The Houston Rockets are sitting in a mess they created
By Criss Partee
The Houston Rockets are, once again, sitting in a mess they created.
What in the name of Hakeem Olajuwon is going on with the Houston Rockets? Besides tearing down the franchise, that is.
Can someone please explain how the Rockets managed to go from a perennial playoff team to present and future cellar-dwellers, all in, the matter of a couple of months?
Now that the NBA trade deadline has come and gone, we can effectively say the Rockets traded away James Harden for…nothing. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada. You get what I’m saying. Tilman Fertitta just took the lead as the worst owner (team governor) in the NBA. Fertitta’s team currently has the third worse record in the league (13-32), with plenty of time left to play themselves into the worst record this season.
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I’ll go ahead and guarantee that now. The Rockets will end the 2020-21 season with the worse record in the NBA. Talk about going out on a limb, right? Just in case you don’t remember some of the details of the Harden trade, I’ll break it down just a little bit.
The Rockets essentially traded Harden to the Brooklyn Nets for Caris LeVert (and other assets), who was then immediately traded away to the Indiana Pacers in return for Victor Oladipo, who now, less than three months later, no longer plays for the Rockets.
It looks like Fertitta is planning to run his basketball team the same way he’s run many of his restaurants…and that is right into the ground.
The fans and the players on the roster are the ones who are going to suffer over the next handful of years. Yes, the players make tons of money, but these guys want to win. At the least, players want to know the organization is doing the best it can to help put the team in a position to win. Stevie Wonder can see what’s going on in Houston.
But the biggest loser and future scapegoat of this whole situation is first-year, first-time head coach Stephen Silas. This man gives 20 years of his life to coaching as an assistant and the first opportunity he gets as a head coach is this mountain of a mess. The most unfortunate part is that Silas is a good coach, but in the NBA, you need stars to win. John Wall is a good player at this stage of his career, not a star.
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Maybe the NBA will find a way to “persuade” Fertitta into selling the team. If not, Rockets fans are in for a long bout of ineptitude out of that front office for the foreseeable future.