the more things change, the more they stay the same.

while the rockets managed to trade punches with the mavs for 43 minutes and keep the game interesting, we collapsed down the stretch of the game when the result is decided.

i'll be the first to admit that the rockets were never a mentally tough team. inability to deal with full court pressure, errant/lazy passes, bad shot selections, ill-adviced threes... you can count on most of the above to happen in the 4th quarter or in certain game 7's... i thought it'd be different this year...

same old, same old. it's shouldn't even surprise anyone anymore.

but it just ticks me off *that* much more since the loss came at the hands of dallas. i thought i put this loss behind me last night, but i couldn't even sleep well, waking up on numerous occassions thinking about that game and the things that went wrong.

it's only the 4th game out of 82, and we have new players with a new coaching playing in a new system. we fought well against a very good dallas team for majority of the game on the road with one of their bench players that couldn't miss. it's too early to hit the panic button.

but we've got a lot of work to do.