given themselves only a Mine That Bird chance of winning.
But that was before anyone ever heard of Mine That Bird -- and before Ron Artest's arrival and Rafer Alston's departure. Until those last two things happened, the Rockets never knew who the team staring at them in the mirror was.
Now, in that mirror, they see a sense of pride, a sense of purpose. They see what everyone else was overlooking or failed to notice. They see self-regard, self-respect. They've found amour propre.
Aaron Brooks refused to die. Luis Scola refused to die. Battier refused to die. Chuck Hayes, Von Wafer, Kyle Lowry … all refused to die. No All-Star Games between them, no votes for MVP, no regular visits to the postgame podium. This is something we haven't seen before, not in a post-Hakeem Olajuwon Rockets team: a group of nonsuperstar players not willing to die when they have no reason to live.
To the outside world, once Yao went down, there was no reason for the Rockets to compete or prolong the inevitable. "You will never beat the Lakers now!" The Rockets' players heard it, too. And even if that's still the widely held belief heading into Game 6 Thursday, that Game 4 performance was the true measure of this Houston team. The Rockets had a built-in excuse to fold, and no one would have blamed them. They had every reason to think God was just continuing this sick joke on them and everyone knew the punch line.
They could have gone out as Dallas did.
But instead, they manned up better than any other team has during these NBA playoffs. And even off the heels of a 40-point beatdown in Game 5, the Rockets will walk away from this season knowing that talent and superstars are secondary to what this team is and will be about. That will make them extremely difficult to beat once the superstars return. Because the superstars, too, have seen the true character of this team.
Although we all thought the key ingredients to the Rockets were Yao and Tracy and Rafer and staying healthy, it turns out the key ingredient was an untapped sense of pride, which never would have been discovered had almost everything not been taken away from them. And even if Game 6 against the Lakers is their last game of the season, the Rockets will walk off the court knowing that whatever they set out to accomplish at the beginning of this season -- when a championship was their legitimate and realistic goal -- they surpassed that.
Win or lose, the Rockets have proven what needed to be proven. To us. To themselves.
As I said, they call it resilience. But really, it's something much, much deeper than that.
im a laker fan toonight !
Lakers blow out Rockets by 50, go on to sweep Nuggets by an average margin of 30 points, only to meet a Bron-less Cavaliers and take the trophy home hands down~!~ Lakers all the way~~!
Hope the jinxing from opponent team's fan works as well
If there's one thing the Lakers have been doing consistently well, it's closing out a series.
Lakers have been 4-0 in close-out games the last two years.
Rockets are a'goin fishin' tonight.
U suk and don't even think about calling yourself a Rocketsfan.
And you completely missed it.
someone got it
lame reverse Jinx...however have fun debating the merits of the reverse jinxes and the game. I'm off to Toyota Center.
lol toyota center
First game of the series I get to watch!...they better win
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