Charlotte Hornets loss to the Houston Rockets, 107 to 95 Thursday night. It's Rockets third straight win while Hornets have dropped eight of their last nine games. Eric Gordon (back soreness) and Nene (shoulder) both didn’t play tonight against the Hornets, while Charlotte’s starting center Cody Zeller finally came back after missing seven straight games with a quad contusion. But in the second half, Zeller left the game and wouldn’t come back due to soreness in his quad, he finished with nine points and four rebounds. Charlotte Hornets looked great in the first half of this game, holding James Harden to just 13 points on 3-of-12 shooting; and taking a 54-50 lead into halftime. But in the second half that’s when James Harden got going, scoring 14 points in the third quarter alone and the Rockets scoring 36 points in the third quarter. It was all Rockets in the second half and the Hornets was never able to make a comeback.
The MVP for the Hornets this game would be Kemba Walker who scored 14 points, grabbed 5 rebounds and handed out 5 assists. I mentioned in my last post about Kemba shooting struggles in the past few games, tonight even though wasn’t perfect, looked like he’s heading back to his old self of scoring at will. The leading scorers for the Hornets this game were Nicolas Batum with 15 points 8 rebounds 10 assists, Marvin Williams with 12 points 7 rebounds and Marco Belinelli with 10 points off the bench. Now I have some good and bad things to say about this game. The good is when Cody Zeller was in the game, the team looked completely different. Especially on the offensive side, with his pick-and-roll to setting screens to moving without the basketball. He just made the offense and defense much better. I’m just hoping its nothing serious with his quad and able to play Saturday. The bad was the fact that the Hornets turned the ball over a season-high 22 times that lead to 27 points for Houston. You cannot win if you have that many turnovers, and many of those turnovers were unforced. The other thing is the Hornets shot selection in the second half was terrible. When you are to come back from 10 down on a very good offensive team and one of the top scorers in the NBA, you must get good looks on the offensive side. Frank Kaminsky, Jeremy Lamb, and Marco Belinelli shot some very questionable shots in the second half of this game. Houston turned the ball over 17 times but the Hornets only scored 8 points off the turnovers. The leading scorers for the Rockets were James Harden with 30 points 11 rebounds 8 assists and 9 turnovers, Patrick Beverley with 17 points, Montrezl Harrell with 15 points and Ryan Anderson with 14 points. Charlotte Hornets (24-29) host the Los Angeles Clippers Saturday.
No comments:
Post a Comment