Houston Rockets committed to playing Howard, Asik together?

The Houston Rockets did everything they could to find a power forward this preseason, hoping somebody would step up and claim the role.

Unfortunately for the Rockets, that wasn’t to be the case so the team decided to turn to playing both Dwight Howard and Omer Asik together, something that was brought up early in training camp but an idea they attempted to shy away from, at least at first.

Now after playing Asik and Howard together for the previous couple games, it apperas as if the Rockets will run with the combination which head coach Kevin McHale thinks they’ll eventually figure out:

"“There’s a lot of unknowns,” McHale said. “They’re both diligent. They’re both intelligent. They both have really good instincts defensively. That should work defensively. Offensively, it may be jammed up a little bit more. They’ll figure it out.“I played that way with bigs. I’ve seen it work before.”"

There was concern that given both Howard and Asik have similarly styled games, the pairing together wouldn’t work very well (at least on the offensive end) and while that remains to be seen, the two towering talents should be a force on the defensive end.

Add in that both players were going to get significant floor time together anyway, even if Asik was to come off the bench, it’s not really that strange to see them in the starting lineup together.