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Bench Warmer
Of all the moves in Rafer Alston's repertoire, this was the rare one that he pulled off away from the court.
It's called the Rip Job, the time-honored, always-risky move where one calls out one's teammates for being selfish. Alston pulled it out of his bag of tricks in his hometown Monday night, trashing the Houston Rockets following their 104-98 loss to the New York Knicks.
"We played selfish tonight," Alston said, beginning a monologue that repeatedly came back to that opening statement. "They were able to capitalize off our selfishness, and we have to decide whether we're going to play one-on-one, or we're going to pass the ball to each other and play team ball."
With Yao Ming missing a second straight game because of a sore knee, the Rockets played their 31st consecutive game without their preferred starting lineup of Yao Ming, Tracy McGrady, Luis Scola, Alston and Ron Artest.
They expect to have that starting five back Wednesday night when they begin a stretch of playing 10 of their next 12 at home, but a return to health is not all it'll take to fix the upset chemistry in the locker room.
That'll only get better when two key players -- McGrady and Artest -- start to consistently buy into the key team offensive concept of moving the ball around.
The Rockets were the 22nd team to take a lead into the fourth quarter against New York, and on 21 previous occasions the Knicks came out on the losing end of the final score. But New York scored 16 of the game's final 20 points, and things actually started to go bad for the Rockets after back-to-back buckets by McGrady, the first a difficult 3-pointer with 6:14 remaining that electrified the crowd and gave Houston a 94-88 lead with 5:25 left.
The Knicks scored the next six points, McGrady missed his next four shots -- all 3-pointers -- and Artest had three 3-point misses of his own in the final two minutes to fuel the collapse.
One member of the Rockets pointed out that the team's victory the previous day in Detroit had been fool's gold because Houston had triumphed despite getting away from the passing and ball movement that have always been hallmarks of Rick Adelman's most successful teams. And one member of the Knicks said the Rockets seemed especially tired down the stretch.
Not coincidentally, the victory in Detroit coincided with the return of McGrady (six straight games) and Artest (nine of 10) from prolonged injury absences.
"One day you have this guy, the next day you don't have this, so the offense changes, the game plan changes, but one thing that shouldn't change is playing hard, playing together, playing with some passion," Alston said.
Asked to define what he meant by selfishness, Alston continued:
"Not playing with energy on both ends, being lazy, not running up and down the court, not sharing the basketball, not setting side screens. Just simple things," he said, not singling anyone out by name. "It's to a man. We got away from that for 6-7 games, then tonight we got back to playing selfish basketball."
At this point a year ago, the Rockets were only six games over .500 (26-20) but were three victories into what would become a 22-game winning streak -- the second-longest in NBA history.
Expectations were raised this year with the arrival of Artest and the hope that both Yao and McGrady could stay relatively injury-free, and being four games ahead of last year's pace -- with their next seven games against team with records of .500 or worse, five at home and two on the road (Memphis, Milwaukee) -- it is now time for the Rockets to be jelling with each other rather than yelling at one another.
This should, after all, be a championship-contending team, no?
"That's the million-dollar question; we don't know what the potential is for this team to be," Alston said. "I don't think we learned anything from winning 22 games; we're not playing nearly the way we were. We won 22 playing a passionate style of ball. We played together, we played hard, we played intense."
But on this night -- a night that should serve as a warning that the Rockets need to get on the same page quickly, or consider a major move at the trading deadline -- the most energy, passion and intensity was what was coming out of Alston's mouth afterward.
Ten games over .500 or not, Alston's words are far from reassuring for a team still a long ways away from being where they need to be -- physically and mentally -- to be a credible threat come playoff time.
