James Harden and the Houston Rockets come into the Garden to face the Knicks tonight in a game that should be very interesting to watch. Former Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni has a team that actually embraces his coaching philosophy, which means that they run – a lot. And shoot threes – a lot. However, like D’Antoni’s other famous teams, they also do not play much defense, although part of that is the fact that their starting backcourt is James Harden and Eric Gordon and their starting power forward is Ryan Anderson. All three players are poor defenders at this point in their respective careers.
The Rockets played (and lost) last night to the Cavaliers and Harden is playing on a bad ankle and Trevor Ariza (one of the few Rockets known for his defense) was injured via a head-to-head collision with Tristan Thompson, so we can only hope that the Rockets are a bit fatigued tonight. Sadly, Jeff Hornaceck thought that the Knicks looked fatigued last night, which makes no sense since their previous game was on Saturday and they made a point of reducing Joakim Noah’s minutes with the back-to-back in mind (always good to be managing a player’s minutes in year one of a four year deal). So I don’t know what’s up with that.
The Rockets’ defense is so bad that I’d like to believe that the Knicks would have a chance of winning this one by scoring a lot of points. Hopefully the Rockets don’t score a lot more than the Knicks.
Let’s go, Knicks!