Calvin Watkins, ESPN Staff Writer 9y

Rockets keep moving despite injuries

HOUSTON -- The relentless NBA schedule doesn't care about a team's problems. Just doesn't.

Kevin McHale is stressing over not having Donatas Motiejunas (ankle), Terrence Jones (lung), Patrick Beverley (wrist) and Kostas Papanikolaou (ankle) and trying to incorporate Dwight Howard (knee) back into the Houston lineup.

Flip Saunders?

The man played with only eight players on Friday night.

In what almost became an afterthought, the Rockets clinched a playoff berth with a 120-110 victory over the Timberwolves at Toyota Center. The Rockets moved to within a half-game of Memphis for the No. 2 seed in the West.

You don't get banners for just reaching the postseason around here. It's expected given the monies distributed to form this Rockets team.

There are higher goals and one of those is a deep playoff run. To achieve this goal, McHale has to manage the roster when injuries occur.

"Guys just played," he said. "When you play some of those bigger teams, it gets dicier. We were lucky that Minnesota has been hurt a lot. They went small and some of these teams don't go small. We're going to have to find a way to keep battling away against some of these big guys."

He has lost Motiejunas for about 10 days because of lower back pain. Jones is out another week because of pain associated with a partially collapsed lung that has healed. Jones said he just started working out Thursday and is feeling better.

It was interesting to note when Jones arrived in the locker room he wore upper body padding under his suit. It were as if the Rockets didn't want to chance anything should Jones get into a fender bender on the way to the arena and hurt himself more.

You can't predict injuries or when the human body will recover from them. All the science in the world just can't do it, so coaches and players adjust.

"That's been the resolve of this team, when guys go down, when we have injuries," Jason Terry said. "On some teams it can be a distraction. On this particular team, we've been mentally tough and that's something we talked about in training camp, being mentally tough through adversity."

Without Motiejunas, Josh Smith started and produced 16 points, 11 assists and was one rebound shy of a triple-double. McHale is using a combination of guards: Pablo Prigioni, Nick Johnson and Terry to replace Beverley, who could miss the season because of ligament damage in his wrist.

Howard?

In the small sample size since he has returned from swelling in the right knee, Howard is improving. He finished with 18 points, eight on dunks in nine shot attempts. He's moving around better and not afraid to mix it up with defenders his size. Howard is setting good picks during the pick-and-roll portion of the Rockets' offense and moving toward the basket.

"I'm just trying to do whatever I can to get guys open, set good screens and roll," he said after playing 19 minutes. "When I roll hard, the defense is going to collapse and we're going to get open threes and my teammates found me in great spots to just finish the ball."

Oh yeah, while McHale deals with these injuries he leans on James Harden, who has carried this group for a majority of the season. He finished with 33 points, making six 3-pointers along the way to lead all scorers.

McHale doesn't have all his people and at some point everybody will be back and ready to go for the postseason.

Right?

"We all have one goal," Harden said. "No matter who steps in they know what the goal is and so, they're going to do whatever it takes to help this team win and we've been doing a great job of that all year."

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