ROBOT CLEANER
Star power, consistent playoff berths help create great expectations for the Rockets
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The Rockets probably don’t have to state their obvious goal, their unabashed championship aspirations, so openly. Their actions, having made so many win-now moves, already had announced all that. Still, they don’t hold back.
There likely would be something disingenuous about pretending otherwise. Some of the declarations even can be boilerplate. But the Rockets don’t just speak of their pursuit of a championship 25 years since the franchise last held the Larry O’Brien Trophy; they drop it into conversations about other things.
That quest is that much a part of who they are. On a team with MVPs and playoff runs, and perhaps a shrinking window, the NBA championship pursuit shapes everything. Even as a team in the middle of the Western Conference playoff pack, with the front-runners boasting past Finals MVPs, there has been no interest in lowering expectations, including their own.
Asked about the Rockets’ improving defense, James Harden said, “That’s going to win us a championship, on the defensive end.”
When Austin Rivers was asked about the basket that gave him a career-high 41 points, he said, “When you do it on one of the best teams in the NBA, a team fighting for a championship and everybody’s playing the right way, that’s the best way to do it.”
Even Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni, when speaking of the need to play with pace, went there.
“We try to talk about it a lot. How important is winning a championship to you?” he said. “I think we all have faith that guys want the championship bad enough.”
That hunger comes from years of contention spent without taking the next step.
The Rockets’ eight consecutive playoff appearances are the longest active streak in the NBA and the longest in franchise history. The 14-year run with .500 or better records is the longest in the league. Their record in D’Antoni’s four seasons is the second-best in the NBA, after reigning champion Toronto.
After so many seasons with relatively few changes in their status, never quite becoming the team to beat but usually belonging in the pack of contenders, impatience is not limited to a fanbase that had often been tempted to dream of bigger things. This is especially true with a franchise that has so often brought in big-name stars, including Dwight Howard, Chris Paul and most recently Russell Westbrook to go with Harden, who has been in the top three in MVP voting in five of the past six seasons.
Before the restart began, general manager Daryl Morey put it directly.
“Two of the greatest players ever on our team,” he said of Harden and Westbrook, “we should win this thing.”
Even before the season began, Morey said there was only one goal that would be considered sufficient, a boom-or-bust mentality that leaves all but one team disappointed.
“That’s how we’ve measured success the past few seasons, so I guess we’ve been a bust,” he said. “Yeah, we’re just focused on one thing.”
By the end of the seeding games, he was ready to consider the championship race relatively “wide-open,” increasing the sense of opportunity to take the next step.
“It’s one of the most exciting moments in NBA history,” Morey said. “We have a historic situation we’re all facing. We’re all playing for a championship. I count eight teams that can win it. When does that ever happen? It’s really, really interesting. It’s exciting. And I think we’re one of those teams.”
With the playoffs to begin Tuesday against a Thunder team that so far exceeded expectations that the season can already be considered a success, the Rockets have not just accepted that they will be graded on a the most demanding of pass/ fail basis, but have chosen to embrace it. At this point, there might not be much of a choice.
That attitude comes from the top down. After the Rockets lost Game 6 in the conference semifinals at home to the Warriors, Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta was livid.
“It’s unacceptable,” he said after the Rockets were eliminated. “We just have to be better. I know that we’re going to rise to the occasion, and our time is going to come.”
After so many seasons expecting more, there is not much room to “rise.”
“We’ve been fairly close, we thought,” D’Antoni said. “The best team beat us two years ago. Even last year, before they got hurt, they were the best team. Maybe it’s one of those things, if you wish it hard enough, it comes true.
“That’s also a great quality about James and Russell. Being great and making money is not enough. They want it all. They want a championship. That’s one of the reasons we talk about it. Their quest for it is total. We’re going along with their vision. Anything less than that, they have already. They have the accolades, the money, everything personally. The only thing left to pursue in the championship. That’s great to have the aspiration to do that.”
They are not the only ones judged with such outsized demands. D’Antoni and Morey, though widely respected, are often described with the caveat of having never taken a team to the NBA Finals. But including this season, the Suns, Knicks and Lakers have each been to the playoffs just once since D’Antoni left, in 2008, 2012 and 2104, respectively. The Rockets had won just one playoff series in 17 seasons before the current eight-season stretch in the postseason, with at least one series win in four of the past five seasons.
“I don’t think it bothers me,” D’Antoni said. “That’s the way our society is. You kind of know going in, that’s the way it is. We all know what’s at stake and the way this game is played and is something I can’t control anyway. I try to learn from past mistakes and try to do better, but don’t sit around and worry about it.”
It is the business they have chosen. But they are now in an era in which opinions are heard far beyond the guy over on the next barstool or even those who tune in to a radio talk show.
“That’s what we chose,” Morey said. “When you choose sports as what you do with your life, you know you’re always going to face long odds and you’re going to face those expectations and both positive things and criticisms. It comes with the territory. We have chosen the business you have to win the title … to really have accomplished anything.”
With D’Antoni, at the end of his contract, there seems no way that postseason success and how it is judged will not impact the next round of negotiations.
He is not the typical lame-duck coach in that there were contract offers. Fertitta has said that he would trust Morey to handle those decisions and talks. Morey has said the Rockets hope to keep D’Antoni. Both sides acknowledge that they agreed to table talks until after the season. But results will seem to be inevitably relevant.
“I’m not thinking about it daily now,” D’Antoni said. “I’m all-in on right now. I want to win the championship or get to the Finals or be the best we can be, whatever it is. My focus is pretty narrow right now. I’m not looking at the big picture right now. The only thing I’m looking at right now, from the bottom of my heart, is Oklahoma City. How can we beat these guys?”
That has been complicated by Westbrook’s quadriceps injury, likely to keep him out of the start of the series. But combining Westbrook with Harden, as it had with Paul and Harden, created extreme expectations.
At this point, the Rockets don’t deny them. Instead, they turn up the volume.
“I think we have two of the best players in the league in NBA history,” Morey said. “Anytime you have that, you have a shot. And, what else are we doing this for?
“All of us have done some good things in our careers in terms of James, Russ, Eric (Gordon.) But we’re all hungry for the ultimate prize.”