Andy Bailey of Bleacher Report<\/a> explained.<\/p>\n“The Houston Rockets went undefeated this week and got even more evidence that they might just need to embrace sophomore Reed Sheppard as their starting point guard.<\/p>\n
Sheppard had 27 points in Wednesday’s win over the Milwaukee Bucks, and the Rockets moved to 13-4 when Sheppard starts.<\/p>\n
Perhaps most importantly, Houston has a slightly better net rating when its best player, Kevin Durant, has a better net rating when\u00a0sharing\u00a0the floor with Sheppard than he does\u00a0without\u00a0him.”<\/p>\n
Sheppard has been the Rockets’ x-factor this season. At least on the offensive end.<\/p>\n
At least, one of them, alongside Jabari Smith Jr. Sheppard is averaging 13.6 points, 3.5 assists, 2.9 rebounds, 43 percent from the field, 39.6 percent from outside range and 80.7 percent from the foul line.<\/p>\n
Sheppard is no Jason Kidd or John Stockton. He’s not even Fred VanVleet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But he’s the Rockets’ best table-setting point guard on the roster. In fact, he’s the Rockets’ only floor general at the guard spot.<\/p>\n
Especially since they have not utilized HD Davison consistently. But even if they did, Davison was an undrafted free agent guard, whereas Sheppard was a lottery pick.<\/p>\n
And he’s got point guard traits and tendencies. He’s the closest skillset match to VanVleet on the roster.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Houston is currently 48-29 and fifth in the Western Conference. It’s safe to say that they wouldn’t have had that success without Sheppard’s contributions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was known that the Rockets were going to give Reed Sheppard a much greater role, heading into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":702015,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3794],"tags":[7,292,194,4066,6,211],"class_list":{"0":"post-702014","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"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702014","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=702014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/702014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/702015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=702014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=702014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=702014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}