J.B. Bickerstaff Says the Rockets are a ‘Broken Team’

The Houston Rockets dropped their third in row Wednesday night, and head coach J.B. Bickerstaff did not hold back in his assessment of the squad following a 116-103 road loss to the Portland Trail Blazers.

Bickerstaff says his team (27-28) is “broken”.

Jason Terry was even more unguarded, accusing the Rockets of a total lack of chemistry.

Per the Houston Chronicle:

They fell to 27-28 and to ninth in the Western Conference, closer to the bottom four teams than the top four that they had once assumed would include them. Save a few misleading stretches on Wednesday, they had spent the night bouncing from disinterested to disillusioned, playing like strangers or worse. […] When they were through, the Rockets could no longer cling to the memory of what they once were or expected to be. They faced what they had become with center Dwight Howard and guard James Harden meeting with Rockets interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff and general manager Daryl Morey long into the night.

 

Morey would not comment about those talks, but Bickerstaff had already summed what had become of his team. […] “We’re broken,” Bickerstaff said he told his players in an unusually long session after the game. “Right now, we’re a broken team. We all can use this break to figure out how we’re going to impact change. If we don’t want to impact change, we need to be made aware of that, too, and we’ll go in a different direction. We can’t continue to go out and play this way. It’s easy to see. It’s a fragmented bunch. You can’t win that way.”

 

“If you look at it, the chemistry is not like you would like it,” Terry said. “Hopefully, the break will be what we need to away from each other. I’ve seen worse. […] Genuinely, do we like to play with each other? That’s as simple as I can get it. If you can’t get five guys on the court at one time to function as a unit, you’re not going to have success.”