Yao contests a shot from Boris Diaw Wednesday night in a 102-91 loss. The Rockets were down 22 points, but Yao scored 13 points in the third quarter to help get the Rockets back in the game. Click here for the game story. Click here for more photos.

The Rockets blew a golden opportunity to come back from a 22-point deficit against the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday night. It would have been their second greatest comeback in franchise history, but because of poor decision-making and the fact that Phoenix had run them ragged, they fell apart in the fourth quarter and the Suns cruised to a 102-91 victory.

The first half was awful with the Rockets turning the ball over numerous times and shooting only 37%. Meanwhile, the Suns went to the line 19 times in the first half alone, making 17 of those attempts, and held a 57-40 lead at halftime.

One of the main problems was that T-Mac was settling for too many jump shots. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t taking it to the hole more. Everyone knows he’s struggling from the outside and that he needs to be more aggressive and drive to the basket more, but for some reason he kept shooting and missing from outside, and no one corrected him.

Jeff Van Gundy said before this season that one of the Rocket’s pitfalls last season was “Basketball IQ” issues. Well, I think T-Mac’s insistence to continually shoot from the outside ranks as one of those IQ issues.

In the fourth quarter, McGrady did make a three-pointer and a long two-pointer consecutively to give the Rockets a 74-72 lead to cap a 34-15 run to put them ahead for the first time all night. Before those shots, he had shot 4-of-19 from the field. But down the stretch, he again settled for three-pointers, even after Steve Novak had checked into the game for 3-point shooting purposes and had nailed his previous three-pointer. Dumb!

After the Suns had put the game away 98-82 with 1:38 remaining, T-Mac padded his stats by hitting three treys in a row, but the damage had already been done and the Rockets lost.

To cap off a strange evening, for some reason the Rockets broadcast crew gave T-Mac “Player of the Game” honors. Maybe that’s because no one else had scored over 20 points (T-Mac finished with 23) — Yao didn’t finish with that great of numbers (18 points on 6-of-11 shooting) because of foul trouble. But c’mon! T-Mac essentially shot the Rockets out of the game. And you have to give credit to Yao for scoring 13 points in the third quarter to get them back into the game.

Then Rocket broadcaster Matt Bullard had the intelligence to say McGrady put up a courageous effort, or something like that, because he had been injured the night before and was probably playing with pain.

Excuse me, but if this had been any other sports market, the media wouldn’t be so kind and would have been asking instead, “If your hurt so badly that you can’t even shoot right, why are you playing, risking further injury, and hurting your team?” or “Adjust your game to compensate for your injury – stay away from your weakness, like outside shooting.”

Finally, the broadcasters said the Rockets had run out of gas because they had played back-to-back games, and that this loss was expected. But the fact of the matter is that the Rockets had a chance to steal one, and because of basketball IQ issues, they let it slip away.

Now there were other reasons why they lost. Maybe because they had attempted 35 three-pointers and made only 10 before T-Mac’s meaningless 3 three-pointers at the end of the game, which may demonstrate the following: when the Rockets are chunking them up with tremendous frequency trying to make a comeback, or trying to score more points to keep up with the Suns, thus throwing them out of their rhythm, I can buy that. But I don’t believe in letting them off the hook by serving up old clichés like a “courageous effort,” “he was hurting,” or “they ran out of gas.” Some of it may be true, but don’t cite it as the main reason why they lost. It’s weak. And I think Van Gundy would agree.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 29th, 2006 at 11:59 pm and is filed under vs. Phoenix. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.