Dave Hardisty

And he does have above average mobility on the ground for a guy his size, right?

So the way he can weaponize those things is by thinking faster than other people and reaching the spots faster.

And, you know, I guess contesting earlier than what players are expecting him to.

You know, that turnover that it generated off of Gek, right?

That was a foul, but he was quick to jump on the opportunity, knowing what was going to happen, figuring out what was going to happen faster than it happened, and being there at the point of contention.

If Cat there gets the ball and gets the post up, then it's a lot more difficult for him to put up a defensive effort because he doesn't necessarily have the tools to do so.

And the same happens, you know, he had multiple blocked shots where he got beat, recovered, and blocked the shot.

That only happens if the moment you get beat, you immediately, you know, move your legs, shift your body position to be able to be in a position to contest the shot afterwards.

That's something that he hasn't been doing earlier on.

As I said before, I cannot count the amount of possessions in earlier games this season where someone's driving right at him and he chooses to lazily just box out, hit the center, rather than contest the shot.

You've got to contest the shot and force the players to make the play and drop the ball off to the center.

That's how defenses play, right?

You force an extra decision and you hope that someone can pick up the guy that you just got open.

If you're not putting up the initial resistance and forcing that extra effort from the offense, especially in the skin that the Rockets run, you're never going to get that success defensively that you want.

And that's why teams like the Pacers, teams like the Kings, teams like this extremely short-handed Oklahoma City Thunder are able to stay in games with the Rockets up until very, very late because they are always a cold stretch from being away from being down double digits and struggling to come back.

No, I was going to touch on something that they said that I thought was really valid.

The thing about people saying, you can't have your pick in the 2, you can't say, let's press OKD a year, and at the same time say, hey, we've got to play reach effort a lot.

And I want to reach back to something that Rafael Sloan said in the post-deadline press conference, which was, we're not a the whole mental team.

And I think a lot of us being a developmental team or not is Reed Shepard, right?

The other guys pull their own weight.