Houston Rockets Drop-Kicked By San Antonio Spurs 110-98

After a couple of days off, the Houston Rockets were back in action after a quite impressive win over the Oklahoma City Thunder Sunday afternoon.

By the way, it’s great to know that our team is has a perfect record on national television.

As you know, in past seasons, the few opportunities we’d get the widespread exposure, we’d fail miserably when all eyes were on us.

Past Rockets’ teams within the last couple of seasons would do better when they were out of the spotlight but this current team embraces such a position.

And there’s no problem with that.

The more people that are aware of the Rockets and what a darn good basketball team they have, the better off they are.

Any way, the Rockets faced the San Antonio Spurs tonight on the road as well as Friday but at their home court.

I’d liken this to a mini-playoff rehearsal, getting these teams geared up for what it’s going to be like once the postseason commences.

That’s what I’m talking about!

The 1st quarter is what you’d expect out of a match up like this — tighter than a drum.

It was bucket-for-bucket pretty much until toward the end of the 1st where the Rockets took a nine-point lead with 1:19 left after a James Harden layup, scoring his 13th point of the night.

The Rockets continued to battle until the end of the quarter where they led the Spurs 33-32.

At the start of the 2nd quarter, the Rockets did work to take a brief six-point lead after a Josh Smith three-pointer at the 10:03 mark but the Spurs battled back until the game was tied at 49-all via a Tony Parker reverse lay-in with 3:39 left.

The Rockets were able to hang tough enough to trail by four at the half, 57-53.

But it was the 3rd quarter where the bottom of this game completely fell out.

The defense on Parker became non-existent as he was able to get anything and everything that he wanted, including getting his teammates involved if his shots weren’t falling.

I apparently thought that Jason Terry and Pablo Prigioni were two guys up to the task but all I saw were two 37-year-old guards completely dumbfounded and defenseless to the task at hand.

Yes, Cinderella’s carriage had literally turned into a pumpkin at that point.

By the end of the third, the Rockets trailed the Spurs 85-71, a 14-point deficit staring them in the face and had been outscored 28-18.

It didn’t get much better after that either.

By the 6:16 mark in the 4th quarter, the changing of the guard occurred, calling off the dogs and inserting their reserves.

Our bench was gutsy to play as hard as they did and even cut their deficit back to 14 points after a Joey Dorsey layup with 2:34 left.

But that’s as close as they would get.

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K.J. McDaniels had a couple of passionate blocks on layup attempts from Williams and Anderson and was the only guy on the team at that time that showed some semblance of heart and hustle.

Dorsey was a liability whenever he was in the game and quite frankly, if he isn’t crashing the boards, there’s absolutely no reason why he should be getting minutes.

He will because we honestly have no other options outside of him with the news that Donatas Motiejunas will be out for the rest of the season, including the playoffs.

Nonetheless, the Rockets succumbed to the Spurs when the final buzzer went off and the clock hit triple-zeroes with the Rockets on the far on the short end of the stick.

But you can’t discredit the Spurs for the kind of basketball they’ve been playing, they seem to always turn it up at this time of the year as well.

When one thinks they’re dead in water or that it may not be their year, they have to think again.

They’re the hottest team in the league right now and it seems they have that gleam in their eye that no NBA team can seize at the moment.

All I know is that they better damn for sure find that passion and fast or else they’re going to be on the outside looking in wishing that we’d be able to make a deep playoff run.

This is certainly a team that we don’t want to face in the first-round because if they look like this in any series against them, they’ll be pulling out their brooms early.

For what it’s worth, Harden had 22 points, leading the Rockets and Dwight Howard put up 16/11 in just 21 minutes of action. Trevor Ariza also threw in 19 points.