Questions, Cautionary Tales Linger Despite Houston Rockets' Hot Start
HOUSTON — As the on-court Toyota Center announcer screamed his questions to Jason Terry after the Rockets’ 98-81 rout of a majority of the San Antonio Spurs on Thursday, he noted the last time the Rockets began a season with six consecutive victories, they ended it with the first of back-to-back NBA championships.
This was not actually true, but many people cheered, and it did bring up the memory of that season when everything came together around a dynamic center and a former power forward coach.
Dwight Howard and Kevin McHale have not replicated Hakeem Olajuwon and Rudy Tomjanovich by winning six games to start the season. And the Rockets have not matched the streak to open the season of the 1993-94 Rockets.
Their 6-0 start is the franchise’s best since the 1996-97 Rockets, not the championship team of three years earlier. But there are lessons from that first championship season that seem relevant again more than 20 years later. The Rockets have a long way to go to reach the 15-game run from 1993-94, but this team's accomplishment, if not unprecedented, is noteworthy.
Heading into Saturday’s showdown with the Golden State Warriors, another Western Conference team on an unbeaten roll, the Rockets have joined the 1985-86 Denver Nuggets as the only teams to ever start a season with as many as six consecutive double-digit wins.
Some of that is tied to the lightweights they knocked off on their way to this week’s wins against the Miami Heat and some of the Spurs. But the lesson of the 1993-94 Rockets and the streak they put together to start the season was not that they proved themselves in the season’s opening weeks but that they built a foundation for the trials that would come later.
“That’s what people forget,” Tomjanovich said recently. “San Antonio passed us that year. But we had come together. We knew what we could do.”
The Rockets’ rapid start this season has answered some questions.
They really are committed defensively. After the first six games, they rank first in opposing field-goal percentage and three-point percentage, second in points allowed per game and third in defensive rating, according to Basketball-Reference.com.
Howard is healthier and more explosive than since he left Orlando. The routs have helped keep the superstar center's minutes to just 32 per game. He's been more efficient, making 62.5 percent of his shots, a greater percentage than he ever has had through a full season. His chemistry with James Harden and other Rockets guards in the pick-and-roll is better too, and his low-post game is more polished and assertive.
Trevor Ariza has more than ably replaced Chandler Parsons, as his three-and-D strengths are ideal for the Rockets’ needs. If there were suspicions that his 40.7 percent three-point shooting last season was a contract-year fluke, they have been at least tabled by his 55 percent mark from long range through the first six games.
Other questions remain unanswered.
Power forward Terrence Jones had shown signs of stepping up, but he has yet to face one of the star power forwards who gave him fits last season. He will miss a third consecutive game and another week with a bruised nerve in his right leg; these absences have kept him from showing whether he can be more consistent than he ever was last season.
The backup big men have not come close to replacing Omer Asik. Planned replacement Joey Dorsey has barely been able to get off the bench behind undrafted rookie Tarik Black, and forward Donatas Motiejunas is suddenly unable to make a shot. The Rockets’ best option is having rookie small forward Kostas Papanikolaou play as a range-shooting power forward, even though he has not been a shot-making power forward.
The real questions, however, have not been and cannot be answered with the winning streak, even if the Rockets keep it going against the Warriors in what should be their toughest test of the season’s first two weeks.
Win or lose against the Warriors, the more important test will come when the Rockets struggle.
“We will have adversity,” Howard said. “It’s a long season. It’s about how you handle things that come up.”
For all the signs of improvement, from the tougher defense to the more reliable efforts against weak teams, the Rockets have yet to show how they will handle adversity because, so far, they have not faced any. The closest they have come have been the nagging injuries to Jones and Patrick Beverley.
The real issues will surely present themselves. Winning now could help build a foundation to handle whatever happens later.
“I do like where our guys are at,” McHale said. “They are working hard and stuff. I don’t think they have a lot of separate agendas. They all seem pretty much tied in to ‘let’s just try to win this game.’”
Even if the quick start this season has yet to be really tested, that attitude sounds a lot like the mindset the Rockets of ‘93-94 developed. But there is another similarity.
The Rockets’ run that season was in part fueled by a playoff failure in the Pacific Northwest the year before. They lost Game 7 in overtime in Seattle, which drove them the following season to put that heartache behind them.
“We had that unfortunate game at San Antonio at the end of the year, with that controversial call at the end of regulation,” Tomjanovich said. “It gave Seattle home-court advantage, and we lost that series. Every team won on their home court, and that game went down to the last shot. That could have been the beginning of it all then.”
The Rockets this season returned for the start of training camp being pushed by the pain left from the season before and particularly from the way it ended on Damian Lillard’s dagger three-pointer at the Game 6 buzzer in Portland.
“We’ve been committed since Damian Lillard’s shot last year,” Howard said. “That’s one thing that really stuck in our heads—that 0.9 second we relaxed on the defensive end. Someone was able to get a shot off. That really stuck with us all summer. We don’t want situations like that to happen early in the season where we allow guys to score, get easy buckets and then in the playoffs we get exposed for that. We want to clean that up now.”
It is too soon to know if the Rockets have made those repairs, or if they have just taken steps in that direction. They might have demonstrated that their strengths are real, but the weaknesses remain.
They still have a long way to go to get to the postseason—the only time they really will be measured—or even to the '93-94 team’s 15-0 start. But as long as the subject of that season comes up, there's reason to hope history repeats itself.
“We start great,” Howard said, “and we just want to finish great.”
Jonathan Feigen covers the Houston Rockets for Bleacher Report and the Houston Chronicle.
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