5. Houston Rockets
If you were paying attention, you could have seen this coming. We all should have. It was almost too obvious that at first we overlooked what seems now like a foregone conclusion.
Mike D’Antoni and James Harden are two men who are very good at a very particular set of skills, and Daryl Morey was smart enough to put the round peg into the round hole. It worked out pretty well.
Now, people question whether an offensive genius can meld together the games of two guards who can both pass and shoot the lights out of the arena, as if we learned nothing from last season.
It’s going to work.
Can they win a title as currently constituted? It’s anyone’s guess. But any team that puts up this many threes can take four out of seven off of anyone, including these Warriors. More importantly, moving forward, you can bet that any team with Dork Elvis at the helm is going to maximize its chances in the years to come.
Path to Glory: Use the regular season as an 82 game experiment to figure out which crunch time lineup works best against the Warriors, and hope for the shooting series of Harden and Paul’s lives come May.