Interview: Bahadır Erdil, TrendBasket
On the last day of 2016-17 NBA Regular Season, the Houston Rockets got a 123-118 road win over the Sacramento Kings. After the 55th win of the season, Rockets’ energetic power forward Montrezl Harrell discussed his performance in this season, friendship in the locker room and their chances against OKC Thunder with us.
What do you think about your performance this year?
I’ve definitely gotten better, grown as a player. Coming back for my second year, I definitely understand the game a lot better. The system we have here is not a hard system to understand, so I feel like I improved tremendously from my first year. I still think I have a lot of stuff to work on.
Compared to last year, can you easily say that the friendship among the team is better?
I feel like it is. I feel like everybody’s came in and bought into what we want to do, what Coach wants us to do. We just grew from that. Everybody is coming in and playing for each other. We pick each other up when somebody is down. That is the kind of atmosphere we have in the locker room.
In his sophomore season in the NBA, Harrell played 58 games and averaged 9.1 points, 3.8 rebounds, 1.1 assists in 18.3 minutes per game.
How do you see your chances against Oklahoma City Thunder in the Playoffs?
I think we have a really good chance. We know what those guys have on each side of the floor. We know they have an MVP candidate in Russell Westbrook but we are going to go out and do things in our way. We are going to play smart basketball and take the open shots we have. We know what Russell is going to try to do but that is not going to stop what we do on defense.