six shots
houston cannot buy a jump shot under the apron, so it hired the man who has spent twenty-three seasons building them.
houston spent its summer on guards. marcus smart, two years, $13 million. bogdan bogdanović for the bench. tari eason back for five years and $81.5 million, one of the better value contracts any team signed this offseason. none of them is the most important thing the rockets added.
that would be a sixty-five-year-old man who will not take a shot all season.
chip engelland joined ime udoka’s staff this week. he played at duke around the turn of the eighties, then in the philippines, then in the continental basketball association, and in 1999 he took a job in detroit as a shooting consultant. his first serious project was grant hill. across five professional seasons hill had made 22 of 121 from three, 18.2%. the season engelland arrived he made 34 of 98.
what engelland does is small and physical. chris ballard put the tony parker rebuild in a book in 2010. the right hand sat too high on the ball. it came down, the thumb went wide, the release moved, and the whole motion slowed. parker had shot 34.5% from outside the paint. the season after, he shot 39.7%.
this is basketball as mechanism. a jump shot is a chain of small hinges. most of them can be adjusted by a man standing close enough to see a thumb.
houston needs the whole chain rebuilt. the rockets finished 28th in three-point attempts last season and 25th in makes. in the playoffs they shot 30.2% from three, last among the sixteen teams that got there. the rotation held three men who shot better than a league-average player from the midrange and from three: durant, sheppard and jabari smith jr. everyone else was under the line. durant played one game of the six against los angeles, carrying a bruised right knee and a sprained left ankle. houston went out in the first round for the second consecutive year.
rafael stone was asked in las vegas what he had wanted from the offseason.
“i wanted guys who could dribble, pass, shoot and defend,” stone said.
a general manager who says that out loud is describing the roster he already had.
so houston bought the best shooting teacher alive. that is the surface, and the surface is easy to read. underneath sits a harder question. a team holding six tradable first-round picks and three swaps went shopping for a coach instead of a shooter. that choice says something about which assets still hold value in a league that has spent three years pricing everything else.
