Are Houston Rockets Ready for the Even-Better Western Conference?

The good news for the Houston Rockets is they got better in the offseason. The bad news is their rivals did too.

Did the runner-up in the Western Conference last year do enough to get over the hump, or did the rest of the pack catch up to them?

The San Antonio Spurs added LaMarcus Aldridge. The Oklahoma City Thunder kept Enes Kanter and have Kevin Durant returning. The New Orleans Pelicans stole Alvin Gentry from the world champion Golden State Warriors as their new head coach.  And the Los Angeles Clippers revamped their bench.

How do the Rockets match up against each of these competitors after their respective changes? And do they have enough to get past the Warriors?

Golden State Warriors

The biggest reason the Rockets lost to the Warriors in the Western Conference Finals is that James Harden was essentially the only shot creator on the team.

Rockets general manager Daryl Morey  filled that need when he recently acquired Ty Lawson from the Denver Nuggets for Kostas Papanikolaou, Nick Johnson, Joey Dorsey, Pablo Prigioni and a protected first-round pick.

The chart below shows the top shot creators in the business last year, based on ball possession, scoring and passing, according to SportVU numbers from NBA.com.

The vertical axis shows how long the player kept the ball, and the horizontal axis shows how many dribbles he took on average. The icon is sized proportionally to points created (scoring and passing). Hover over an icon for more details. You can also use the slide bars to change the parameters or click to filter by teams.

What’s noteworthy here is how far up and to the right—both indications of shot creating—Lawson and Harden are. In fact, only two other players matched their minimum thresholds of 5.2 average dribbles, a 5.43 average touch time and 37.9 points produced: John Wall and Chris Paul.

Whether or not it’s enough to get Houston over the top remains to be seen, but the analytics suggest that the team met its biggest need this offseason.

Still, until the Warriors lose, they remain the favorites. The Rockets can beat them. They just shouldn’t be considered the favorites…yet.

There are reasonable concerns over how Lawson and Harden will fare defensively together, but remember, Houston had Pablo Prigioni or Jason Terry paired with Harden during the postseason, and neither veteran is a stopper. And defensive bulldog Patrick Beverley, who was injured, will still be there when they need him.

San Antonio Spurs

The San Antonio Spurs made the biggest splash in free agency, acquiring LaMarcus Aldridge to carry the torch into the next decade. There may be no better player in the league to assume Tim Duncan’s mantle.

Then, as if that weren’t enough, San Antonio added David West. Combined with Duncan and Boris Diaw, you might say, the Spurs are ready to “power forward” through this season.

So, how much will the new additions help San Antonio? Here’s a look at some of the key numbers, comparing their bigs to Houston’s with numbers gathered from Basketball-Reference.com:

I used per-100 possessions stats because the Spurs will be combining three new players, so they’re not likely to put up the same per-game stats. And since Donatas Motiejunas and Terrence Jones backed one another up at times, that overlap nerfed their relative value.

Duncan and West are getting older, so their numbers should decline. Howard is coming off an injury-plagued year, while Motiejunas and Jones are still young, so all of those numbers should improve. Furthermore, Houston’s Clint Capela, who showed flashes of outstanding play during the playoffs, should enter into the rotation without Josh Smith there now.

So, the Spurs are slightly overstated in the chart, and the Rockets understated.

All that said, the Spurs have a decisive edge in the paint over the Rockets, and few teams can make that claim. Add the advantage Defensive Player of the Year Kawhi Leonard has over Trevor Ariza, and the Spurs' frontcourt supremacy is inarguable.

A series between the Spurs and Rockets will come down to whether the Rockets’ backcourt can overcome the Spurs’ frontcourt superiority. The Spurs would have a slight advantage in this series, but an injury to either team could tip the scales.

New Orleans Pelicans

Watch out for the Pelicans! They’re going to be an exceptionally good team next year. In fact, I expect them to finish ahead of the Clippers in the regular-season standings. Alvin Gentry serving as the new head coach will be a huge part of the Pelicans' potential success.

The GIF below, courtesy of NBA.com, shows the difference between the Warriors shot chart in 2013-14 (the year before Gentry was the offensive coach) and 2014-15 (when Gentry took over the offense):

NBA.com

Now look at the Pelicans’ shot chart from last year, per NBA.com:

NBA.com

And consider that Gentry told John Reid of the Times-Picayune he wants superstar Anthony Davis to start taking more threes:

"

That's got to become a consistent shot for him. I don't think he's going to have any problem doing it. If you go back and look at his high school days, he was a very good 3-point shooter. But all of sudden he decided to grow six or eight inches. He still has that range, but I don't think it has been incorporated in the offense in college or the pros that he's been in.

We want him to shoot that shot. So I think you probably see him make more 3s than he's made his entire career.

"

The Pelicans are going to have a more modern offense engineered by a man who has already shown he can make a huge difference in just one season. And he’s not starting from scratch. Just like with the Warriors and Stephen Curry, Gentry has a transcendent player to build an offense around. 

He also has a quality complement of players surrounding Davis.

Quincy Pondexter, in particular, was a huge addition midseason. He didn’t put up flashy per-game numbers in New Orleans (9.0 points, 3.1 rebounds, 1.5 assists), but he was the glue guy the Pelicans were looking for. According to Basketball-Reference.com, the Pelicans won 13 of the 19 games (68.4 percent) in which both Pondexter and Davis started.

That translates to 56 wins in a full season—a reasonable ceiling for the Big Easy this year.

The Pelicans will have a great regular season, but they're still unproven in the playoffs. They gave the Warriors a stiffer challenge than expected last year, but they still have a lot to learn about winning in the postseason. 

They're on the right track, but it's going to take one more season before they get to the Conference Finals. Experience gives the Rockets the edge in a second-round series. 

Los Angeles Clippers

The Clippers made a lot of moves this offseason to revamp their bench. Whether or not they are good moves is debatable, as I discussed at Today's Fastbreak. 

I'm confident the Clippers got worse. They added more recognizable names, but that doesn’t mean they improved.

I’m fully aware that my opinion on this is in the minority. And some very smart people told me I’m wrong. I understand why people think the Clips got better, but it requires excessive optimism to see it.

I looked at the offensive (ORPM), defensive (DRPM) and real plus-minus (RPM) tracked at ESPN.com. The advantage of using RPM is it accounts for who a player is on court with and against. And when we look at the departing Clippers' numbers versus those of the new arrivals, it’s stunning:

The outgoing Clips had a total ORPM of minus-6.390 and a DRPM of 2.92. Those fall to minus-11.37 and 2.33, respectively, with the incoming group. Don’t hate the analyst, hate the game.

There’s a “positive-thinking” version of this conversation where Josh Smith plays like he did in Houston and not in Detroit, and Lance Stephenson plays like he did in Indiana and not in Charlotte. Austin Rivers plays like he did for that magical playoff moment against Houston. Jamal Crawford un-regresses. And Paul Pierce doesn’t play like he’s a 38-year-old man.

There’s also a very realistic possibility that the Clippers get the worst of all that. And if that happens, they’ll be longing for the good old days when Hedo Turkoglu was being a disaster.

I’m not arguing that the Clippers bench wasn’t bad last year. I’m just saying that no matter how bad they were, it doesn’t make this year’s version an improvement necessarily.

The Clippers’ revamp is like their uniform redesign: It changed, but it did so for the worst. They couldn’t put the nail in Houston’s coffin last year, and the Rockets got better, while the Clippers got worse. I give the Rockets a solid edge in a series.

Oklahoma City Thunder

The Thunder are the last of the contenders—a team that will see a healthy Kevin Durant (please?) return to the court.

Oklahoma City’s big offseason move was to keep Enes Kanter on the roster for the not-a-discount price of $70 million. That’s a lot of money for a guy who only plays on one side of the ball. Offensively, Kanter was splendid with the Thunder, averaging 21.6 points per 36 minutes with a 61.1 true shooting percentage last season.  

The following chart shows how the NBA’s defenses played before and after the trade. The larger the icon, the more the team improved. The teams closer to the bottom were better prior to the trade; the ones to the left were best afterward.

The Jazz gave up 10.8 fewer points per 100 possessions after they got rid of Kanter. The Thunder gave up 6.7 points more. Those two numbers represent the two poles of the NBA’s 30 teams.

Kanter played his last game for the Utah Jazz on Feb. 11. They were ranked 27th in the league on defense at the time. Oklahoma City was ranked 10th.

He played his first game for the Thunder on the 21st. For the remainder of the season, the Jazz had the NBA's best defense, and the Thunder had the second-worst.

That mark would likely have improved if Serge Ibaka, who didn’t play after March 13, hadn’t gotten injured, but he didn’t help much when he had the chance. The Thunder actually had a defensive rating of 109.2 with both Ibaka and Kanter on the court, which is even worse.

The Thunder are going to have a bad defense next year. And bad defenses don’t fare well in the postseason. There is a distinct possibility the Thunder don’t get out of the first round. There’s a Lloyd Christmas chance they beat the Rockets in a series, but it’s doubtful.

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I fully expect Houston, San Antonio and Golden State to be the top three seeds in the Western Conference playoff bracket, and they could finish in any order. They have separated themselves from the rest of the pack, and any of them could represent the West in the NBA Finals.

The Clippers, Thunder and Pelicans will claim the next three spots. 

The Rockets have an excellent chance at getting past both the Spurs and Warriors, but right now I have those latter teams in the Western Conference Finals. Houston's best shot at the "upset" is to get the No. 1 seed, making those two duke it out in the second round, before it can finish off the winner. 

Stats for this article were obtained from Basketball-Reference.com and NBA.com.