Chris Paul explains origin of Rockets’ switch-heavy defense

CP3 explains origin of Rockets’ switch-everything defense

Former Houston Rockets guard Chris Paul stated:

“We started switching on all screens because we wanted to prepare to play [Golden State]. Alot of people were like ‘why are they switching everything, why are they playing like that?’ The reason why is because you would play a certain way in 95 percent of your games.

And then you’d play against Golden State, and they were switching all those screens, and now all the plays that you had been running don’t work.

So that’s what we figured out. It was like ‘Okay, we’re gonna play this way every night’ so when we would have to play against Golden State, we would know how to switch the screens.

And we’ll know how to play against them. Alot of that switching forces people to play iso. We had a good strategy man, I just got hurt.”

What got lost in the criticism of the Rockets’ defensive gameplan was the fact that the Rockets had a plethora of legitimate defenders, such as Luc Mbah a Moute, P.J. Tucker, Clint Capela, and Trevor Ariza, which made the switching scheme easy to employ.

Next: How Rockets have fared with strategy