Kevin Garnett puts much of his weight in defending Yao Ming in the paint Wednesday night. Tough Timberwolve defense against Yao held him to his lowest shooting percentage of the season (26%), yielding only 14 points in 41 minutes in a 90-84 loss in Minneapolis. Click here for more photos.

Yao had his worst shooting game of the season Wednesday night in Minnesota, shooting only 26% (5-of-19) and scoring only 14 points in 41 minutes in a 90-84 loss to the Timberwolves. It looks like the rest he was able to enjoy the previous night by taking the fourth quarter off didn’t help.

Kevin Garnett, Mark Blount and Craig Smith showed they can play defense, too. There’s a reason the T-Wolves are third in the league in opponents’ scoring average (92.9 points per game). They did a good job pushing him further away from the basket than he likes to be, which happened to him earlier this season and resulted in a poor shooting night.

You would think if teams knew that’s what it took to contain Yao, they would do it all the time. But give credit to Yao for being strong enough and fighting hard to get great position against most of his opponents and average 26 points per game.

The fourth quarter was especially disastrous for Yao. He was called for a very questionable tech – his first of the season — after posterizing Eddie Griffin on a dunk and belting out a yell.

Later on he was called for goaltending against Troy Hudson, which gave the T-Wolves an 85-77 lead with a little over 5 minutes remaining.

Shortly afterwards, Yao was blocked at the rim by Garnett, but grabbed the rebound and blew a layup. I had just written a few days ago how impressed I was that Yao wasn’t blowing chip shots this season like he had done so often in previous seasons. After the game, Yao vowed, “I will make those next time.”

Throw in 7 turnovers on the night for Yao, and you have his worst overall night of the season.

Yao didn’t get much help from his partner Tracy McGrady, who also finished with 14 points and shot worse than Yao (didn’t think that could be possible), making only 5-of-21 shots, missing all 3-point attempts, and turning it over 5 times himself.

So although the Rockets have a decent 12-6 record, it’s clear they aren’t as good against tougher competition. Even with such a bad night for Yao and T-Mac, at least they didn’t get blown out. They had a chance to tie it very late in the game with a three-pointer, but like all night, they couldn’t get off a decent shot and lost.

Yao throws one down in a dominant performance against Golden State Tuesday night where he was played man-to-man most of the night. Yao finished with 27 points on 12-of-17 shooting, 8 rebounds and two blocks in just 27 minutes as the Rockets blew out the Warriors, 118-90. Click here for more photos.

Yao and T-Mac put on a clinic Tuesday night against Golden State. Yao’s 12-of-17 shooting and 27 points and 8 rebounds atoned for the 8-for-23 shooting abomination and 5 boards Saturday night against Cleveland. Give alot of credit to his teammates, who got him the ball down low many times against man-to-man defense.

After suffering a concussion in that Cleveland game, T-Mac inexplicably was as good as new, scoring 31 points on 13-of-25 shooting and doling out 7 assists.

I thought it would have been distasteful after his last injury to joke about it, but now that we know McGrady suffered no ill effects after getting bopped in the head accidentally by Dikembe Mutombo’s elbow, I can tell you what I was thinking as T-Mac struggled with his balance. I thought the injury might help clear T-Mac’s head of all the negative vibes he has been having this season and make him shoot better….kind of like those stories you hear about where people with diseases or blindness get struck by lightning and are suddenly cured.

Who knows. Maybe that’s what happened. Yao evidently thought the same thing after the game when he joked, “It knocked him awake.”

The Rockets were definitely awake in the first quarter. Not only that, they were on fire, moving the ball around for high percentage shots and layups and opening up a 19-point lead, 26-7. Yao scored the first 11 points for the Rockets, with the last 3 baskets easy layups.

By the end of the first quarter, the Rockets had scored their highest number of points in the first quarter this season, making 64% of their shots and leading 35-20. Yao had 17 points, and T-Mac had 11. Incredible!

In the second quarter, the Rockets kept pouring it on, building a 56-28 lead a little more than halfway through it. Their shooting from the field cooled off somewhat, making only 7-of-19 shots. But they went to the free throw line 15 times, and made all 15!

Juwan Howard made all 5 of this free throws on his way to a 9-point quarter. Yao added six more points to his total, including a powerful one-handed slam that raised his teammates off the bench in exaltation, and he went into halftime with 23 points and a 65-44 lead.

T-Mac lit it up in the third quarter, going to the hole aggressively like the T-Mac of old, making 6-of-11 shots and scoring 13 points to build an even bigger lead after 3 quarters, 93-68.

In the fourth, Yao didn’t play and T-Mac played for just a few minutes since they play a back-to-back against Minnesota Wednesday night. That gave the Rockets’ bench some much needed playing time, and Vassilis Spanoulis took advantage of it, scoring 13 points and hitting 4-of-9 from the floor, 3-of-5 in the fourth quarter.

John Lucas also played fantastic in his 6 minutes, hitting all 3 of his shots and finishing with 7 points. The Rockets finished the game with their highest point total this season, winning 118-90.

I really felt sorry for Golden State, who was playing a back-to-back after losing to San Antonio by 40 points Monday night.

Poor Don Nelson. I bet he wish he hadn’t come out of retirement for this kind of abuse. Not to say the Warriors haven’t done some good things this season. After all, they lead the NBA in shooting percentage. But against the Rockets’ defensive buzzsaw, they were held way below their average — 39%.

Nelson was very complimentary of the Rockets afterwards. “The Rockets are for real,” Nelson said. “We had no answer for anything they did. I was going to attack Houston in the open court and spread their defense, and it blew up in my face.”

Apparently Nelson was also playing a ‘spread defense,’ as described by Yao after the game. “I thought after the first two baskets I made they might come to double-team or something,” Yao said. “But I kept looking around and still there was only one man. I think they were hoping we’d get bored throwing the ball into the paint and start to play some perimeter, playing their game. We know their game. They were weak on the inside.”

John

Click here for the game story.

Yao tries to keep Lebron James from scoring Saturday night, but with no success as James prepares to throw one down. However, it was one of only 7 shots that James made in 22 attempts. Meanwhile, Yao finished with 24 points and 5 rebounds in leading the Rockets to an 81-63 win over the Cleveland Cavaliers. Click here for the game story. Click here for more photos.

This is probably the latest commentary I have had after a game, more than 24 hours after the fact. I spent the past day at my folks’ house helping out with a very ill relative, and didn’t have access to TV during the game, but was able to watch it on Tivo late Sunday night. I’ll probably have a similar schedule during most weekends in the foreseeable future.

With that said, it was a thing of beauty to see team defense play such a big part early in the day when one of my favorite teams – the UCLA Bruins football team – shock the world and the 14-point favored USC Trojans by knocking them out of the BCS National Championship Game by holding them to the least number of points this decade.

Later that evening, defense was the overwhelming factor that led to the Rockets dismantling of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ offensive attack, holding them to 28% shooting for the game. It probably would have been worse if the Cavs hadn’t cut a 26-point deficit in half late in the fourth quarter.

After Houston had gone scoreless during a Cleveland 13-0 run, though, the Rockets righted the ship and scored 3 baskets in a row to put the game out of reach, winning 81-63.

I’m sure you know by now that T-Mac suffered a concussion after running into Dikembe Mutombo‘s elbow accidentally. It looked scary at first, with McGrady totally out of it. But then later on it was reported that he doing much better after the game, joking and smiling in the clubhouse. It’s uncertain if he will play in Tuesday’s game against Golden State.

T-Mac actually had a great start before getting hurt late in the first quarter, scoring 7 points on 3-of-5 shooting and doling out 3 assists in just 10 minutes of play.

The Rockets went on a 14-1 run without T-Mac at the end of the first half, holding the Cavs to no field goals for 8 ½ minutes. Yao had scored 20 points by halftime, and the Rockets were comfortably ahead 43-29 at the half.

Shane Battier did an amazing defensive job on Lebron James, who was only 4-for-16 at one point in the third quarter. King James finished 7-of-22 for the game.

With the ‘playmaker’ McGrady not able to dish some assists to Yao for dunks or layups because of his concussion, Yao did not get easy looks (finished only 8-of-23 from the field) and only scored 4 points in the second half. But the Rockets didn’t really need him much in building a 26-point lead.

When the Cavs cut it close, Rafer Alston and Luther Head came up with some clutch shots as they have done most of the season and put the game away. Head was especially outstanding, hitting 3-of-6 three-pointers (13 points), grabbing 7 rebounds, and passing 5 assists. And he only had 1 turnover in 31 minutes.

Overall, it was an ugly game since the Rockets only shot 39% from the field, but on a day when defense made headlines on the West Coast, the Rockets applied their own smothering defense on the Gulf Coast.

Here is an excerpt from today’s announcement on NBA.com

The Orlando Magic’s Dwight Howard and Houston Rockets’ Yao Ming today were named Eastern Conference and Western Conference Players of the Month, respectively, for games played from the start of the season (Oct. 31) through November.

Other nominees for the Eastern and Western Conference Players of the Month were Atlanta’s Joe Johnson, Charlotte’s Emeka Okafor, Cleveland’s LeBron James, Dallas’ Dirk Nowitzki, Denver’s Carmelo Anthony, Detroit’s Chauncey Billups, Indiana’s Jermaine O’Neal, the Los Angeles Clippers Sam Cassell, Milwaukee’s Michael Redd, New Jersey’s Jason Kidd, Sacramento’s Kevin Martin, Utah’s Carlos Boozer and Deron Williams.

It looks like Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle feels the same way I felt (and wrote) about T-Mac’s performance last night.

Yao contests a shot from Boris Diaw Wednesday night in a 102-91 loss. The Rockets were down 22 points, but Yao scored 13 points in the third quarter to help get the Rockets back in the game. Click here for the game story. Click here for more photos.

The Rockets blew a golden opportunity to come back from a 22-point deficit against the Phoenix Suns on Wednesday night. It would have been their second greatest comeback in franchise history, but because of poor decision-making and the fact that Phoenix had run them ragged, they fell apart in the fourth quarter and the Suns cruised to a 102-91 victory.

The first half was awful with the Rockets turning the ball over numerous times and shooting only 37%. Meanwhile, the Suns went to the line 19 times in the first half alone, making 17 of those attempts, and held a 57-40 lead at halftime.

One of the main problems was that T-Mac was settling for too many jump shots. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t taking it to the hole more. Everyone knows he’s struggling from the outside and that he needs to be more aggressive and drive to the basket more, but for some reason he kept shooting and missing from outside, and no one corrected him.

Jeff Van Gundy said before this season that one of the Rocket’s pitfalls last season was “Basketball IQ” issues. Well, I think T-Mac’s insistence to continually shoot from the outside ranks as one of those IQ issues.

In the fourth quarter, McGrady did make a three-pointer and a long two-pointer consecutively to give the Rockets a 74-72 lead to cap a 34-15 run to put them ahead for the first time all night. Before those shots, he had shot 4-of-19 from the field. But down the stretch, he again settled for three-pointers, even after Steve Novak had checked into the game for 3-point shooting purposes and had nailed his previous three-pointer. Dumb!

After the Suns had put the game away 98-82 with 1:38 remaining, T-Mac padded his stats by hitting three treys in a row, but the damage had already been done and the Rockets lost.

To cap off a strange evening, for some reason the Rockets broadcast crew gave T-Mac “Player of the Game” honors. Maybe that’s because no one else had scored over 20 points (T-Mac finished with 23) — Yao didn’t finish with that great of numbers (18 points on 6-of-11 shooting) because of foul trouble. But c’mon! T-Mac essentially shot the Rockets out of the game. And you have to give credit to Yao for scoring 13 points in the third quarter to get them back into the game.

Then Rocket broadcaster Matt Bullard had the intelligence to say McGrady put up a courageous effort, or something like that, because he had been injured the night before and was probably playing with pain.

Excuse me, but if this had been any other sports market, the media wouldn’t be so kind and would have been asking instead, “If your hurt so badly that you can’t even shoot right, why are you playing, risking further injury, and hurting your team?” or “Adjust your game to compensate for your injury – stay away from your weakness, like outside shooting.”

Finally, the broadcasters said the Rockets had run out of gas because they had played back-to-back games, and that this loss was expected. But the fact of the matter is that the Rockets had a chance to steal one, and because of basketball IQ issues, they let it slip away.

Now there were other reasons why they lost. Maybe because they had attempted 35 three-pointers and made only 10 before T-Mac’s meaningless 3 three-pointers at the end of the game, which may demonstrate the following: when the Rockets are chunking them up with tremendous frequency trying to make a comeback, or trying to score more points to keep up with the Suns, thus throwing them out of their rhythm, I can buy that. But I don’t believe in letting them off the hook by serving up old clichés like a “courageous effort,” “he was hurting,” or “they ran out of gas.” Some of it may be true, but don’t cite it as the main reason why they lost. It’s weak. And I think Van Gundy would agree.

Yao prepares to lay in one of his 11 field goals Tuesday night against Washington. Yao scored 25 points and grabbed 10 boards in a 82-75 win, while Shane Battier chipped in with 17 points in a game where Tracy McGrady was limited because of an injury. Click here for the game story.

Where would the Rockets have been last night with Yao and Shane Battier? Both players shot lights out (Yao: 11-of-15, Shane: 6-of-11) while every other Rocket struggled (13-of-53 combined). But the Rockets’ defense and some timely three-pointers late in the game prevented Minnesota from completing a fourth quarter comeback.

Despite the Rockets propensity to lose big leads this season – this time they lost an 11-point lead to allow Minnesota to tie it at 68-68 with 4:42 remaining – they were able to close it out, thanks to Shane hitting two treys in a row (he made an incredible 5-of-5).

Then Rafer Alston made up for a poor shooting night (4-of-15 overall) to hit a three, and followed with a runner in the lane to make it 79-70, and that was the ballgame as the Rockets finished with a win, 82-75.

Alston has impressed me this season to hit big shots down the stretch, even when he has struggled shooting earlier in the game. He has made me forget this year about the Rockets’ inability to sign Mike James this off-season, who finished with only 4 points, 4 rebounds, 2 assists, and one steal in 23 minutes. Meanwhile, Rafer scored 13, had 7 assists, 3 steals, and grabbed 3 rebounds

Although the Rockets are known for losing big leads in the fourth quarter, they are winning (they have won 9 of their past 11), and I have said all along it doesn’t matter if they lose leads. Just win, baby. And if you lose leads and still figure out a way to win, it just makes you stronger later in the season when the pressure gets really intense. Yao seems to agree:

“Actually, at the point it’s getting close, I’m not nervous,” Yao said. “I didn’t feel worried. That’s the way we play. We’ve gone through this many times.”

Tracy McGrady got hit in the abdomen late in the first quarter and was in-and-out of the game all night long. He finished with 8 points (4-of-14) and 7 assists in 32 minutes of play.

It doesn’t look good for him to play against Phoenix on Wednesday night, but at least the injury didn’t occur in his back where things could get really scary after missing so many games last season, leading to a disastrous record.

Yao shoots over former teammate Stromile Swift on his way to 28 points in an 85-76 win over the Memphis Grizzlies Saturday night at Toyota Center for the Rockets third win in a row. Click here for the game story. Click here for more photos.

The Rockets again showed Saturday night that when things are going south — like they did in the second quarter against Memphis – they can stare panic and defeat in the face and still find a way to get the job done. That’s a mark of a team that I think can go a long way this season.

Against the Memphis Grizzlies Saturday night, the Rockets were sizzling in the first quarter, shooting 61% on their way to a 24-18 lead, with Yao making all four of his shots.

But then all of a sudden the wheels came off. The Rockets only hit 20% of their shots in the second, with Yao only making 1-of-4 shot attempts.

Meanwhile, Memphis showed their athleticism and quickness during a run that gave them to a 39-37 halftime lead. They were aggressive going to the rack, getting fouled, and shooting 20 free throws in the first half compared only to Houston’s eight.

Rudy Gay, Houston’s first round 2006 draft pick traded to Memphis along with Stromile Swift for Shane Battier, showed glimpses Saturday night why Memphis GM Jerry West wanted him so badly. At the half Gay was tied with Brian Cardinal for most Memphis points (7 points), led the team in rebounds (6) and blocks (2). One of those blocks came against Yao in an amazing athletic move.

So Houston went into the locker room at halftime wondering if their reknown fourth quarter offensive collapses were now moving up in schedule a couple of quarters early. Would they be able to put that bad shooting behind them and come out with more resolve at the start of the second half?

Did they ever.

Rafer Alston came out more aggressive out of the gate, scoring on three of Houston’s first 4 possessions with a jump shot, a running floater along the baseline, and a Skip-to-My-Lou crossover-like move to the basket for a layup. Throw into that scoring mix a dunk by Yao, a tip-in by Shane Battier after a missed Alston free throw, and a few easy shots by Yao, and the Rockets finally got some breathing room to take a 53-47 lead.

The Rockets ended up outscoring Memphis 28-13 in that pivotal third quarter to lead 65-54, and kept playing hard to open the lead up to 15 points in the fourth quarter, cruising to their third straight win.

Yao finished with a team-high 28 points on 11-of-16 shooting, 8 rebounds and three blocks.

The things I like about Yao’s game this season that is leading to his increased scoring numbers this season (26.4 ppg vs. 22.3 last season) are the following:

First, he’s getting to the line almost 3 times more per game this season, and making the same percentage (about 85%) of free throw attempts.

The other thing is that he isn’t blowing near as many chip shots around the rim like he has done in previous seasons. I think that might be coming not only with being stronger and using more of his weight to get exactly where he wants around the basket, but taking his time and concentrating all the way through his shot when he is around the rim.

T-Mac was fantastic, showing once again how great of a passer he is, finishing with a career-tying 13 assists and 19 points. I think he is still shooting too many three-pointers (1-for-4), although the one that he did make was a difficult one that came at the shot clock buzzer. It’s almost like if he has time to think about the shot, he misses it, but if he has to use his natural ability and just shoot, his muscle memory kicks in and the shot goes in.

But his ability to find open shooters is phenomenal, including a wraparound behind-the-back pass to Yao for a dunk.

Honorable mention goes to Luther Head, who continues to shoot lights out from three-point territory, hitting 3-of-4 treys (9 points total), including two in the fourth quarter that kept Memphis a comfortable distance away. Luther is really having a breakout year, hitting 50% of his three-pointers, and is just the kind of contribution they need from a second-year player. Dallas had Devin Harris come to the forefront last season, and his fellow Illinois teammate Deron Williams is having that kind of year this season (18 ppg, 9.3 assists per game) with the surprising 12-2 Utah Jazz.

I was able to take a break from all of my personal stuff happening today and read one of the best articles I have seen written about Yao in the past few months. Check it out by clicking here.