The Houston Rockets were struggling on the road and on the second night of a back-to-back, but they went into Detroit and beat one of the top teams in the Eastern Conference anyway, downing the Pistons 111-104 behind a total team effort.<\/p>\n
Kevin Durant once again led the way, scoring 32 points on 11-for-19 shooting, including 5-for-11 from deep. He also pitched in 7 boards. 3 assists, 1 steal and 1 block. He also played pretty good defense all night, and the middie game was working.<\/p>\n
Alperen Sengun had 19 points and 5 assists on 6-for-11 shooting. He had a lovely poster dunk, but he also doesn\u2019t look completely healthy, which he has been open about. Reed Sheppard had 18 off of the bench, and though his three-ball wasn\u2019t there, going just 1-for-7, he contributed down the stretch, hitting Cade Cunningham with a nasty hesi to take him to the cup for a bucket.<\/p>\n
He also played 25 minutes, and Ime Udoka must finally be listening to us, as Reed closed the game and was an essential component of the victory.<\/p>\n
Amen Thompson pitched in 15 points, 9 rebounds, 7 assists, 2 steals and a block, while Jabari Smith Jr. had 11 points, 10 boards, 2 steals and a block and played the Dillon Brooks role by picking fights and being the emotional backbone on the court. He was also 5-for-9 shooting, the kind of side role we need to see from Jabari every night. Again, the man is just 22, one of the youngest on the team. High-end role player is still the ceiling with some more consistency.<\/p>\n
Clint Capela had 5 points, 9 boards and 3 blocks as the backup center, and these type of performances will be needed to weather the storm with Steven Adams potentially out all year now.<\/p>\n
This was one of the best team wins we\u2019ve seen in a while, and especially with Houston\u2019s road struggles, it meant much more. The Rockets move to 27-16 and are on roughly a 52-win pace, the same as last season. They currently sit in the four-seed and will be back in action Monday versus the Memphis Grizzlies.<\/p>\n
Hope you\u2019re all staying warm out there. Here in Pennsylvania, it\u2019s current -7 degrees outside, and we\u2019re waiting on a storm later today that\u2019s dropping 12-16 inches of snow. A total of 45 states are currently under weather emergencies this weekend. Wherever you are, we hope you\u2019re staying safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Houston Rockets were struggling on the road and on the second night of a back-to-back, but they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":557864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3794],"tags":[7,292,194,4066,6,211,52385],"class_list":{"0":"post-557863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-houston-rockets","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-houston","10":"tag-houston-rockets","11":"tag-houstonrockets","12":"tag-nba","13":"tag-rockets","14":"tag-rockets-scores"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115950531663138831","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=557863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/557863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/557864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=557863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=557863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=557863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}