The Houston Rockets have fired coach Kevin McHale following a 4-7 start, according to a report by Yahoo Sports’ Adrian Wojnarowski.
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“First and foremost, we’re in a business where expectations certainly drive decisions at times”, Stevens told reporters before his team hosted the Mavericks. Assistant Chris Finch will become associate head coach.
Stevens isn’t the only one who publicly has questioned Houston’s decision to part ways with McHale, who led the Rockets to the Western Conference finals last season.
Rockets general manager Daryl Morey said that the Rockets decided to make the move because the players were not responding to him anymore. But he may want a break after watching the Rockets drop their last four games in largely listless fashion – the last defeat a 111-95 collapse against the Celts on Monday. “The team was not responding to Kevin”, Morey said via ESPN.
The next day the team called a players-only meeting.
J.B. Bickerstaff – McHale’s former assistant, the son of longtime National Basketball Association head coach Bernie Bickerstaff and one of the more highly regarded young assistant coaches in the league – will take over on an interim basis, and will be charged with trying to lead the team out of the malaise it now finds itself in. “We just weren’t playing with any juice, with any rhythm”.
While other people figure out the precise Xs and Os which can enable McHale to engineer this turnaround, what is a reasonable timetable for Houston to get this larger issue fixed? “He’s going to get a chance to get a few rest here, probably jump on TV and have a blast doing that, and then there will be a lot of teams wanting to hire him, because he did a fantastic job in Houston”. “Everyone needs to look and figure out what to do better and I think the players were doing that (Tuesday) and I think it was positive”. Each guy said what their role was and how every single night they’re going to contribute to that role.
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The Houston Rockets have parted ways with Kevin Mchale, so they are in need of a new coach. Harden’s struggles hurt early in the season, and nobody else picked up the pace on offense. He’s hitting 37.2 percent of his shots overall and a disconcerting 26.2 percent from three-point range on more than nine attempts per game.
