Game 4 Preview: Hoping Against Hope

By now, any Rockets fan has seen the news. Our talented, hard-working, oft-injured, 7'6" center from Shanghai will be out for the rest of the postseason. In other words, goodbye 2008-2009. I believe we will win tomorrow, but I do not believe we can win this series without Yao Ming. He is the best player on our team, and you don't beat a team that might have beat you healthy without the best player on your team. Yeah it sucks, but then again so does losing in the Finals, and you don' t see the Lakers bitching about not having their starting center last year. Wait..scratch that. Let the bitching begin. But like it or not, we have a game to play tomorrow. And that means we have a game to preview.

The Good

-For the second time in three games, Kobe Bryant had a poor shooting night against the Rockets. I have to attribute this to Battier and his pesky, relentless, Kobe-manual-reading defense. I don't see why this won't continue.

-We actually match up better against the Lakers without Yao. I am not saying we are better without him, far from it, I'm just saying that Pau has been playing Yao very well during the series, doing a much better job of poking the ball away from him and fronting him than I've seen from him before. On defense we also might end up putting Scola on Pau, which is a much better matchup for him than Odom or Ariza. Also, they could end up treating us to the greatest Spanish trash-talking matchup ever. How Scola's hair does against Pau's Pubic-Beard is key for us tomorrow.

-Derek Fisher is back. If we are to have a chance tomorrow, Aaron Brooks has to use his quickness to score, get in the paint, and wreak general havoc on the Lakers defense. That'll be a lot easier if Derek Fisher's Repuation As A Good Player is guarding him.

The Bad

-Yao Ming isn't playing. There's nothing to really say here, we know what he does for our team. Losing his 20-10 is going to hurt. Losing our 9,000 fans who watch basketball just for him is probably going to hurt just as much. So will losing his agonized facial expressions that I've grown to love. Nobody can make sitting on a bench look as painful as Yao can. Not only does losing Yao ruin this series for us, it ruins it for the rest of the league, the fans, and the Lakers. Beating us without our best player is not the same as beating us when we're at healthy, and you can bet your subscription to O, The Oprah Magazine that they wanted to beat us with our full team.

-The Lakers are still the best offensive team in the NBA. They actually played a pretty sub-par game against us Friday, with their two best players shooting a combined 15-39. Stopping them is going to be even harder without 7 and a half feet of China's hopes and dreams in the paint to contest their shots.

-Our offense has a tendency to stagnate, and without Yao we are going to be more prone to that. We can't let it turn into the Ron Artest show, and ball movement and smart decisions are going to be more important than ever tomorrow.

The Ugly

Vanessa Bryant. Not that she's ugly. She's actually far from it. I just want to remind everyone that Kobe cheated on this woman. Look at her, read that last sentence again, smile.









What Has To Happen

For the Rockets to win Game 4 we are going to have to do what we have done all year long, except we're going to have to do it better and without our best player.

First and foremost, the Rockets need to defend with intensity and hustle. No letting players get open looks like in Game 3, every shot needs to be contested for us to have a chance. Despite their best efforts to convince themselves otherwise in Game 3, Ariza, Farmar, Walton, and Odom are not three point shooters and we can't allow them to look like they are. A simple hand in their face will help with that.

We have to continue to out-rebound the Lakers. This is obviously easier said than done after losing Yao, but we still have to find a way to do it. Rebounding is going to have to be a more of a team effort. Every time a shot goes up, all five players on the floor for the Rockets have to box a man out. Landry, Scola, and Hayes are going to have to work especially hard tomorrow afternoon. Not that bringing the effort is ever a problem for these guys.

The bench has to step up. With Landry most likely becoming a starter, Lowry, Wafer, and Hayes are going to have to out-produce the Lakers' bench. Say what you want about their names, but Sasha, Shannon, and the rest of the girls can actually play some pretty good basketball. This seems like a good time to bring up that when asked about the craziest thing that ever happened to him as a basketball player, Sasha Vujacic recalled a time when a girl asked him to sign her panties. I don't really know how that affects Game 4 at all, I just think it's something you should hear. Anyways, the Rockets' bench has to outperform the Lakers', which is only made tougher by Jordan Farmar remembering that he is, in fact, and NBA player sometime during Game 3.

The offense has to work. Think of this game as a married couple's desperate attempt at having a child, with the Rockets' offense being the male's go-to guy. It doesn't have to work well, it just needs to function long enough to get the job done. I don't care how ugly and unsatisfactory it might be, the Rockets offense has to perform. Artest has to stay within the offense and take smart shots, which he has done a decent job of all series long. Battier needs to get more shots, and Wafer simply cannot go 2-10 again.

The Point

So here we are, punching just to have a puncher's chance. The Rockets have played through injuries all year, and we're going to have to do it again tomorrow afternoon. It's going to be hard, but so is everything else worth having right? Rudy Tomjonavich once told us to "never underestimate the heart of a champion," and the Rockets have proven his words time and again this year. We have played with heart and determination all season long and I expect us to play every second like it's our last tomorrow. Of course, I'd have a 7'6" heart with phenomenal basketball skills and footwork, but we have to work with what we have. We are going to have to play as a team tomorrow to win as a team, and luckily for us, that's what we do best. We can't control that the basketball gods seem to have a passion for kicking us in the shins, but we can control how much effort we put in tomorrow. Tomorrow, we play for pride, we play for the fans, we play for the chance to let Kobe know that the NBA Championship isn't just going to be handed to him. Just like that girl in Colorado wasn't handed to him. Uncalled for, I know, but I'm bitter and it made me feel better. Sexual assualt cases aside, tomorrow, more than anything else, we play for our franchise player, the man who led us out of the first round for the first time since 1998, the best center to put on a Rockets jersey since that guy we called The Dream. He fought through a knee collision that would have ended T-Mac's career in Game 1 and through a hairline fracture in Game 3 for us. I hate to sound sentimental, but tomorrow afternoon we're fighting for him. Go Rockets.