Game 5: Houston Rockets (2-2) vs. Dallas Mavericks (3-1) | 7:30pm CST

[rocky164]

Reasons for the L:

Refs -- the crowd was right. It's the most biased officiating against the Mavs since the series against OKC where SGA got every call. There were 2 questionable calls on Lively early on.

Luka's not facilitating -- I get it, scorers need to shoot, that's what's needed to break out of a slump. But with Luka it isn't just a shooting slump, he just isn't ready yet for the usual Luka scoring runs, so he needs to facilitate more, or at least, don't kill ball movement with ISOs. It's funny how we can see the difficult passes and think how'd he do that? But I've seen Luka miss the open man too many times this game (and even this season). It's so un-Luka like.

Luka's complaining less -- but still complaining. I mean, I hate Lebron's flops, most people do. Luka's whining is almost at that level. People are starting to hate it.

Rebounds -- Sure the ball bounces funny some times, but it shouldn't be all the time. There was a considerable lack of effort in securing the boards.

NOTES: I don't like Kidd, but this wasn't his fault. At least, not a big chunk of it. I applaud him for sitting Luka at times when Luka is trying to singlehandedly lose the game with sloppy plays. I also like that Kidd trusts Naji. It may not look like Naji is productive when you look at the box scores, but I'm loving what I'm seeing from Naji.

One other factor that nobody has mentioned: This was the 3rd game in 4 nights, which historically is a low energy night for every team.  Tonight this showed in the rebounding. Winning 2 of the 3 in 4 nights is a success almost regardless of who you played.  November is rough scheduling wise.  We have more 3 in 4 and even one 4 games in 6 nights.

We can play better and will play better.  This game was almost a scheduled loss