Rockets hire Adelman

He's a retread, but as retreads go Rick Adelman is perfectly serviceable. I'm still not exactly sure how exactly the wheels came off of the Jeff Van Gundy bus, but given that they did, we could have done far worse. Hope you have better luck in the playoffs than Van Gundy did, Rick.

Richard Justice has a fairly measured take of the situation. While I tend to agree with him that the root cause of the Rocket's plateauing is more one of personnel than coaching, I have to quibble with this:

[Rockets owner Les] Alexander's problem is that he has some bad ideas about what wins in the NBA. After four years of listening to Van Gundy preach rebounding and defense, Alexander apparently wants more points and more excitement.

He might be hoping that more points will lure fans into the expensive seats at tipoff. Never mind that these NBA playoffs have again proved rebounding and defense win.

All those high-flying teams -- Phoenix, Golden State and Denver -- are watching San Antonio and Utah slug their way through the Western Conference finals. Of the NBA's 13 highest-scoring teams, just one -- Utah at No. 6 -- is still in the playoffs.

This is a bit disingenuous, since one of those high-flying teams got hosed by the league in the aftermath of Robert Horry's Australian-rules-football foul on Steve Nash in Game 4. Had the Suns been at full strength for Game 5, they might well be the ones going against Utah in the conference finals now. To be sure, Justice's point is correct in general, and Phoenix does rebound and play defense well. But those things are not incompatible with a high-powered offense (see, e.g., Lakers, Showtime era), and to ignore the external factor that helped knock the Suns out this year is just wrong.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on May 23, 2007 to Other sports