Jalen Green is having another one of his smoldering stretches for the Houston Rockets. Over eight games in January, Green is averaging 30.2 points on 52/48/92 shooting splits. That 48% from 3 is coming on more than nine attempts per game.
Last Monday, Green put 42 on the Grizzlies. On Wednesday, he gave Denver 34. Then it was 28 in an OT loss to Kings as he refused to let Houston go quietly, sandwiching 57 feet worth of 3-pointers around an attacking finger roll over two defenders at their peak inside the final two minutes. Green has made 15 of his last 24 3-pointers and at least four triples in his last seven games, over which he’s registering an incendiary 70.1 true-shooting clip.
Houston, meanwhile, has won six of its last eight and currently owns the Western Conference’s No. 2 seed, two games clear of No. 3 Memphis entering play on Saturday. Right now, this is a match made in basketball heaven — a Rockets team built on top-end defense and depth that is a consistent alpha-dog scorer short of genuine contention.
Notice the word consistent. If Green had played like this all the time, there would be no question regarding his franchise-player status and less about whether the Rockets would be ready to compete with the big boys right now, especially in playoff time.
But he doesn’t play like this all the time. In fact, entering play on Saturday, the Rockets are eight points better per 100 possessions when Green is off the floor, per CTG. He’s coming off a two-month stretch in which he shot 29% from 3 and just 40% overall. He’s a 32% midrange shooter this season, per Cleaning the Glass, and 36% on all jumpers. His 34% clip on pull-up 3s waters down much of the excitement that his smooth, athletic shot creation evokes.
The fact is, Green hasn’t even been penciled in for consistent fourth-quarter minutes all season. There have been games he’s played virtually the entire quarter and games he’s sat for long stretches. You may think that a player of Green”s profile would have his most meaningful minutes decided by whether his shot is going in, but Ime Udoka is looking a lot closer at the defensive end, where Green has picked up his game this season and especially of late.
“[Udoka] doesn’t really care what’s going on, he’s going to tell you the truth and make you come sit down [on the bench],” Green recently told NBA TV. “Playing defense was a big part of that. Staying engaged. I think he knows that I can score naturally; he wanted to see it on both sides, and [see me] do other things other than scoring. If I wasn’t playing defense I had to go sit down. I’m just trying to stay on the floor and earn his trust to play the big minutes in the fourth quarter.”
The Rockets are plus-four per 100 with Green on the court, which supports the idea that this is not an indictment on the net value of his pros and cons. He’s a big part of a very good Rockets team that just performs even better, at least on paper and in much smaller samples, when Amen Thompson takes his place on the floor with the other four starters.
Thompson stands out as a generational defender, but even beyond him, the Rockets are loaded with stout defenders. Green has to pull his weight, sure, but nobody else offers his brand of dynamic, three-level offense; if Fred VanVleet and Dillon Brooks were brought in to raise Houston’s floor, it’s Green, and it has always been Green who raises the ceiling. The evidence has shown up in these spurts that have yet to be sustained.
Over Houston’s 11-game win streak last March, Green averaged over 30 a night, with a pair of 40-point games, on 50/45 shooting splits. But that sample fell in between a January-February stretch and a nine-game finishing sample in which he shot under 30% from 3. The year before that, just his second in the league, he put up 15 30-point games and two 40-pointers.
Entering this season, just four players in history had made more 3-pointers than Green’s 545 through the first three years of their career, and only 12 have more than his 115 so far this season. Green’s highs are super high, and he tends to take the Rockets with him. But we’ve seen it before. The question is, can it sustain this time?
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