The locker-room tension that had dominated talk for days was gone, but the problems were clearly far from solved.

On Saturday, McGrady said there definitely are issues.

"I do know," he said, "that you can see that amongst ourselves, things are not how they used to be, meaning the bonding, the togetherness with our team."

A day later, Rockets coach Rick Adelman said he had seen signs of trouble and had addressed them.

"I see things," Adelman said. "I've been doing this a long time. There's not too much that slides past me, body language, comments, whatever. Once you've seen it over and over and over again, you get a pretty good sense right off the bat. That's why it's important as coaches, we keep trying to talk to them about it. I think it's important as a team that individually they talk to each other about it.

"You're going to have times throughout the year you're going to have guys irritated or whatever. It's important it does not carry over and stay and fester. That's what I keep trying to tell them."

It seemed to work. By Monday, the Rockets were loose and cheerful. The problem was that when the game began, they never switched over to intense.

As with so many games against struggling or short-handed teams, especially on the road, the Rockets tried to coast and were burned.

"This has happened now time after time on the road," Adelman said. "We go home and we play with more energy and resolve, with more of an urgency, and then we come out here knowing a team is going to play better at home and we don't come out with the effort. They did everything they wanted to do and we didn't put up any fight at all."

BUCKS 124, ROCKETS 114: As nice as it is to have name-brand stars, the sort that look good on billboards and television commercials, playing hard is better. The Rockets had the celebrities. The Bucks had Michael Redd, Andrew Bogut and Luke Ridnour on the bench with injuries.

But the Bucks played with energy and intensity that the Rockets could not come close to matching, rolled up a 25-point third-quarter lead and easily scored nine points more than any team has against the Rockets this season. The Bucks made 52.8 percent of their shots and had just eight turnovers as the Rockets played little defense.

Yao Ming and Tracy McGrady combined to make 3-of-17 shots and score just 10 points (seven for Yao, three for McGrady). And while the familiar Bucks stars watched, Ramon Sessions, Charlie Villanueva, Charlie Bell and Richard Jefferson combined for 97 points to demonstrate that how you play can be more important than who.