Michael Shapiro

That's sort of my sense is that if you have Kevin playing this hard and this efficiently on top of it, you know, how does it not sort of light a fire under everybody?

He's low C, been very good.

And I thought you needed his rim protection on a night when, for the most part, it was rough for Shingun.

I mean, there were some rough stretches in pick-and-roll defense, but I think the bigger thing, for whatever reason, and this goes back multiple years, Grant Williams is a nightmare matchup for Alper and Shingun.

I don't know why it is, but if you want to be optimistic... So, the Rockets held the Hornets to 101 points, which bummed me out.

There was this stat that the Rockets had been pushing that they're 9-0 this year when they hold opponents below 100 points, and of those nine games...

Five have come since the start of January, reflecting the fact that the team's defense has been improving for a while.

It's just been sort of masked by the downturn offensively and with turnovers.

Well, the Hornets should have been below 100 tonight.

It took those two kickout threes off of just, you know, loose ball rebounds and air balls that landed in the laps of a guy for the Hornets to barely scrap across 100.

but they got 101 with an insane game from Grant Williams.

Grant Williams had 20 points and nine rebounds on seven of 10 shooting, four or five from three.

This is a guy who was like 26% on threes entering the night.

And he goes for, you know, 20 and nine on 80% from three.

So that's the, you know, the really glass half full on the Rockets defensively tonight.

Not only did they win that game on that side of the ball, 23 steals and blocks combined, but man, if not for like a crazy outlier performance by Grant Williams,

The Hornets probably don't even score 90.

The season.

And then in terms of the defense, I think Dorian Finney-Smith, Michael, I know you wanted to talk about him, and we honestly should, because this is the second straight really good performance from him.

Eight points, four boards, made a couple of threes, but, you know, the traditional box score stats...