NEW YORK _ Mike D'Antoni was not panicking. Not quite yet.
The coach most responsible for putting NBA scoreboards on steroids was not worried that his Houston Rockets had the NBA's 26th-ranked offense entering Friday night's game against the Nets. Nor was he worried that his team, which finished with the best record in the NBA last season, had lost four of its first five games.
D'Antoni, for now, has faith in his offense and faith in his team. He has faith that things will start to click once Chris Paul and James Harden are back in the lineup together, which should happen Saturday night in Chicago. He has confidence that Carmelo Anthony, at age 34, will adjust to playing this offense and the fact that he usually will be coming off the bench. He has confidence that his players' defensive focus will return once their shots start falling and they aren't so distracted.
And on Friday night, that faith paid off. The Rockets, thanks to a big performance from Anthony off the bench, snapped a four-game losing streak with a 119-111 win over the Nets at Barclays Center. Anthony scored a season-high 28 points, including back-to-back 3-pointers in the fourth quarter.
It was a much-needed win for a team that was being labeled as one of the NBA's biggest busts.
The Rockets' offense, the second-best in the league last season with an average of 112.4 points per game, scored only 85 points in a loss to Portland on Tuesday and 89 in a loss to Utah in the fourth game of the season. They entered Friday night's game shooting 41.2 percent, the second worst in the league.
What's more, the problems went both ways. The Rockets clearly are struggling to adjust to the loss of key defenders Trevor Ariza and Luc Mbah a Moute. Houston entered the game allowing an average of 116.3 points per game and 49 percent shooting. In the first half Friday night, Houston allowed the Nets to shoot 64.9 percent.
D'Antoni and his staff have combed through the tape and crunched the stats, and they can come up with no reason that the team is off to this kind of start.
"Analytically, there's no reason why. We're taking the same shots we did last year and just shooting at a 20 percent less clip," D'Antoni said. " ... We obviously have some kind of malaise we have to shrug off and get going."
It's hard to ignore the irony of Houston's slow start, considering what is going on around the rest of the league. With more and more teams playing the kind of offense D'Antoni first brought to the league, scoring has exploded this season. There have been seven games in which teams scored at least 140 points. In all of last season, that happened only 13 times. League-wide, teams are averaging nearly six more points a game than they did last season.
"That guy changed the league," Nets coach Kenny Atkinson said of D'Antoni before the game. "That's unbelievable. I see a lot of teams copying what he was doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago, which is the biggest compliment.
"He is a guy who was ahead of his time. That was before analytics. He saw the tipping point or the advantage before everybody else did. Which is a credit to him, and now of course, typical Mike, he's taken it to the extreme, because he's a smart guy and he's not afraid to take risks. That's what I love about him. He doesn't care what the rest of the crowd thinks."
No, he definitely doesn't. And on Friday night, that faith paid off.
