Interim coach J.B. Bickerstaff calls Rockets a 'broken' team

The Houston Rockets dropped their third straight game Wednesday night and head into the All-Star break on the outside of the Western Conference playoff bubble. The loss dropped them to 27-28. They didn't lose their 28th game last year until the second round of the playoffs.

Though the core roster pieces remain largely unchanged, these Rockets could hardly be more different than the 2014-15 version. Last season's Rockets blitzed opponents on both ends, competed like maniacs, and finished sixth in the league in defensive efficiency. They had backbone, surviving a cavalcade of injuries to win the Southwest Division, then clawing out of a 3-1 second-round hole to advance to the conference finals.

This year's Rockets, despite a far cleaner bill of health, look uninspired. They drag their feet when their shots don't drop or they don't get whistles. They're down to 27th in defensive rating. Head coach Kevin McHale was fired after just 11 games, but things have scarcely changed since J.B. Bickerstaff took over on an interim basis.

Bickerstaff offered a fairly straightforward diagnosis after the team's latest loss.

"We're broken," he said, according to ESPN's Calvin Watkins. "It's that simple. We're a broken team, and we all need to use this break to figure out how we're going to impact change. If we don't want to impact change, then we need to be made aware of that, too, and we'll go in a different direction. ... It's easy to see it's a fragmented bunch. You can't win that way."

Center Dwight Howard, whose body language hasn't exactly been a paragon of positivity, feels the team needs to loosen up, band together, and stop being so down on itself.

"I'm not going to talk about what's broken," he said, when asked to respond to Bickerstaff's assessment. "It's all we do is we talk about the issues that we have. Nobody is being positive."

Point guard Jason Terry, a 17-year vet who's more or less seen it all, still feels the Rockets can steady the ship and salvage their season after the All-Star break.

"If you look at it, the chemistry is not quite where you would like it, and hopefully the break can be what we need to get away from each other," Terry said. "It's like a marriage. You might need time away to get back right.

"I've seen worse."