Skip to main content

Are the Rockets for real?

When the Houston Rockets lost Yao Ming for the rest of the season due to injury, I was relieved. The Rockets were on a 12-game winning streak at the time, but I figured they weren't really championship contenders, and if someone has to get hurt, I'd rather it was someone who wasn't going to win it all anyway.

Since then, the Rockets have extended their streak to 22 wins in a row, a remarkable feat by anyone's standards. Should I be changing my tune?

There are some reasons to say yes, and some to say no. In the positive column: the Rockets' win streak has finally moved them to the top of the Western Conference standings, where they're one game ahead of the New Orleans Hornets and Los Angeles Lakers. (Not the trio I would have guessed at the start of the season.) Second, they've...well, I guess that's it, unless you count their winning 22 freaking games in a row.

However, I still think there are more reasons to be pessimistic. First, Houston is barely in first in the conference, despite winning more than a quarter of the season in a row. To me, that means their true level lies somewhere between where they started and where they are now, unless you think Yao was really holding them back. Another piece of the puzzle is Houston's average 5.5-point margin of victory, which is only third in the West behind L.A. and the dastardly Utah Jazz. And it's not even close to the 10.3-point margin averaged by the Boston Celtics, who have exceeded no one's expectations but my own. (To be fair, Houston's average during the current win streak is over twelve points, but I think that just underscores how bad they started.)

More to the point, who's the top-caliber player on Houston's roster that's going to carry them through the playoffs? I hope you think it's Tracy McGrady, since he's the only active Rocket scoring more than 13 points a game. While McGrady is a tremendous talent, and one of the most skilled basketball players on the planet, he's yet to show he can carry a team deep into the playoffs by himself. And I'm not sure if anyone has that talent: even Hall of Famers who've led their teams to titles in recent years have had guys like Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, and Kobe Bryant by their side. (Don't give me that teamwork crap, either: I guess it worked for the Pistons, once, but they had five starters who were all B+ level players, whereas the Rockets have one active player that good. Maaaaaaaybe two. Not five.)

As much as I'd love to see '90s-era Nuggets like Dikembe Mutombo and Bobby Jackson get rings (actually, scratch that, I love Jackson but still think Mutombo's a chump for chasing the cash to friggin' Atlanta), I just don't see it happening for the Rockets this year.

Comments

blaine said…
I'm with you on the Rockets. It's a great story, but they just don't have the talent to compete for a title. As much as I'd like to see T-Mac get some success in the post season, those feelings quickly go away every time I see Mutombo waving that yardstick he calls an index finger in someone's face. Even if the Rockets are able to win the rest of the remaining games on their schedule it doesn't mean anything. They will still have to get through the Western conference and I don't see that happening.
1:56 PM
John said…
The loss to the Celtics the other night pretty much exposed the Rockets. It was a great run, but they had help. In the end, the big boys in the NBA (and the NCAA) always step up.
11:33 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And now that it’s gone, it’s like it wasn’t there at all

I never thought this blog would last longer than Jay Cutler's career with the Denver Broncos. He was a talented young prospect so good that the Broncos, a powerhouse organization only one game removed from the Super Bowl the season before, traded up to get him—or, in other words, a player whose upside was so huge, the team sacrificed its present to get his future. And now? He's gone . How did it come to this? * * * Often I'll play devil's advocate with a move like this; you know, I'll try and explain how it makes sense from the other side of the table. Today, during the most disastrous Broncos offseason in memory—and the draft hasn't even happened yet, so settle in—I just don't have it in me. I don't think move is really defensible from a football standpoint. But what the heck: as the article above says, the Broncos are sending Cutler and a fifth-round draft pick this month to the Chicago Bears for quarterback Kyle Orton, Chicago's first-rounder in t...
11 comments
Read more

Who cares?

So we finally got done with the NBA playoffs after nearly two months of stretched-out play, and tomorrow's the draft. I really couldn't care less. I'm so burned out on the sport. Sadly, there's nothing else going on worth mentioning, so we might as well get into it. (Yes, baseball, Pugs, but I haven't really started following that this year yet, sorry.) Would the NFL hold its draft five days after the Super Bowl? Of course not, and not just because the league doesn't want to distract from the highlight of its annual calendar, the Pro Bowl. Of course, the NBA's situation is a little different. College play ended two and a half months ago, and the teams want to get draftees ready for the all-important summer league play (because the kind of guys that need the summer league always end up players). Not that when college basketball is over is relevant, anyway-the league is overrun by a bunch of high school players "just months removed from their prom" (...
12 comments
Read more

Did CU ever win the Pac-12?

In 2010, I bet a college buddy of mine (who longtime readers may remember as the only other contributor to Hole Punch Sports) that CU’s football team would not win the Pac-12 in the next 15 years. Guess what? It’s time for me to gloat, because I was right. Why we were doomed Back in the day, a lot of people made the argument that CU should join the Pac-12 because we’d get so much more TV money there. Of course, given college football is the answer to the question, “what if you had a sport where multiple teams were like the Yankees, and you created a whole universe of haves and have-nots?”, then yeah, you want to be aligned with some of the haves. But the question in my mind wasn’t, “will CU be better off with more money?” That’s an obvious yes. The question I asked was, will CU be any more competitive in their own conference if they’re competing against teams who are also getting more money? I couldn’t see why they would be. The mathematical angle Legend has it that Cowboys runn...
2 comments
Read more