Houston Rockets: Small Sample Size Theatre

The Houston Rockets have had an awful start to the 2015-16 season, but the key to curing what ails them might have been right under their noses all along.

The Houston Rockets acquired point guard Ty Lawson from the Denver Nuggets this past offseason in the hopes that he would give them more of something they already had. He was expected to share the ball-handling load with James Harden and help run the Rockets’ up-tempo offense and lighten the offensive load on Harden.

Absolutely none of that has gone according to plan, and the Rockets are 7-10 and have fired their coach as a result of this disastrous beginning to the season.

With Lawson on the court, the Rockets have been outscored 110.4 to 100.6 per 100 possessions so far this season in 938 possessions. To put that -9.8 net rating into context, only the Philadelphia 76ers (-12.1) and Los Angeles Lakers (10.6), with two wins between them, have worse net ratings than the Rockets with Lawson on the floor.

No team in the NBA has surrendered more than the Milwaukee Bucks‘ 109 points per 100 possessions, either, which means that the Rockets with Ty Lawson have the worst statistical defense in the NBA. This is a far cry from the sixth-best defensive squad in the league a year ago that had a defensive rating of 100.5.

The healthy return of Patrick Beverley to the lineup has helped the Rockets ease Lawson out of the starting lineup, and on Sunday night against the New York Knicks, Lawson was a healthy scratch. As I speculated just a few days ago, the Ty Lawson experiment may be at an end just a month into the season.

One of the calling cards of a lineup with Lawson was going to a small-ball lineup, often with James Harden effectively at the power forward position. It appears that the Rockets have shifted course considerably, at least at the beginning of games.

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In the last two games, both tight victories against the Sixers and Knicks, the Rockets starting lineup consisted of Beverley, Harden, Trevor Ariza, Clint Capela and Dwight Howard.

Capela and Howard are both centers, which signals a drastic change in focus. While it remains to be seen just how much they’ll actually play together, there is reason to believe that this lineup should be emphasized going forward.

First off, thanks to the Rockets’ emphasis on going small so far this season, their rebounding numbers are in ruins. Until this past week, they were one of the very worst rebounding teams in the NBA. They’ve rallied to a more respectable 19th in the NBA in rebounding percentage, pulling down 49 percent of rebounds.

However, when you’ve got two near-seven-footers on the floor, it stands to reason that the rebounding numbers will go up. In an incredibly small sample size, just 52 possessions with about half of those coming against the woeful Sixers, lineups featuring the two big men together are outscoring opponents 123.1 to 94.2 per 100 possessions, and the Rockets’ rebounding rate is off the charts at 70.2 percent.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough that this sample size is too small to really extrapolate anything meaningful, but the Rockets have been so discombobulated this season that this is an edge that they should probably pursue.

The Rockets will face the Detroit Pistons on Monday night, and the Pistons are something of a rebounding juggernaut thanks to their stellar big man, Andre Drummond. If there was a time to keep this new big lineup in for extended minutes, it will be against the Pistons and Drummond.

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The Rockets have had a hard enough time keeping normal big men off the boards so far this season with one-big lineups, so this should be the time when we get to really see what the Capela-Howard lineup can do together.