Kevin McHale's Imperfect Marriage with Rockets Reaches Its Logical Conclusion
It was May 19. That was the last time it felt like Kevin McHale was on a real high as the Houston Rockets' coach.
The Western Conference Finals had yet to begin, and the concept of firing the coach to whom they'd given a three-year contract extension at Christmas wasn't even a glint in the eyes of owner Leslie Alexander and general manager Daryl Morey.
What did shine in their eyes was a certain gold trophy they felt was finally close.
Alas, that night the Rockets would lose the first of three consecutive games to a clearly superior, tighter-knit Golden State Warriors group. As the series wore on, the Rockets showed fundamental limitations as a team beyond James Harden's creativity. They would be gone in five.
And they would look even worse in starting this season 4-7, triggering McHale's removal Wednesday, barely into his fifth Houston season, in favor of interim head coach J.B. Bickerstaff, as first reported by Yahoo Sports' Adrian Wojnarowski.
Despite the timing, less than a month into the season, it isn't surprising whatsoever that this 6'10" square-shouldered peg was rashly removed from what was always an imperfect fit anyway.
It was back before the West finals that McHale had sat in Oracle Arena and rah-rah'd to reporters the same way he had to his players.
"How hard are we going to have to play? Who are we going to have to knock on their rear end? How much are we going to have to try to punch them in the mouth on this play and attack and go downhill? And how much fight are we going to have to try to win this series?"
As he spoke, McHale was still riding the exhilaration of the Rockets' improbable series rally over the Clippers. Even so, the entire old-school mentality felt dissonantly out of place at the elite level of the NBA's final four, and it was a reminder of how different McHale was as the keep-it-simple head coach of a cutting-edge analytics organization run by Morey.
The Rockets need something less simple now, and maybe they always did, even if McHale's laissez-faire way freed Harden to elevate his game to unimaginable heights. But it was apparent this fall in training camp how little urgency remained in the team's spirit.
Guys were lax in various ways, taking the lead of Dwight Howard, who continued his I'll-pick-my-spots mentality to prepare for the season or even go hard once it started. Injuries and Howard's quest to feel 100 percent limited McHale's ability to establish a flow at either end—and the simplicity of McHale's message wasn't enough to stimulate the team to be on point.
It was always an awkward match, but McHale got by because he was open-minded to applying the data from the offices and video rooms.
A guy who became a Boston legend amid the hardwood physicality of the 1980s was not a natural fit for the modern stats movement in the way someone such as Bickerstaff, who is 21 years younger and never played in the league, is likely to be.
The Rockets are logically hoping for that part of their game to be elevated in practice with Bickerstaff's promotion, aside from the temporary alarm that goes off for the players when the coach is fired.
Bickerstaff, 36, relates to the players on a totally different, closer level than McHale. There's a cool to Bickerstaff that makes the players believe that he gets them, and there should be an immediate unity for this group as a result.
However, take a step back from the coaching change and understand that this has been an uphill battle for the Rockets for a long, long time. Despite his heralded analytics pedigree, Morey has been hunting for traditional superstar talent every which way since the Yao Ming era essentially ended in 2009.
It led the Rockets to the Harden-Howard foundation, which no NBA insider would've predicted to be a secure leadership base. Neither guy naturally inspires those around him, but that ended up being the reality in Houston, with the team's approach just to take the great players it could get.
That was the same mindset that brought Ty Lawson, branded a knucklehead in Denver despite his obvious skills, to Houston to answer Harden's call to lighten his load upon elimination by Golden State.
"When you're trying to be the best team out of 30," Morey told the Associated Press after trading for Lawson, "you've got to risk all over the place."
Trying to trade for Pau Gasol, throwing money at Jeremy Lin, dumping Lin just for the chance to land Chris Bosh…Alexander is more driven to go for it than most know. That urgent opportunity-seeking has unquestionably fueled the Rockets' rise—yet the byproduct is substandard.
The whole operation feels like a panicky, desperate grab.
That's the road the Rockets are on, right or wrong. It only follows that they would dismiss McHale much sooner than later—a totally incongruous move after just validating his work with last year's extension.
When things are going wrong in a place that feels like a panicky, desperate grab, you push the next domino instead of waiting for it to fall.
Kevin Ding is an NBA senior writer for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter, @KevinDing.
