Rockets biggest lineup is coming up short

It’s all about finding an edge.

That’s been the Rockets’ modus operandi for a long time. There is seemingly an organizational impetus to identify a statistical area and lean (almost) absurdly hard into it.

Teams are shooting more threes? Cool. We’re going to shoot way more threes. We’re going to shoot so many threes that we’re widely accused of ruining basketball.

What’s that? We’ve missed 26 in a row? Cool:

Let’s shoot another.

That didn’t work? Well, there’s this concept called “tanking”. Unfortunately (for us), the lottery odds have been flattened. You can’t just tank one season and land a generational player anymore, unless you’re the Spurs, who have a direct line to Fortuna. For us regular shmucks, tanking will take multiple seasons. So let’s tank for multiple seasons. We’ll tank so hard that we’re widely accused of ruining basketball.

We love being widely accused of ruining basketball.

The tank is over? Cool! Offensive rebounds. We’re going to do whatever needs to be done to utterly dominate the offensive glass. We’re going to play twin big lineups, even if they went out of fashion with the videocassette recorder.

Not of which is meant to be a critique. All of these strategies have been defensible. The team’s newfound emphasis on offensive rebounding has yielded results:

But the lineup designed to emphasize it the most has been subpar.

Per CleaningTheGlass, Amen Thompson, Kevin Durant, Jabari Smith Jr., Alperen Sengun, and Steven Adams are precisely 0.0 when they share the floor.

Ah, good old 0.0. Not too high, not too low. It’s a sweet spot if your metric is, say, mental well-being. In basketball, it’s what we call “mediocre”.

Specifically, it lands in the 41st percentile. The lineup’s 48.8% Offensive Rebounding percentage predictably lands in the 99th percentile, but its 45.9 Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%) lands in the first. The very first percentile.

Thought experiment: Assemble five seven-footers. Maybe one of them is eight-feet tall - there’s your big. None of them has played basketball before (a puzzling decision), but each has NBA-level strength. Spent some time teaching them to rebound and put them on an NBA court. What would happen?

They’d probably land in the 99th percentile in offensive rebounds, and the 1st percentile in eFG%, right?

Maybe not. Here’s the point: Securing extra possessions doesn’t count for much if you can’t put the ball in the basket.

Should the Rockets abandon the twin towers?

Take Durant and Smith Jr. out of that lineup and add Reed Sheppard and Tari Eason, and the Rockets are +54.6. That’s fantastic, but that lineup has played just 46 possessions compared to the 136 the prior group has played together.

That’s low volume, but it is intriguing. If nothing else, it’s evidence that the double big lineups have a place. By replacing Smith Jr. with Eason, the Rockets are (unfathomably) leaning even further into offensive rebounding, although the 30.0% Offensive Rebounding Percentage doesn’t tell that story. Let’s chalk that up to sample size noise.

Macro lens: The Rockets’ 40.8% Offensive Rebounding Percentage ranks first in the NBA by a landslide. Whether they’re playing double bigs or not, they’ve established their “edge”. However they go about dominating the glass, it’s something they should continue doing.

Perhaps it’s just not viable to run Thompson at the point with the two bigs in the frontcourt. Sengun’s three-point shooting has been a revelation this year, but a Karl-Anthony Towns he ain’t. Sengun is still most effective in the paint, which is the only area Thompson and Adams can do much of anything in.

That seems to mitigate any edge the Rockets gain from that lineup.