Michael Shapiro

But did it feel to either of you like he wanted to be a little more demonstrative with his teammates to me?

Because that's

That's how it came off.

I mean, it's one game, it's anecdotal, but it felt like he was super engaged tonight, not just individually, but with the team.

Yeah, and you look at the bench.

I like the little tweak they made to play Ja'Sean Tate more.

You know, some folks have wondered what's happened to Josh Okogie.

I think one of the issues is that if Josh doesn't start, it's difficult to bring him off the bench because those units with Reed and Josh

you're extremely light and you're prone to getting, you know, bullied in terms of second chance opportunities.

Whereas with the four off the bench tonight, DFS, who was very good, Jay Shantae, Clint Capella, and Reed Shepard, Reed's the only small guy.

So you have a lot more physicality across the board.

And I don't think, you know, Josh had done anything necessarily wrong, but if you need to optimize Reed Shepard, and I think the Rockets do, you know, even on a night that he was one of five from three, he still made an impact.

He was phenomenal.

four of seven, I believe, inside the arc and made a couple of big middies, a driving shot when the Rockets were taking control of the game late in the third, early in the fourth quarter.

You need to surround him with some physicality, some defense, so that you're giving that unit reinforcements, and that's something that Emei's done.

I like that move.

We'll see if it works that way for every matchup, but

Whatever they did two weeks ago against the Hornets did not work, so you may as well try something different tonight and you had a week to plan it out.

But in terms of the overall defense, I think it starts with Kevin.

In addition to the scoring, he had eight rebounds, he had three blocks, and a steal.