DALLAS -- Kevin McHale was blunt, honest and basically everything you would expect from him when describing what his Houston Rockets were on Sunday night.
“We didn’t play very well tonight,” McHale said after the Rockets' 121-109 loss to the Dallas Mavericks. “We scored early in the game and then we went through periods where we just didn’t move the ball, took bad shots. They played harder than we did.”
The series remains in favor of the Rockets at 3-1, yet McHale said he was surprised by the effort, or lack thereof from his team, given a victory would have swept the series and developed a week’s mini-vacation, if you will, in the postseason.
McHale’s uptempo offense stalled in a critical stretch of the game. The Rockets missed 17 consecutive shots in between a James Harden 3-pointer at 1:55 of the second quarter to Corey Brewer’s layup with 3:57 left in the third quarter.
During this stretch, the Rockets attempted rushed, open and bad shots and the Mavericks built a 20-point lead.
“We got slow offensively, the ball stuck,” McHale said. “We didn’t do very well for that stretch, all that being said, it was our offensive rebounding and our lack of being able to contain the ball that ended up beating us. Our offense sucked for a while. That was a fatal blow, more of our effort overall I think.”
McHale admitted he sat power forward Terrence Jones too long. He was probably the second-most effective offensive player for Houston on Sunday night as he scored 13 points and snagged six rebounds. McHale said he’ll speak with Jones about playing him just 17 minutes, which included missing the final 20 minutes of the contest.
McHale also sat starting point guard Jason Terry, who played 22 minutes and went one-of-five from the field.
At some point, the Rockets have to settle themselves down on the offensive end and get some touches to their big men -- such as Josh Smith, Jones and Howard -- when they can’t hit shots from the perimeter or take it to the basket.
The Rockets offense is designed to get 3-pointers and this team shot 31 of them in the game. Josh Smith set a playoff career-high with four 3s and finished with 23 points off the bench in a solid effort.
It wasn’t enough.
“They played like a team that was trying to close us out,” Smith said. “We played like a team that was going home, and it can’t be like that. We got to have a killer instinct in that type of moment. But you know, the guys in this locker room are feeling this loss and taking it pretty bad. But we know deep down this won’t happen again.”
The Rockets also have to get to the basket, which is James Harden’s specialty. He did finish with 24 points and made all nine of his foul shots, but the Rockets just stood around and took jumpers more than necessary.
Howard scored 10 points inside in the first quarter, which included two points on alley-oop dunks. He would score just three points in the next three quarters and shot an abysmal 3-of-13 from the line.
As a team, the Rockets shot 22.6 percent from three-point range and were outrebounded 52-38 for the game. McHale expressed dismay at the lack of offensive rebounds, 16-7 in the Mavs' favor, for the evening.
Overall, the Rockets just turned into a jump-shooting team, and yes, that’s what they are. However, when your shots aren’t working you need to do something else.
“We can get to the rim and shoot jumpers,” Harden said. “We just didn’t make our shots. It’s a combination of us taking a couple of bad jump shots [and] contested jump shots led to transition points. We shot 3s, that’s what we do. We’ll be all right.”
The good news is the Rockets are headed home for Game 5 on Tuesday night. The bad news is, if the problems that hurt them Sunday night linger into this upcoming week, we might have a series on our hands.
“We just got to play,” Howard said. “Hard work will win a game for you. If you watched tonight, they got all the loose balls and they played harder than us, they rebounded, they ran the floor, they got out on the fast break and they were able to score in transition and that’s how they won the game.”