On Monday, in the aftermath of the Houston Rockets’ 13-point win over the Orlando Magic, Steven Adams noted something that three quarters of the way through the season should be apparent. “This,” Adams said, “isn’t a fluke.” The this Adams was referring to was how Houston, down two starters with Fred VanVleet and Amen Thompson out, came together to beat Orlando. It could have been how the Rockets have collected 41 wins, matching last season’s total. Or that Houston’s winning percentage (62.1%) is the best since the Mike D’Antoni era. Or that the Rockets, a playoff outsider since 2020, are on track to crack the Western Conference’s top six.
“From the start to now,” Adams said, “we’ve grown tremendously.”
You think? Two years ago, the franchise was in a free fall. The talent was bad. The chemistry was worse. The Rockets finished the 2022–23 season 22–60; brutal, until you consider it was the high water mark of Stephen Silas’s three years on the job.
I criticized the decision to can Silas. I thought he was dealt a bad hand in Houston, hired to coach James Harden and John Wall, fired after being unable to succeed with a team that included Kevin Porter Jr. and Christian Wood. Scapegoating Silas, I reasoned back then, was like blaming a deckhand for the sinking of the Titanic.
Since then, the Rockets have engineered a remarkable turnaround. They hired Ime Udoka. They drafted Thompson. They replaced goofballs like Porter and Wood with serious vets in VanVleet, Adams and Dillon Brooks. They were a .500 team last season. This year, they have the league’s third-best defense, per NBA.com. They are a nightly terror on that end, deploying a legion of versatile defenders at opposing wing scorers. On Wednesday, Houston collected its 41st win of the season against the Phoenix Suns. In 37 minutes, Suns star Kevin Durant scored 19 points—just the sixth time Durant has been held under 20 points this season.
Make no mistake: Houston is a contender. The offense can be sputtering—the Rockets are 15th in offensive rating—but more often than not they score enough to give the defense a chance. Against Phoenix, they were outshot 53.4% to 45.5%. Houston is 29–9 when scoring 110-plus points this season. The Rockets have won 20 games by 10 or more points. In clutch situations, Houston has been terrific. It is 33–7 when it leads at the start of the fourth quarter and 13–8 in games decided by five points or fewer.
Last week, during a swing through Houston, I talked with Udoka about this season’s surprising surge. Certainly the Rockets expected improvement this season; Houston had an 11-game winning streak last March and organic growth alone from Thompson, Jalen Green, Alperen Sengun and Jabari Smith was bound to be worth at least a few more wins. But competing for a top-four seed in the final month of the season?
“We knew we could take another step from that,” Udoka says. “I think last year was building a foundation to be competitive on a nightly basis and change the perception of teams that were coming into play us. I think we did that pretty easily, beat a lot of really good teams and got to .500. But this year was more about, the foundation had already been laid. And so for us it’s obviously playoffs.
“We hold our guys to a high standard. And my message, even from my first press conference was like, our youth isn’t an excuse for anything. And so I don’t subscribe to the idea that because you’re young, you just make the same mistakes over. I want guys that are cerebral, understand and move on from those. And so a year and a half into it for me is enough time to figure certain things out and grow and learn from those.”
Rafael Stone was more diplomatic. Stone, the Rockets general manager, put this team together. He resisted overtures—lots of them—from rivals at the trade deadline because he wanted to see what this group can do. As thrilled as he is by its progress, he has tried not to make any predictions.
“The honest to God truth is I’ve tried hard not to expect anything,” Stone says. “I believe in our players. I think we’re talented, but we’re obviously very young. For me it’s less expecting that we’re going to win X number of games or that our progress will look like this, and more expecting that everybody’s going to work really hard and improve. And so long as I’m seeing that, then I want to be happy.”
They certainly have figured out a few things. Thompson is a beast, a defender Udoka feels comfortable deploying on anyone from point guards to power forwards. Brooks, an always reliable defender, is pushing 40% shooting from three. Sengun continues to develop a Nikola Jokic–type game, while Green shows flashes of being the clutch-time scorer the Rockets need.
“I wouldn’t say I’m surprised that any of the guys jumped,” Udoka says. “I think last year when Alpy took a big step defensively earlier, that was great. And you saw it click for Jabari and Jalen, they kind of went on that roll late in the season. Amen did when he finally played consistently. And so no, I always look at it like, if you got it, you got it. And if you’re a leader, you’re a leader. If you have high IQ as a young guy, that’s what you have. And so a year and a half is enough time to get it right.”
So what’s the ceiling for Houston? The Rockets have done the drafting, development and are on the verge of getting the team into the playoffs. Conventional wisdom says the next step is a postseason butt kicking from a more seasoned opponent.
Can Houston skip that step? Udoka points to the Rockets vets—Brooks and Adams have lengthy playoff résumés, while VanVleet won a championship with the Toronto Raptors—as reasons to believe the team can compete in the postseason. And he believes the team can build on regular-season success that includes wins over the Denver Nuggets, Cleveland Cavaliers and Boston Celtics. Age, Udoka reiterated, isn’t an excuse for failure.
“We’ve done it, we’ve shown we could do it, beat all the good teams consistently,” Udoka says. “We showed that we can do it, understanding it’s all going to get ratcheted up and our focus and attention to detail is going to have to go way up as far as that. But I do look at the real game experiences we had last year. This is the deepest team I’ve had. And I’ve been around some really good teams.”
That’s Houston. Really good. Certainly not a fluke.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Rockets’ Surprising Rise to Title Contender Isn’t a Fluke.
