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The Blazers came to Texas with a five wins series

The Rockets will be able to rely on the new duo (Brewer, Shved) tonight, but will need Harden in a great form to match the guests

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Considering the competition strength and the fact that they played a big number of games without key players, the Houston Rockets are pretty all right. They're the fourth in the West conference, and in the last 14 games, they only lost to teams who have the playoff spots right now. Their second defeat in a row happened on Saturday when the Hawks outplayed them in the Toyota Center 104-97.

Kevin McHale's guys played a bad first half-time where they scored the miserable 29.3%, and that cost them dearly. James Harden only had four points, all from the free throw line. The energy they lacked in the first part appeared in the third period which they started with the 9-0 series, and caught up. The fight was more or less even till the last two minutes. The score was 90-90, but the Hawks made a 7-0 series and killed any chance the home team had.

- They got out and fought more than we did at the beginning of the game. We weren't ourselves. In the first half-time, they did whatever they wanted, and that ended up costing us a lot. We all have to contribute more to help the team win, we talked about it at the half-time. That's how we got back in and gave ourselves a shot to win - Trevor Ariza described. He only had 13 points with 5/14 field goal.

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The duel might have ended differently if the Rockets didn't make 14 fouls in the last period, two of those in the offense, and those annulled the points they scored. To compare, the Hawks only had five fouls in that period, and ended up with 51.4% shots, while the Rockets only scored 39.5%.

- You always have tough periods in the season where you find out what you're made of. We have two tough games behind us, but we can't stop fighting and give up on each other. We have to keep on fighting even though we know we won't be perfect every night. We had a good ball flow in the last few games, but the defense wasn't up to the game. We can't lose focus, we have to stay strong and stick together - Dwight Howard pointed out. Despite the minor shoulder injury, he had 19 points (7/10), with 11 rebounds and five assists.

After scoring 35.3 points in the previous three games, James Harden had only 39 with the humble 13/39 field goal against the Pelicans and the Hawks. He made up for the lack of precision with 19 assists. One of the reasons of his decreased efficiency was probably the minor hamstring injury. That won't stop him from playing against the Portland Trail Blazers who came to Texas with a series of five wins.

Even though they played three overtimes in San Antonio the night before, Terry Stotts's guys easily finished the away game in New Orleans on Saturday. They won 114-88, and solved everything even before the last period.

- We knew they were going to talk about us playing three overtimes, so we tried to show we had energy from the start, regardless of what we went through the night before - Daiman Lillard said. He scored 17 points (6/12), after he treated the Spurs with 43 (16/29).

LaMarcus Aldridge did most of the job against the Pelicans. He had 27 points (12/20), and 12 rebounds. At the same time, he helped to limit Davis to only seven shots with 3/14 field goal. After he missed the game against the Spurs because of various injuries, Nicolas Batum came back to the starting five and helped the team with 11 points (5/8), and five assists.

This will be the first match between these two since the Blazers eliminated the Rockets in the last year's playoffs in six games. Aldridge was a big problem for the Houston guys, while Howard dominated on the other side. The injured Lopez won't be able to take of Howard now, so Howard might have a pretty good night.