Howard misses Rockets’ game with back tightness

While Howard and fellow star James Harden look very comfortable with each other, the ball hugging tendencies of the latter is reportedly not sitting well with Howard, who has significantly given up a lot of opportunities in posting up and creating shots for his team. “I couldn’t make a 3 tonight, but just getting to the basket and my pull-up game was there”.

Jimmy Butler finished with 19 points and 10 assists for Chicago, while Pau Gasol had 17 points and 18 rebounds for his 19th double-double this season.

Even center Dwight Howard is playing well, shooting 31-of-42 from the field over his last four games.

It turns out “soon” was Thursday night as Gobert made his first appearance in a Jazz uniform since November 30 when the Jazz suffered a three-point loss at home. While this is obviously great news for Gobert owners, it would still be wise to wait on putting him back in your lineups until he works his way back into game shape a bit. Gobert has missed the last 18 games while rehabbing his knee injury and is actually returning slightly sooner than anticipated, coming back in a little more than five weeks.

“I think we were playing for the most part pretty well defensively; offensively we were too slow”, Harden said of the first half. “Rodney going down, losing another key guy, and we’re still battling and still in the game at the end”.

Howard, who played a season-high 41 minutes on Tuesday night in Utah, missed half of the 2014-15 season with back-related ailments.

In fact, mostly solid rotations and rebounding by all of the Rockets bigs – Harrell, Terrence Jones and Clint Capela – helped propel the Rockets to get out and run. Houston produced 12 fast-break points following the intermission, 10 in the third quarter, to set the pace to its liking. Ariza pushed the Rockets to a 57-55 lead, an advantage Houston upped to 72-66 entering the fourth quarter.

The 30-year-old is averaging 13.9 points, 11.7 rebounds, 1.6 assists, 1.6 blocks, and one steal in 32.7 minutes of action per contest.

“It’s a style that we’ve played before”, he said.