Yao Ming comes over defensively to help Shane Battier defend against Denver’s Carmelo Anthony taking it to the hoop Saturday night. Yao finished with 22 points on 9-of-18 shots, and grabbed 13 boards in a rare 109-81 blowout against a Nugget team that has now shot below 40% for three straight games. Click here for more photos from the game.

For all of us who tuned into the Rockets game Saturday night against the Nuggets to see if they would crash-and-burn in the game’s final minutes…well, we’ll all have to wait until Monday night when the Rockets play the Clippers in LA.

Having lost 6 in a row, the Rockets came out like a caged animal and opened huge 20+ point leads against a poor-shooting Nugget team. Although Denver came into the game 9-4, they had shot less than 40% their last two games, and aren’t really as good as their record indicates. They made it 3 games in a row Saturday night, making only 35.4% of their shots in a 109-81 loss to the Rockets.

The core of their offense, Allen Iverson and Carmelo Anthony, made only 15-of-38 shots to score 35 of their 81 points. So it’s really hard to tell just how well the Rockets will fare once some real pressure is applied to their defense. But the Rockets will take the ‘W’ any way they can get it to get their record back to 7-7.

It was clear the Rockets were going to go all out to stop their 6-game losing streak, showing lots of energy and resolve to build a lead so big that no team could really blow. It’s just too bad it took this long for a sense of urgency to set in.

Tracy McGrady was aggressive going to the hole, and his shooting percentage reflected it, making 13-of-23 shots for 35 points. Not intentionally wanting to be a party-pooper, I still think he fell in love with too many outside shots. Everything he shot close seemed to go in, so I think that emboldened him to take four 3-pointers (he missed three) and take three other unnecessary jump shots.

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Raymond has translated an article that Titan Sports’ Wang Meng wrote after interviewing Yao Ming about how the coaching change has dramatically changed how things get done at Toyota Center before games. One word of caution: this writer sometimes has quoted Yao for saying some almost unbelievable things, but this story sounds very believable to me.

It’s clear that Rick Adelman is an “old school” players’ coach whose pre-game preparation doesn’t stand up to Jeff Van Gundy’s. There probably aren’t very many coaches who could match JVG’s control freak-ism. So I don’t have too much of a problem with coaches who don’t spend as much time obsessing as JVG did. I think too much obsessing can make a team tight. But it’s obvious this season, by looking at the product on the court, there is very little dedication to defense, and that the pendulum may have swung too far the other way. Adelman is clearly letting the players do what they want more than JVG would have ever dreamed.

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