The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - Ime Udoka Discusses Rockets Recent Struggles

Episode Date: March 13, 2026

Ime Udoka Discusses Rockets Recent Struggles 

Emay, it's Matt. Ross, thanks for spending some time with us. Do you just flush the game film out? Do you get rid of the stat sheet as fast as possible after looking at that game against Denver a couple nights ago? How do you take away from that contest against the Nuggets? No, you look at the third quarter and see what happened for us to go down by that large of a deficit. After, you know, 53 to 47 first half where we missed a lot of wide open shots, made some mistakes and turnovers and, you know, still holding the 53 and would be within striking range.

obviously with the late 3 by Brown to put them up to put them up six what happened in the third quarter and that's what we really focused on today. Is it and it's tough because you run through superstars every time you played. You say, all right, we held Yokic's 16 points. We should be in a much more competitive situation. Does the aggravation come in to say, well, if a team's got two stars, you've got to do the best you can to stop him and you were able to stop Yokic. Murray unfortunately had a big game offensively.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's the tandem that you always have to worry about with them. He got a lot late as well, and the game was kind of out of hand. So we did a decent job overall, but you can't let Cameron Johnson have 17 and Brown have 19 and Hardaway 14 off the bench as well as Valentuanus with 12. So just too much scoring overall. You've got to kind of pick your poison, how you're going to go after the old catch is to go after him and let him facilitate for everybody else or, you know, guard him 101 and he'll be more of a scoring mentality. And so too much of both. He scored and got his triple double, but other guys scored at a too high over range for sure. Any logical thinking basketball fan knows the stats in the three-point range were a one-off, free throws, especially the three-point numbers.

What do you take it as a coach to go, well, it's hard to make only four of 33? Was there a hesitation? Was there just trying to get shots up just because the deficit was starting to grow in the second half a little bit? No, I mean, the first half, we didn't make it that many either. So it wasn't like we started launching because of the deficit. You know, they went 17 for 32. We go 4 for 34. They go 16 for 22 from the free throw line.

We go 5 for 14. Unless you're perfect on defense, those numbers are going to be hard to overcome. But it was a carbon copy of what they did, which is go after Kevin. You know, Guard Alpi 101 with Yokic go after them with other guys. And if we watched the pregame film, what we showed was getting rid of the ball, taking care of it and getting wide open shots. And that's the last game where we had the blowout at their place. We made those same exact looks.

And so sometimes it's as simple as making them. But there are other things you can control, obviously, the turnovers are too high, them getting out in transition, and then defending personnel and losing some of their shooters. One of the things we often talk about is talking heads in the media is morale, body language, that type of stuff. How much does that matter? Is that something we make too much of it?

And just about trying to keep the guys' spirits up with, I mean, the good win, of course, against the Raptors, but the bad losses in San Antonio and Denver. Yeah, I mean, our group, you know, we could see that the frustration pretty, I think we all have a higher expectation than the way we're playing right now. Everything's still in front of us and we kind of control our own destiny as far as how we want to finish the season and the standings and all those things. But definitely frustration in those games specifically, especially when you, you know, have a close game where you don't play that well, honestly, and then we kind of lose hold

of the rope in the second half. And so, yeah, we're always disappointed when we play, whether it's a bad quarter or a bad half and, you know, to get our heads down, only down five or seven, you know, in the third quarter is not a great sign. But what our group does a good job of doing is bouncing back. And the night after San Antonio, obviously, we played a good Toronto team that plays physical with energy. And our energy was totally different. And so same thing as the start of the Denver game. You know, we were, we had the right intentions.

Didn't make the shots. But I think we were very competitive there. So we can put games behind us pretty quickly and bounce back to the next. And we're going to do the same thing tonight. Rockets head coach Ema Adoka with us here on a sports talk 790 a bit of a swoon shooting the 3-4

Reed Shepard. Have you been happy with his looks? Yeah, I mean, he's going to, you know, you're not always going to make shots, but the quality of the look is the thing that counts. And we know he's going to knock down a high percentage when he gets those looks. And so that was that. You know, Atari's had a little tough shooting stretch.

Jabari had one early in the season. Alpi's gone through his things. And so making shots is an art for sure, and the more consistent you can be, the better will be, but guys are going to have many slumps here and there, and you've got to impact the game other ways. You know, still play defense, still move the ball and do the things to get yourself going, which is, you know, in the case of some of our bigger wings, crash the glass, get on transition, turn defense to offense, and you see a guy like Jabari bounced back because

of those things. You have two players. Reeds playing the most minutes in his life, probably in this one season. Tari has not been on a long stretch of being able to count on for him. And matter of fact, he's played 15 straight games. what is the advice to each one of those two guys individually the rest of the way, knowing that, hey, we need you, our depth is not as good as it is. You got to come through for us here. I know you're going through a lot of minutes.

Most of you've played in a while, but man, every single night, it feels like there's a flip in the standings car depending on one individual matchup. Yeah, the first thing is everybody's going through that this time of season. It goes quickly after all-star breaks. And right before all-star break, you know, the dog days of the season, you have to push through. And so for young guys, you know, Reed not playing a lot of minutes last year. It's the first time for him.

But, you know, be aggressive, be confident, but also pay attention to detail and all the little things that you can do to impact the game. And so with Tari, you know, his health is much better. He's playing in the back-to-backs, like you said. And although you're having your ups and down shooting, you know, Tari isn't relying on that only to affect the game.

And so for them, it's just continue to take advantage of your matchups. Like I always say, I'm in. Alper and Kevin are going to draw the main deal. defenders per night and we want the other guys to dominate the matchups and for the most part they do that. All right, New Orleans in the night, that 25 point loss still kind of unsettling the way they got to us in New Orleans earlier this year. Does that, that game was so long ago, does that, is that thought about much or do you go, you know what? We have so many games coming up and so many games we've just played that we don't think about a game, a random game earlier in the season.

I mean, it's a very different team now, what they're doing and who they're playing, but, you know, we look back on a lot of those games. There's missed opportunities for us to obviously be having that big lead and losing overtime against them. And so for us, it's continued to play the right way heading down the stretch regardless of the opponent. And they're playing really good basketball right now. They're seven and three in their last 10.

They got Fears and Queen coming off the bench now, so they're playing more veteran lineups out there with Dejante Murray coming back. And Williamson, outside of missing one game, has played, you know, the most games in a row of his career. And so he's playing at a high level at the five now. So still a talent, still talented guys out there, and we have to come ready to play. Thank you for the visit. We'll see you later tonight.

We appreciate it. Thank you.