Yao relaxes with T-Mac during Wednesday’s game against the Sonics in a blowout victory over Seattle, 106-78. Since the Rockets had already clinched the fifth seed in the Western Conference playoffs, T-Mac didn’t suit up because of a sore back, and Yao played only 23 minutes in the meaningless game, scoring 13 points and grabbing 6 boards.
Click here for more photos from the game.
by John
WEDNESDAY, 4/20/05 – Look up the definition of “blowout” in the dictionary, and you’ll see the Houston-Seattle boxscore from Wednesday night’s season-ending finale, which ended with Houston winning 106-78.
As bad as the Seattle Sonics were without Ray Allen (ankle), Rashard Lewis (tendonitis), Vladimir Radmanovic (injured list), and Antonio Daniels (injured list), the Rockets shooting was that good. I have never seen such great shooting through three quarters in my life. Layup after layup. Three-pointer after three-pointer.
With 8:47 remaining in the game, the Rockets were shooting 62% from the field, and 71% (9-of-13) from behind the arc, and held a 38-point lead, 99-61. When Mike James hit another three-pointer with 8:00 minutes remaining, the Rockets had their biggest lead of 39 points (102-63).
By that time, little-played Moochie Norris and Torraye Braggs had been inserted into the game, and the Rockets finished disinterested the rest of the way. By the time the game was over, the Rockets’ overall shooting was 54% from the field and an amazing 11-of-16 from three-point territory.
And they did it all without T-Mac, who sat out because of back spasms.
But Mike James was unconscious, hitting 10-of-13 shots (24 points), mostly from the outside (4-of-5 three-pointers) to lead all Rockets in scoring. Everything he threw up seemed to go in, even a last-second desperation heave at the end of the third quarter where he was twisting in mid-air from way behind the three-point line.
Yao played 23 minutes and finished with 13 points and 6 rebounds. He had a couple of sweet moves down low that fooled Vitaly Potapenko so much, he looked like a mannequin standing in place as Yao went around him.
Since it was such a blowout win, there’s really no sense in my rehashing any other details from this game other than to point you to that impressive boxscore to see how the other Rockets fared statistically.
The main thing to point out is that the Rockets are rolling as they finished the season on a 7-game winning streak, with their final three victories having a winning margin was over 25.
Now the Rockets enter their first-round playoff match-up against a Dallas team, winners of 8 in a row just as hot as themselves and 17-2 under new coach Avery Johnson.
Although Dallas finished the season with a better record, it just doesn’t seem to matter that the Rockets don’t have home-court advantage. The Rockets are hot, and they are a very good road team. I don’t know who will win this series, but the best team should win.
JUDGEMENT DAY
Speaking of predictions, now that the season is over, I wanted to go back in time and recap my pre-season prediction of how the Rockets and Yao would do this season. I have included it below (you can go to the real page where I made the prediction by clicking here and scrolling to the “Predictions for 2004-05” section).
I’ll let you judge for yourself on how close I came to hitting the mark. 😉
With all the new players on the Rockets this season, I predict the team will get off to a very slow start. (I know, that’s not much of a stretch given their mediocre preseason.) Their won-loss record will suffer as they try to get accustomed to each other. They will lose many of their games in the first couple of weeks of the season. In many ways it will mirror the season of the Houston Astros: by mid-season the Rockets will be hovering around .500, and the national media will be saying the Rockets trade for T-Mac might have been a mistake.
But then they will turn it around, start clicking, get their fans excited like the Astros did, and finish strong. They will make the playoffs, probably as the fifth playoff seed with a record like 49-33 [they finished 51-31]. They will win their first playoff series in 6 or 7 games, advance and lose in the next round. But it will be an improvement over last year’s first round exit against the Lakers in 5 games.
Another reason why the Rockets won’t have a better record is because this new Southwest division in which they have been placed is tough…
Prediction for Yao: Yao and T-Mac this season will do some very special things on the court with each other, as anticipated. You’ll see great passing between the two that will be dazzling. And Yao’s stats will improve in almost every category since he’ll get the ball more now that Steve Francis and Cuttino Mobley are gone.
So here are my projected stats for Yao: 19.1 points, 10 rebounds, 2.3 blocks, 52% field goal percentage, and 82% free throw percentage. [Yao finished with 18.3 points, 8.4 rebounds, 2.0 blocks, 55.2% shooting, and 78.3% free throw shooting].
Not bad, huh? Now only if my fantasy league team had done as well. ;-(
John
john@YaoMingFanClub.com
To read the Houston Chronicle’s post-game analysis, click here and here.
As many of you may experienced yesterday (Sunday), this site was down for several hours. We made some phone calls to the hosting provider, and it turned out a lot of their servers were down for all their customers’ sites, not just this one. I found it ironic that one day after many of the Rocket players failed to show up for Game 7, our hosting provider had a similar failure. 
