Forget Everything You've Heard About Chris Paul and James Harden's Shortcomings
Admit it. Even amid all this—the 15-game winning streak, James Harden's MVP war path and the threes (so, so many threes), you're still not sure about the Houston Rockets.
I get it. The reasons to question the Rockets, who'll try to extend their run to 16 straight wins when they face the sliding Oklahoma City Thunder on Tuesday night, are rational and well-documented.
Head coach Mike D'Antoni has, to put it mildly, a spotty postseason track record. And before you buy the Rockets as championship threats, you need to be sure the guy calling the shots won't get out-schemed when it matters. Last year, Gregg Popovich's San Antonio Spurs took away Houston's layups and threes, daring the Rockets to shoot the mid-rangers that had basically been outlawed all season, and D'Antoni couldn't adjust.
You might also be worried about the Rockets' two best players in the postseason. If Chris Paul quit playing tomorrow, the second paragraph of his career epitaph (after a first that chronicled his many achievements and status among the greatest to ever run the point) would begin with some version of "Paul, though, never managed to lead his teams beyond the postseason's second round."
CP3's legacy of playoff failure (often achieved in spectacular fashion) is a major part of his story.
To a lesser extent, so is Harden's. He went out with a whimper in last year's conference semifinals and was on the bench when the Rockets engineered one of the most stunning postseason comebacks in recent memory, charging back to steal Game 6 of the 2015 West semifinals...against Paul's Los Angeles Clippers.
It's fair to worry when past precedent says the three principals in Houston are unreliable. But ironically, precedent, or in this case the glaring lack of it, is the best reason to believe in the Rockets.
Because we have never seen anything like this before.
Offensive History
Start with the anecdotal: Paul and Harden form the most devastating playmaking tandem we've ever seen. The former is one of the great pure point guards of all time, and the latter represents an evolutionary leap forward at the position. Harden is unstoppable as a scorer—an efficiency monster who'd average 20.8 points per game if you only counted his made threes and free-throws.
He's the league's leading scorer, a man who can't be stopped by any individual defender or collective scheme. He just also happens to average 8.9 assists per game.
With those two ensuring Houston never has anything less than an elite offensive pilot at the controls, the scoring never stops. When Paul and Harden play together in the clutch, which we can reasonably say best approximates the intensity of the playoffs, Houston scores at obscene rates, as this note from ESPN's Micah Adams attests:
While it's true the Golden State Warriors own the superior offensive rating, that statistic doesn't do justice to the sheer extremity of Houston's attack.
If we're going to believe in the Rockets based on the idea that they do things no one has seen, and that it makes them uniquely dangerous, you have to consider the process by which they get their points.
Houston attempts 50.4 percent of its shots from beyond the arc, a figure that leads the league by plenty. The Brooklyn Nets are the only other team above 40 percent. Never in the league's history has a team taken half its shots from deep. Houston is on pace to do that.
Isolation Sensations
While leading the analytically driven charge into an era of threes and free throws, the Rockets are also masters of a throwback, much-derided style.
They destroy you in isolation.
Harden and Paul have the first and second highest points-per-possession averages among players with at least 100 isolation sets. Collectively, the Rockets average 1.14 points per isolation possession. That rate leads the league, which is doubly important because Houston also devotes a larger percentage of its offense to isolation plays than anyone else.
No offense in the NBA's publicly available database (which spans the last three years) has isolated more often or more effectively than this year's Rockets.
Spread the floor and leverage one of two singular individual talents to either score or find an open shooter.
It's achingly simplistic, this attack created by general manager Daryl Morey's analytical approach and nurtured by D'Antoni's revolutionary devotion to pace and space. But the result is spectacular. It's weaponized mathematics unleashed at blistering velocity.
Defense Wins Championships...Even in Houston
The Rockets aren't just two guys hunting mismatches, dissecting pick-and-roll coverages and setting up three-point looks. They're also a capable defensive bunch built around like-sized wings who pass for forwards (and sometimes even centers) in today's modern schemes.
Trevor Ariza, PJ Tucker and Luc Mbah a Moute give the Rockets another edge, and Mbah a Moute is the guy who creates the most noticeable advantage.
According to Ben Falk of Cleaning the Glass, Houston allows 100.4 points per 100 possessions when Mbah a Moute shares the floor with Harden, a figure that would rank first in the league. When Harden plays without Mbah a Moute, Houston permits 112.6 points per 100 possessions, which would rank last.
See? It's not all about the offense. The Rockets are exceptionally deep and capable of winning games on both ends...which is one reason they head into OKC having won, and won, and won.
It's also why you're starting to hear some telling chatter.
"You have to win a few of those to win a championship," Tucker told Jonathan Feigen of the Houston Chronicle after the Rockets pulled off a comeback victory against the Boston Celtics on Saturday.
"That type of atmosphere, it's always petty loud in there," Harden told Feigen ahead of the matchup with Oklahoma City. "A lot of energy in that building. It'll prepare us for what we're heading towards."
That's title-pursuit talk, and it is earned.
The Power of Precedent
Maybe none of that stuff about evolutionary offense and underrated defense sways you. Maybe you're still hung up on Houston's past.
But consider the idea of precedent from another angle.
This is the last team we should presume to forecast based on its past because it's the first to do so many remarkable things.
Paul is a choker. Harden quits. D'Antoni doesn't adjust.
That's what those guys used to do, but what the Rockets, as a whole, are doing now matters more.
It's what makes it impossible to know what they're capable of, what their ceiling might be. There's no precedent for a team playing this way, and it's possible we're watching one of those situations unfold where an outlier is really just ahead of the curve, and it'll take the league a while to adjust.
The history suggesting we shouldn't believe in the Rockets is still there, and anyone committing to Houston's corner will have to do it knowing the Warriors are also still there, foot on the clutch waiting to shift into the gear only they possess.
But history is funny that way. It's always being rewritten.
These Rockets, a never-before-seen phenomenon, look ready to pen a new chapter.
Stats courtesy of Basketball Reference, Cleaning the Glass or NBA.com unless otherwise specified. Accurate through games played Monday, March 5.
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