Advertisement

Are the Rockets ruthless enough to stop another Warriors NBA finals appearance?

Hunter Felt

The only thing between yet another appearance for Steph Curry and Co in the NBA finals is a team who are underdogs but far from beloved by neutrals

Houston Rockets guard Chris Paul and James Harden celebrate the team’s win over the Utah Jazz.
Houston Rockets guard Chris Paul and James Harden celebrate the team’s win over the Utah Jazz. Photograph: Eric Christian Smith/AP

After two mostly non-competitive rounds, the NBA’s Western Conference playoffs are about to step up a gear thanks to the Houston Rockets. After finishing off the Utah Jazz in five games, the Rockets find themselves standing in the way of the Golden State Warriors’ fourth-straight finals, where they could play LeBron James’s Cleveland Cavaliers once again.

Not that that would be a nightmare match-up. A Warriors-Cavaliers finals would feature the league’s best team against the league’s best player. The Warriors aren’t “bad for basketball,” as some argue: there’s something about seeing greatness at work. The casual basketball fan wasn’t fantasizing about a Raptors-Jazz finals.

What isn’t so great for the NBA is a finals that feels pre-determined. Before the season began, practically everybody believed we would have a Cavaliers-Warriors finals for a fourth-straight year. Now, with the field down to four, it looks like the popular sentiment was spot on, and it’s not hard to feel that the last seven months of basketball could end up being mostly pointless.

Of course, the Cavaliers aren’t locks in the Eastern Conference finals as Sunday’s blowout loss to the Celtics showed. Maybe Brad Stevens can concoct a gameplan that continues to stop a LeBron James who has been in brilliant form.

These Rockets, on the other hand, were constructed with the sole purpose of stopping the Warriors. It’s why they made the franchise-altering move to trade for point guard Chris Paul and brought in defenders they thought matched up well (or as well as possible) against Steph Curry, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. They knew that the route to the championship would be through Golden State for the foreseeable future. Here is their moment of truth.

There are plenty of reasons to doubt the Rockets heading into this series. Rightly or wrongly, the team has a reputation of crumbling in the spotlight. James Harden himself is still looked at as something of a choker, a reputation dating back to his baffling disappearance act in his sole finals appearance with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Meanwhile Paul, one of the best point guards in the league for pretty much the entirety of his career, is just now making his first ever Conference finals.

They’re also not the most likable protagonists. Harden’s game relies on creating contact and getting to the free-throw line, something which gets him labeled as a flopper. Combined with his reputation of, ahem, conserving his energy on defense, a tendency he’s cut back on during the last few seasons, Harden’s become a difficult player to root for. Paul’s time with the Clippers earned him a reputation as a “physical” player, with “physical” a code word for “dirty.”

Aesthetically, the Rockets’ game is easy to respect but difficult to love. Like the Warriors, the Rockets are devotees of modern basketball strategy which emphasizes shot efficiency, particularly when it come to the three-pointer. This year, the Rockets broke the NBA record for most three-pointers in a season, a record that they themselves had set the year before. While the Warriors crush opponents with basketball pyrotechnics, the Rockets methodically outscore opponents, breaking the rhythm of the game by maximizing the number of free-throw attempts, joylessly smothering them in the process. In a vacuum, it’s no question that the Warriors are much more fun to root for than the Rockets.

But we’re not in a vacuum. The Warriors are on the verge of becoming a dynasty and when a team becomes as dominant as they have been over the last few seasons, it’s natural for them to play the villain (see also the New York Yankees and the New England Patriots). The Rockets might not be the giantslayers we wanted, but they’re going to get support simply for being “Whoever Is Playing The Warriors.”

Heck, Houston could pull it off. They had the best regular-season in the NBA, going 65-17, seven games ahead of the Warriors (who were, it should be added, without Curry for the season’s final stretch). Harden had the best year of his career, leading the league in points-per-game and won the scoring title, making him a near-lock to win his first MVP. Paul is coming off the best playoff game of his career against the Jazz in Game 5 last Monday. They’ve lost only two games so far in the postseason, the same as the Warriors.

The Warriors have even shown signs of relative weakness. Curry is returning from an injury that kept him on the bench for part of the series against New Orleans. Plus, the mere fact that Anthony Davis and a DeMarcus Cousins-less Pelicans were able to steal a game from Golden State should give Houston encouragement. This Warriors team is not invulnerable.

And from a neutral fan’s perspective, the Rockets don’t even necessarily have to win this series, they just need to make it close. If they can last six or seven games against the Warriors, and at least create the possibility that Golden State’s season could be in jeopardy, it would go a long way towards making this a postseason to remember.