Jul. 15—LAS VEGAS — The Rockets were somehow still within seven with 3 1/2 minutes left. They did not know how, but there was time to salvage what had been their first real test of the summer league schedule.They had seemed dead-legged and sluggish from the start. They had collapsed to start the fourth quarter. Cam Whitmore, who for the two previous games had been so effective he seemed out of place among the summer leaguers, couldn’t shoot straight. Reed Sheppard, though still occasionally effective, had turned back into a rookie.Still, the Rockets had somehow remained in the game.Then it fittingly crashed in a final reminder that this NBA stuff, even in a summer league setting, is not so easy after all.Nate Williams, who had scored relatively reliably, took a rebound the length of the floor and to the rim, then missed his layup. Sheppard missed an open 3-pointer, one of just two he attempted all night. Whitmore badly missed another 3, falling to 1 of 15 in the game.If summer league is about lessons, among other things, the Pistons on Monday served up several in an 87-73 win against a Rockets team that had won its first two games in Las Vegas in routs.“They came out and punched us in the mouth early, and we never got over the hump,” said Sheppard, who had 15 points with two assists, but with four turnovers and six fouls. “You got to give credit to them. They came out and played with a lot of energy. They wanted it more and they played way better than we did.”Games like that happen in summer league, especially later, when the games begin to pile up. Sheppard made a point to say playing a back-to-back is “not an excuse to play like we did.“We’ll learn from it and get better,” he said. “That’s the beauty of the summer league, you got to learn, and you got to figure things out before the season. When you get to the regular season, they’ll have other plays and schemes to go against different things.”Mostly, the Rockets never adjusted to a physical, aggressive defense, moving the ball less when they needed to move it more, repeatedly charging into packs of bodies when it had failed them so often before.It might not have mattered had the Rockets executed better, they shot so poorly. Sheppard and Whitmore had their first challenge ...
