Rockets: Ryan Anderson needs to break out of his slump

The starting power forward for the Rockets is in an extended slump and needs to improve.

Ryan Anderson has been an up and down shooter during his tenure with the Houston Rockets. To begin the season, he was fantastic and looked worth the price of $20 million a year. However, after this long slump, Ryno hasn’t looked worth half of that.

On the season, Anderson’s shooting numbers are not really that poor. His strong start to the season is making up for his slump. Overall for the year, he is shooting 37.1% from deep on 6 attempts per game. That shooting percentage is just slightly lower than his career average.

What happened to Ryan Anderson? In this post, we’re going to look at a couple of reasons for his rapid decline. Ryno needs to break out of this slump if he wants to continue to get chances from Coach D’Antoni.

Let’s examine his struggles, then offer some positivity:

Shooting percentage

With the exception of a couple of decent games, the extended slump for Ryan Anderson started with the game against the Portland Trail Blazers. In that game on December 9, Ryno went just 0-2 from deep and played just 17 minutes. He also had just one rebound.

Including that game, since then Anderson has shot an abysmal 24.6% from 3 and has looked useless in most of these 15 games. He has struggled to make an impact and the Rockets are just 8-7 during the slump.

Hesitancy

Ryan Anderson has been much more hesitant to shoot the ball during this slump. He’ll have open shots that he either passes up or he pumps fakes and is forced to take a fadeaway.

While you can see this claim by watching the games, the numbers back it up as well. During this stretch of 15 games, Ryan Anderson is shooting just 4.3 shots per game from 3. To put that in comparison, he was taking 7 per game last season and 7.1 until the Portland game.

It seems like Anderson has just lost confidence in his shot. For someone who is being paid quite a bit of money to stretch the floor for James Harden and Chris Paul, that’s a huge problem.

Positives

There are a couple of positives that we can look at for Ryan Anderson. First off, he has not seemed to lose any confidence, according to Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle. He recognizes that he is slumping, but is willing to work out of it.

ICYMI, Rockets' Ryan Anderson remains confident despite slump https://t.co/j91nAWeky3 via @houstonchron

— Jonathan Feigen (@Jonathan_Feigen) January 8, 2018

Ryan Anderson is also a hard worker who should be able to break this slump. We saw his worth ethic just this past summer when he came into training camp in the best shape of his career. Hopefully, that same work ethic will get him out of this decrease in production.

If not, then the Rockets will possibly need to look to trade Ryno. But that’s an article for a different day.

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