Yao goes up against New Orleans/Oklahoma City’s PJ Brown on Saturday night in a frustrating game for the Rockets, who led by 8 points with about six minutes remaining in the game, but got blasted by the Hornets down the stretch. Playing without the injured Tracy McGrady, Yao scored 20 points, grabbed 14 rebounds and had 7 blocks in the 91-84 loss.

by John

SATURDAY, 11/5/05 – Recently whenever New Orleans has hit troubling times, Houston has been there to help. And I’m not only talking about Hurricane Katrina. I’m talking about the Rockets giving away games to the New Orleans Hornets last season, this preseason, and once again…Saturday night at Houston’s Toyota Center.

Houston and the Hornets played an ugly game against each other, but at least the Rockets had the game in hand in the fourth quarter leading 82-74 with 6:09 remaining. But then Houston’s offense shut down faster than the city’s freeways during a hurricane evacuation, or Houston Astros bats in a World Series. New Orleans/Oklahoma City (a.k.a. “NOK” for short) took advantage of Houston’s struggles, broke out of its own shooting slump, and blew past them on a 17-2 run to stun the Rocks once again, 91-84.

Yao was playing a great game, hitting 6-of-12 in the first three quarters for 16 points, and rejecting everything in sight (7 blocks overall, matching his career high). But he ran out of gas down the stretch (37 minutes of action, six minutes above his average) and missed 8 of his last ten shots. Jeff Van Gundy probably played Yao more minutes because of T-Mac’s absence, but it’s reasonable to wonder why JVG didn’t budget Yao’s minutes more wisely.

After Yao opened the game with an easy fallaway jumper in the lane to make it 2-0, it didn’t take long to see Houston’s offense go into disarray without Tracy McGrady, who we learned before the game will miss at least 3 weeks of action because of back spasms (click here for the story). Ouch! Hopefully the thought of last year’s 5-11 record to start the season isn’t surfacing in any Rocket players’ heads today.

The Hornets’ speed of rookie Chris Paul, Speedy Claxton, and J.R. Smith were too much to handle in the first quarter. NOK led 19-8 midway through the first quarter getting lots of easy layups and dunks, and it didn’t look like the game was even going to be close.

But somehow Houston battled back and managed to trail only 27-23 at the end of the first quarter, thanks to Houston’s own speed merchant Rafer Alston scoring 7 points in the quarter and doing some neutralizing of NOK’s speed on defense.

2nd quarter:

At the opening of the second quarter, the Hornets’ speed started to burn the Rockets again. NOK went on a 7-1 run to take a 34-24 lead, at which time Van Gundy called a timeout to rip into his players. It wasn’t pretty.

It got a little worse after the timeout, with NOK taking a 40-29 lead. But Stromile Swift started doing some good things offensively, like hitting a long jumper at the top of the key (which surprised me that he had that kind of range), then making a whirling dervish move on the baseline to score with about 7 minutes remaining to make it 40-31.

About 30 seconds later after Jon Barry was fouled and went to the line to shoot his free throws, it was great to see the entire Houston bench trying to energize the comeback by getting up and clapping as Barry cut the deficit to 41-33. It looked like a college game there for a second.

The Hornets cooled off and the Rockets continued their comeback. Yao made a great spin move in the lane, scored and was fouled. After hitting the penalty free throw, they only trailed 45-42.

Then on the next possession, Jon Barry threw a sweet pass to Yao as he ran down the lane past NOK’s Chris Anderson on a semi-fast break, and Yao laid it in with the left hand to make it 45-44 with 2:54 remaining.

Then right before halftime, Jon Barry pulled a veteran move on J.R. Smith by drawing a foul on a desperation 3-point attempt right after crossing the half-court line. After making 2 of 3 free throws, the game was amazingly tied at 52-52 even though Houston shot 41.7% compared to NOK’s 53.7%.

3rd quarter:

Yao was doing a great job on the boards and blocking shots. NOK continued to challenge Yao by going to the rack, and Yao defended the rim beautifully. For example, in the middle of the third quarter, Desmond Mason went up for a dunk and Yao blocked his shot directly to the floor. There was a scrum for the loose ball, with Yao on the floor with Mason trying to get possession. After the ref blew the whistle for a jump ball, Yao was trying to get off Mason, but it wasn’t fast enough for him: Mason intentionally lifted himself up before Yao could gain his balance, lifting Yao off the floor and almost on to his head!

Juwan Howard didn’t take kindly to Maso treating Yao that way and came over and pushed him, starting a skirmish that got everyone in a ruckus. After things calmed down a bit, Yao was quite the gentleman by acknowledging “bygones” with Mason before the jump ball.

After Houston’s Derek Anderson hit two consecutive treys, the Rockets led 69-61 with 1:54 remaining in the third. In Anderson, it looked like the Rockets finally had someone in the backcourt step up and fill the scoring void for T-Mac, and that this veteran team was going to pull away as everyone expected. After all, NOK had made only 2-of-21 of their shots in the quarter. However, Houston only led 71-65 after making 8-of-22 shots in the period.

4th quarter:

As mentioned earlier, Houston led 82-74 with about 6 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter, but fell apart and couldn’t buy a bucket the rest of the way, getting outscored 17-2. Yao missed 8 shots in a row during the stretch run, Houston only made 3-of-16 shots in the final quarter, and got outscored 26-13 by a revived NOK team.

That automatic fallaway jumper that Yao hit at the beginning of the game just would not fall in the fourth quarter. Clearly, Yao’s accuracy plummeted as the game wore on, but after grabbing 14 rebounds and blocking 7 shots, what 7’6” player would NOT be a little fatigued. It will be interesting if Jeff Van Gundy has anything to say about how he budgeted Yao’s minutes in this game, leaving nothing in Yao’s tank for crunch time..

To see the boxscore from the game, click here.

To read the Houston Chronicle’s story of the game, click here.

John
john@YaoMingFanClub.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 5th, 2005 at 11:59 pm and is filed under vs. New Orleans. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.