Check out where PJ Tucker is on this drive. And he goes right in the middle of the paint for a potential rebound. Look at the 4 Golden State players surrounding him, there is no way he should be able to get the ball here. But yet Tucker fights for the rebound and eventually gets the foul. Right here, as the shot is up, PJ is all the way out at the three point line. But great effort to get to the paint and win the battle against 3 opposing big men.
Plays like these may not be mentioned when summarizing the Rockets win in game 3, but the offensive rebounding was one key factor that secured the victory for Houston.
And the rest of the story? Let me break it down for you. What up everybody my name is Stefan and this is Heat Check. Let’s get into it.
James Harden is finally forcing the issue inside on a consistent basis. He is getting to his floater range and in this game he was able to hit that shot.
He showed that he can go past anyone off the dribble, so there is absolutely no reason why he should settle for contested 3s. He still had quite a few of those. And looking at the last one that he made, the dagger late in the game, people are probably going to forget the terrible shots that he took, but they are a problem.
And the most obvious example of that was this situation where he had a wide open midrange jumper, but blindly following the analytics, Harden starts stepping back giving Thompson some time to get back and contest, and getting himself into a more difficult shot position.
Anyway Houston will take the good with the bad on this 41 point eruption for the beard when his team needed it the most.
Eric Gordon continues to be consistently great for the Rockets, and while many people will point out the threes, which admittedly he was on fire from downtown, I love his aggressiveness and pushing the ball to the basket always looking to penetrate the defense, especially in transition.
Right here, this is after a made basket, he gets the ball at half court, and turns on the jets, going straight past a great defender in Klay Thompson.
And again, in between 3 defenders, Gordon finds the way to the rim. He is playing with great pace in this series.
On the other end of the court however, for the third consecutive game the Rockets can’t find an answer for Kevin Durant.
This time he exploded for 46 points. And the crazy thing is that when Houston decided to trap Durant, Iguodala made his shots. Seeing this, I thought that this series is gonna be over soon.
However fortunately for Harden and the gang, Steph Curry had a terrible night.
Honestly this wasn’t too much to do with the defense on him, rather than just him being off in this game. He got some good looks which normally he knocks down, but even more jarring were all the missed layups, and I guess you’ve all seen it by now- the missed dunk at the end of the game. So my point is- I definitely don’t expect this to happen in game 4 as well.
So Houston comes back from the dead and now I feel like the confidence is pretty high for them, seeing that they can hang with the Champs after those 2 initial losses where things looked pretty bad for them.
Now it’s getting extremely interesting and I am already looking forward to another do or die game in this epic matchup.
That’s it for now if you liked this video, subscribe and hit the notification bell so that you don’t miss my future in depth analysis. Talk to you in the next one. Peace out.
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