Less than five minutes into the Rockets’ game two matchup with the Portland Trail Blazers, Dwight Howard headed to the bench, drenched in sweat. He wasn’t in foul trouble, he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t playing poorly. He’d made all six of his shots and scored all 13 of Houston’s points. He was just tired. Tired from beating up on Robin Lopez.
Howard returned less than two minutes later (game time, not, you know, real time) and picked up right where he’d left off, finishing the frame with a franchise playoff record 19 points on 8-of-9 shooting (he even hit all three of his free throws). By the end of the first half, he’d scored 25, pulled down eight boards (four offensive), generated all three of the highlights above (and plenty more that didn’t make the cut) and chucked in an assist for good measure. He finished the night with 32 points, 14 rebounds and four blocks. In short, he had himself a game.
And the Rockets still lost by seven. Why? Because LaMarcus Aldridge had himself an even bigger one.
Following on the heels of a franchise record of his own (46 points in game one), Aldridge poured in 43 points in 36 minutes of work last night, shooting 18-of-28 from the floor and tacking on eight rebounds and three blocks. After two games, he’s now averaging 44.5 points, 13 rebounds and 2.5 blocks and shooting 59.3 percent from the floor for the series. Behind Aldridge, Portland looks like the club that started the season 17-3. Meanwhile, heading to Oregon for games three and four, Houston looks doomed.
Viewed through the lens of modern NBA analytics, Aldridge’s game one explosion made sense. He got the bulk of his points around the basket and at the charity stripe, hit his only two threes and picked up the lion’s share of his 14 misses on mid-range looks—going 3-for-12 on two pointers 10 to 24 feet from the tin.
Analytics, and the people who trust in them, assert that mid-range shots are wasteful; converted at a rate not much better than threes, but worth a point less. Rockets GM Daryl Morey is quite a prominent example of one such trusting person, and the club he runs reflects that. The Rockets heaved more threes than any other team in the league this season (26.6 per game) and ranked dead last in mid-range looks. Houston is so opposed to long twos they took 604 less of them on the season than the next-most mid-range-averse team in the Association, the Philadelphia 76ers—that’s 7.3 less per game.
The way Aldridge lit the Rockets up in game two was, then, a little ironic. Sure, he still beat Houston up inside, going 5-for-6 in the restricted area, but he did his finest work in that oft-disparaged slab of real estate between the paint and the arc.
Aldridge took 19 mid-range attempts in the game and converted an astounding 13 of them. The Rockets had no answer for him: Send Terrence Jones out to contest those looks and Aldridge took it to the hole; use Howard or Omer Asik to push him away from the basket and he’d coolly cash a jimmy.
Howard may have racked up more crowd-pleasing highlights, but if Houston can’t find an answer for Aldridge in game three and four, they may be looking at a sweep.