Lone Star showdowns quite the rare treat
AS THE ROCKETS TAKE ON THE SPURS IN THE NBA PLAYOFFS, IT'S A RARE TREAT FOR FANS WHO RARELY GET TO SEE TEXAS TEAMS TANGLE IN THE POSTSEASON
For a state as big as Texas, intrastate pro sports rivalries aren’t quite what they should be.
When Pat Beverley was asked about the Rockets’ looming “state championship” against the San Antonio Spurs before a practice Sunday afternoon, he responded with a puzzled look, replying, “State championship?”
Well, yeah, Pat. Texas has two teams standing in the NBA playoffs and your team is one of them. By mid-May, one of you is going to be cutting the nets down. “OK, OK,” Beverley said, nodding. “Guess this is for the state championship.” And this is a relatively rare treat because, despite all the passion that exists for sports in Texas, our big-boy teams rarely cross paths come playoff time. Going to back to 1970, the first season in which it would have been possible on any playing field at the major-league level, no two of them have faced off with the end result being a banner hanging from the rafters. In fact, only two conference championships since 1976, the year San Antonio’s franchise joined the NBA fold, have come down to a Spurs-Rockets or Spurs-Mavericks dustup.
And, now that the Astros and the Rangers share the same
American League West address, there never can be a Texas World Series. As for hockey, the Dallas Stars by default are destined to be No. 1 in Texas every year, a circumstance that Houston — and the NHL, one would think — should be working to fix, rather than accepting the status quo. But the real onus, of course, is on the Texans, who, like the Oilers before them, never have gone to the Super Bowl and, with apologies to the grand and glorious history of the “Governor’s Cup” — awarded to the annual preseason victor during the Oilers-Cowboys era — that’s the only place they could have taken on the Dallas Cowboys in a game of consequence. At least the Astros and the Rangers, the Rockets and the Spurs and the Rockets and the Mavericks can pretend their multiple regular-season collisions and their occasional playoffround dustups possess cosmic implications.
D’Antoni dismissive
Mike D’Antoni, who had no ties to Texas before hiring on with the Rockets, dismissed a suggestion that somehow playing San Antonio — or Dallas — might get his players’ juices flowing extra as being unlikely, and he insists the Spurs’ geographical proximity, or the fact that the two teams’ cities are both dissected by the same freeway, Interstate 10, has little bearing on the passions that will come into play this week. Fair enough. But that fire we saw in the Rockets’ collective belly Monday night surely seemed to burn a lot hotter than it had in the previous series against Oklahoma City.
Truth to tell, the Rockets as a franchise should have a chip on its shoulder and should feel as if Spurs are owed their full fury, which was gloriously on display in Game 1. The team from the bigger city has been made to feel like the little brother for too long a time now. All five of San Antonio’s NBA championships — tying them atop the Texas chart with the Cowboys’ five Super Bowl victories — have been claimed since the Rockets won their back-to-back pair in the mid-1990s. The Spurs haven’t even missed the playoffs since 1997, when Gregg Popovich was an interim coach replacing Bob Hill, whom the Rockets had vanquished en route to the 1995 title.
Also, during the James Harden era the Spurs have owned the Rockets during the regular season. Save for the bizarrely aberrant 2013-14 campaign, when the Rockets registered a 4-0 sweep against a 62-20 San Antonio team that was bound for its most recent NBA championship (while Houston would go down meekly in the first round), the Spurs have won three of the four meetings each year, including the final three games of each of the last three seasons.
History on Rockets’ side
Historically, the Spurs lead 106-83 in regular-season meetings, but they trail 11-6 in the postseason and never have defeated the Rockets in a playoff series. It’s also comforting to know, especially in light of Monday’s pummeling, the Rockets advanced to the NBA Finals both times they first had to survive a best-of-seven against San Antonio.
The 1981 Western Conference semifinal series was oddly scripted and could prove to be a good omen for the current one. It also began with a Rockets victory in San Antonio, followed by a leveling Spurs victory. After that, neither team found a way to finagle a home win until the Rockets closed the deal with a 105100 Game 7 victory with Calvin Murphy, the same guy you know today for his animated banter and blinding outfits, going off for 42 points and Moses Malone contributing 21.
In 1995, the Rockets’ last-hurrah season to date, Hakeem Olajuwon schooled David Robinson and the Rockets won in six. Again, however, the home court proved to be of little advantage. Only after Game 6, a series-clinching 100-95 Rockets victory defined by Olajuwon’s 39 points and 17 rebounds, would the home fans leave either venue happy. The Rockets were on a 7-1 roll in the playoffs in San Antonio before Wednesday's loss in Game 2. That counts for something.
Baseball futility equal
What transpired this week between the Astros and the Rangers is of less consequence considering we’re barely into May, but any successes the local nine can experience, such as winning rallies from 5-0 deficits as occurred Tuesday night, in the months ahead, represent progress.
No matter how tepidly the Rockets
have fared vs. the Spurs in the regular season, winning at only a .440 clip, the Astros have been off-the-charts worse, going 53-95 (.358) coming into this season against Arlington’s team. More relevant — and far worse — was their 23-53 record (.267) since they became AL neighbors.
They’ve also taken a Silver Boot — presented annually to the series winner — to their butts 12 times in 16 tries.
But, in big-picture terms, the Rangers can’t act all haughty. The two franchises have both been around for approaching 60 years (although the Rangers spent 11 seasons in Washington before moving to Texas), yet neither has a World Series title to its name. The Rangers advanced back-to-back in 2010 and 2011 and, in the latter, they got to within a single strike twice in Game 6 of closing out the St. Louis Cardinals. Instead, St. Louis went on to win with an 11th-inning walk-off home run, then erased a first-inning 2-0 Rangers lead in Game 7, coasting to a 6-2 victory.
The Astros, for their part, never got so much as a whiff of what a World Series celebration might smell like, going stone-cold at the plate and getting swept by the Chicago White Sox in 2005, as anticlimactic a letdown as the city has ever been forced to endure on the sports front.
The Rockets do hold a modest edge over the Mavericks, winning two titles to Dallas’ one while owning a 90-81 regular-season advantage. The Mavericks have won two of three playoff series — but the Rockets prevailed most recently, 4-1 in 2015.
No football comparison
Football? Dallas kills us. It started with the third AFL championship game, when the Dallas Texans ended the Oilers’ two-season reign in the upstart league with a memorable 20-17 double-overtime victory at Jeppesen Stadium on the University of Houston campus. And, to be sure, the Cowboys’ five Super Bowl wins and eight appearances will taunt and haunt Houston for a long time to come.
And the Texans haven’t beaten the Cowboys since the franchise’s inaugural regular-season game 15 Septembers ago. The Oilers went 3-5 against Dallas between 1970 and 1994 but did dramatically prevail 30-24 in on Thanksgiving Day 1979 in a game that approached the magnitude of a Texas Super Bowl.
The teams, in fact, had a decent shot at staging a real-deal rematch on the floor of the Rose Bowl in January. However, while the Cowboys were as good as any team in the NFC, they got sucker-punched in the divisional round on a late 50-yard touchdown pass by the Rams’ Vince Ferragamo.
On the AFC side, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ dynasty was winding down, but the Oilers had to travel to Three Rivers Stadium for another AFC Championship Game and, deflated by a blown call on what should have been a tying touchdown pass from Dan Pastorini to Mike Renfro late in the third quarter, couldn’t keep the Steelers from going forth to win a fourth Super Bowl.
Thirty-seven years later, the Cowboys and the Texans both advanced to the divisional round together for the first time. Two more victories by each and they would have faced off in Super Bowl LI … in Houston. Didn’t happen, of course.
But Spurs-Rockets is a better-thannothing consolation prize.