Rockets need creative Adelman

After hanging with the Lakers longer than any other opponent in the 2009 playoffs, the Rockets were strip-mined of their key personnel during what could end up being the most damaging offseason in franchise history.

First it was determined that the hairline fracture in Yao Ming's left foot will sideline him for the 2009-10 season. Then free agent Ron Artest, on the short list of the league's top shutdown defenders, took his turbulence (pro and con) to Los Angeles for a better shot at winning a championship. Meanwhile, the enigmatic, often-injured Tracy McGrady remains enigmatic and on the shelf, with no set timetable for his return from microfracture knee surgery and no confident prognosis about how it will affect team chemistry if and when he's ready to play.

Add in an unbalanced roster that, in Yao's absence, contains as many as eight forwards but not a single natural center, and the question is not if, but how tragicomically far the Rockets will fall from their 53-29 record of a year ago.

Houston's ace in the hole is the NBA's most underrated coach, Rick Adelman. Some might laugh at the notion of Adelman in the Hall of Fame, but he's building a persuasive case: He ranks 12th all time in regular-season wins (860), ninth in playoff victories (79) and eighth in regular-season winning percentage (.616) among those who have coached at least 500 games. Despite never having an iconic superstar on his roster (no Bird, Magic, Kobe, Kareem, Russell or Jordan; Clyde Drexler in Portland was probably the best player he's coached), he's made the playoffs in 16 of his 18 seasons, and won 50 games or more 11 times. Every one of the four teams that hired him improved its record during his first year, and every one of the three that fired him won fewer games the following year.

Yes, it's true that an Adelman-coached team has never won a championship. But neither has a team coached by Don Nelson or Hall of Famer Jerry Sloan. And while basketball pundits routinely genuflect in Nelson's and Sloan's direction, Adelman has a better regular-season winning percentage than both and more playoff victories than Nelson despite coaching 12 fewer seasons.

You want strategic innovation? In Sacramento, Adelman re-tailored the high-post offense he learned while playing in Chicago with coach Dick Motta, stationing slick-passing big men such as Vlade Divac, Chris Webber and Brad Miller near the free-throw line, where they had room to assist on cuts to the basket and kick-outs for three-pointers. Today, most NBA teams have a variation on that scheme, and the jousting among big men is as lively at the elbow as it is in the low post.

You want player motivation and management? Adelman has a long history of turning supposed goofballs and malcontents into productive contributors, from Rod Strickland to Latrell Sprewell to Chris Webber to the volatile Artest. His first season in Houston, in 2007-08, he fostered an esprit de corps that produced a 22-game winning streak (10 of them without Yao) during the second half of the season. Last year, the Rockets were arguably the league's grittiest overachievers, extending the Lakers to seven games in the second round despite losing McGrady and then Yao.

But Adelman has been around long enough to realize that grit without talent only takes you so far.

"We're going to have a hard time making the playoffs this season," he said. "We lost our top three scorers -- 60-plus points. That's very hard to make up. It will be my most interesting season in a long time because there are no stars and a bunch of role players. We have to get them to believe if they play hard they can still win."

A brutal early schedule won't help. Sixteen of Houston's first 26 games are on the road, a stretch that includes three meetings with Dallas, two with the Lakers and matchups with Cleveland and San Antonio. Less than two weeks before the opener, Adelman's projected starters included three holdovers from last season: breakout point guard Aaron Brooks, Argentine banger Luis Scola at power forward and glue-guy small forward Shane Battier. Free-agent signee Trevor Ariza -- coming over from the Lakers in a de facto swap for Artest -- will join Brooks in the backcourt, and grinder Chuck Hayes, who, at 6-foot-6 is a foot shorter than Yao, is Adelman's first choice to fill the gaping void at center. "I'm leaning toward Chuck because he's by far our best interior defender and one of our best team defenders," Adelman said.