Time to Refine the Game Plan
Not many teams make this big of a switch to their roster midway through the year. It wasn’t necessarily the fact that they flipped the entirety of their roster around like the 2018 Cleveland Cavaliers, but their style of play was making a large shift.
After a 4-team trade which sent Clint Capela to the Atlanta Hawks, and brought the Rockets Robert Covington, Houston was fully ready to buy-in to a unique style of play.
A style of play which saw Russell Westbrook thrive from the jump, averaging 31.7 points per game, off 54.5% from the field.
The 3-point shooting which spaced the arc, created a runway for Westbrook to absolutely fly to the rim. On top of that, teams were struggling to find ways to match-up with the oddly assembled team.
The majority of teams first tried to guard Westbrook with their centers, due to the fact that he is the weakest 3-point threat on the roster. That allowed Russ to blow by guys who were six-to-eight inches taller than him, and considerably slower and less mobile.
Like anything though, every strategy and game plan contains weak-points. Obviously the lack of height is one of them, but the lack of ball movement can also be exposed.
As every coach will be, this gives Mike D’Antoni an opportunity to devise a game plan, and refine what seemed to already be working.
We likely won’t see a complete system change from what we saw before the break, but the ability to work out little kinks, especially for a roster who didn’t get a training camp together, will help immensely.
Surrounding Westbrook and Harden with shooters is the perfect way to maximize their skill sets, and with two months off, it will be interesting to see if Coach D’Antoni can create the ideal system for his team.
