How Clint Capela Changed The Tone Of Rockets’ Season

In what was a lost season, the Houston Rockets have unearthed a new team identity with the insertion of Clint Capela into the starting lineup.

It’s no secret the season isn’t exactly going according to plan for the Houston Rockets.

After reaching the Western Conference Finals last year, and adding a fringe top-10 point guard in Ty Lawson during the offseason, Clutch City Redux was supposed to battle the Golden State Warriors and San Antonio Spurs for the conference crown.

However, calling the Rockets’ start to the 2015-16 campaign tumultuous would not do their ineptness justice — their beginning stretch was downright disastrous.

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Not only did Houston begin the year 5-10, their lackadaisical effort and laissez-faire approach cost coach Kevin McHale his job after just 11 contests.

But the NBA season is a long, unpredictable journey.

With a blink of an eye, the Rockets have wheeled off 11 wins over their last 17 games, and currently sit in sixth place in the underperforming second tier of the Western Conference.

While we all expected Houston to rally to some extent after their highly publicized coaching change, the way they’re winning games, on the contrary, is something of a pleasant surprise.

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Sure, James Harden still dominates the ball on the offensive end — creating an absurd amount of free throws, as he slowly rekindles his shooting touch of yesteryear — and their analytically-driven scheme still has the team attempting the most 3s in the league, as they rank atop of the NBA in both 3-point and free throw rates.

Earlier on during the season, however, the Rockets were a team without an identity. Last year, the team thrived scoring from beyond the arc, at the rim and at the line, would push the pace in a moment’s notice in transition, and housed a battalion of tough, versatile defenders.

For the first dozen or so contests this year, though, Houston was a major enigma — allowing an avalanche of unimpeded layups and uncontested 3s on defense, while going through at least several decapitating cold spells and elongated periods of stagnant, motionless lapses on offense.

In what was an unheralded lineup change, however, interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff would remodel the entire tenor — or tone — of their season when he inserted Clint Capela into the starting lineup in a twin tower alignment alongside Dwight Howard.

As the majority of the league quilt under the incumbent small ball epidemic, the Rockets have taken a page out of their instate rivals, the Spurs’, book — getting defensive and going big.

If you’ve been following Howard throughout his polarizing career, you’d know that Superman does not possess the same super powers as he once did. The injuries he has suffered over the past handful of years have limited both his lateral quickness and leaping ability.

The Dwight we saw circa 2008-11 — the 6’10” cyborg with shoulders as big as cinderblocks, who could cover the entire lane in a short millisecond with the leaping ability to swat your shot into an oblivion — is an extinct specie.

And unlike Tim Duncan, Howard has never been the positional savant to effectively defend by closing up angles and swallowing up opposing penetrators.

By replacing Terrance Jones with Capela, though, the Rockets have indirectly rediscovered a brand of defensive omnipresence they had previously expected from D-12.

He may stand tall and lanky at 6’11”, but the second-year big man has amazing agility for a man of his size — covering an insane amount of ground, as he’s one of the best bigs in the league in closing out on 3-point shooters while recovering quickly enough to protect the paint.

A highly effective pick-and-roll defender who fully utilizes his 7’4.5″ wingspan by staying active and staying wide — thereby, evaporating all passing angles and driving lanes.

Sure enough, the Rockets have posted a defensive rating of 99.7 over their last five games as they gradually transform into a slower-paced (93.7 over the aforementioned stretch), grind-it-out team.

More prevalently, when pairing their two pillars of power together, the Rockets have held their opponents to just 94.2 points per 100 possessions this season, per NBAWowy. 

Moreover, in the 142 minutes Howard and Capela have shared the floor with another thus far, Houston has decidedly dominated the trenches — posting a jaw-dropping 40.6 percent offensive rebounding percentage and a 59.4 percent total rebounding percentage, which would lead the league by more than 4 and 5 percent, respectively.

In summation, despite averaging just a smidge more than 20 minutes a game, Houston’s defensive intensity ratchets up when Clint is anchoring the paint. In fact, not only do the Rockets concede 5.9 points per 100 possessions less when Capela is conducting their defense, he also ranks within the top five among power forwards in Defensive RPM.

In a rare season where parity has reigned supreme in middling tier of the West, a former second-round pick from Switzerland may just be the pendulum-changing ingredient the Rockets needed to get them over the hump.

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With Clint Capela fully entrenched into Houston’s primary rotation, Clutch City has once again unearthed a dynamic identity — albeit, not one that General Manager, Daryl Morey, had envisioned.

The only downside: with the opposing team having their choice of hacking either Capela or Howard at any given opportunity, Toyota Center fans may be paying for a lot more than they had initially bargained for.