Suns vs Rockets: The Yao Ming Marathon Preview

7:00pm vs. Rockets TV: NBATV RTV, FSN AZ

Yao Ming has been the catalyst to all the Rockets success thus far this season. You may be thinking that it is Tracy McGrady who is the Rockets best player but this season he has made it his goal to set up the big guy, and Yao is taking full advantage. Not to say that we can forget about T-Mac, who has scored like 15 points in under a minute, but if you can shut down Yao, it makes it very difficult for the Rockets to win.

Now, the Rockets are a great team. Last season's flop was a fluke, both star players were largely injured for most of the season. The year before the Rockets took the Mavs to seven games in a rediculous playoff series. This team is legit but we have their kryptonite. Like those other teams who try to pound the ball inside on the Suns, we know the Rockets glaring weakness. Yao cannot run a marathon. If we go small and make it our focus to run on every single possession, Yao Ming is only going to last a few minutes at best on the floor. This strategy has worked great in the past against the Rockets, and against other dominant centers like Shaq.

They simply do not have the conditioning to run with this team. If we run hard and often, we win this game. Of course we are also going to have to stay in front of T-Mac as best we can because he is a legitimate superstar. But I think Shawn Marion and Raja Bell can do an adequate job of bothering him enough so that he doesn't catch fire. Tracy has also been doing a much better job of enabling his teammates this season so the other guys are going to have to make sure they stay with their man. Most importantly, they need to run run run and run some more. Yao is so bad against this strategy, we can actually blow them out, as long as we can defend well McGrady enough. Barbosa should be back in the lineup tonight which is good because we are much faster with him on the floor. Look for Coach Mike to go extra small tonight.