It’s only one loss, but what a loss
Coach, players don’t want rout to erase all the good
In a desperate search for good news, or at least gallows humor to help get through the day after, Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni stumbled across a bright side.
At least, he said, with the Rockets’ season over he does not have to view the video of their Game 6 collapse.
It is enough that the images kept running through his mind. They will haunt his team, leaving faint hope that the memories of Spurs 114, Rockets 75 might drive the Rockets to escape the wreckage.
As they packed lockers and held exit meetings, stunned to have their season so suddenly ended, the Rockets found little reason to think good could come from one of the worst losses in NBA playoff history.
“That’s not going to be something you can forget,” forward Trevor Ariza
said. “Any lessons you can take from it? No. Just, it’s there. It’s always going to be there, but you can’t take nothing with you from that. That was terrible.”
Instead, the Rockets insisted the one loss, no matter how spectacularly disastrous, should not define them, should not obscure all they had accomplished. It should not, they said, slap a label on James Harden, who sauntered through much of the final game of his best season, often at half-speed as if playing at a family reunion.
But it will not be forgotten.
That is not possible, either for the way it stains their reputation to even how it influences their drive when, after a longer than wanted offseason, they can climb from the wreckage and rebuild.
‘I’m still shell-shocked’
This was their one elimination game, the one game they had to win. They responded with their most disheartening, most dispassionate defeat. It does not erase the successes that built expectations. But those accomplishments also cannot obscure or change whatever was revealed when the Rockets faced their moment of truth.
“I’m still shell-shocked,” D’Antoni said. “How do you build on it? It was so bad. I can’t explain it. It hasn’t happened all year. I don’t think we had one game all year we totally collapsed. I don’t know if it’s mental or energy. It’s something we’ll look at.
“I will mostly take the body of work we did for 90 games and get that better. I don’t think this will rear its head.”
The Rockets did not avoid the worst loss in their playoff history until Bobby Brown tossed in a final 3-pointer. It was, with few exceptions, among the worst in NBA history.
The 39-point loss matched the third-most lopsided home loss in Games 6 or 7 in NBA history, trailing only Milwaukee’s 120-66 defeat to Chicago in 2015 and the San Francisco Warriors’ 118-78 loss to the Los Angeles Lakers in 1969. The St. Louis Bombers lost 85-46 to the Philadelphia Warriors in 1948.
A tight group
The rout was made more shocking because of an otherwise successful season that offered no clue to the twist ending. The Rockets’ 55 wins and fivegame, first-round series win dramatically changed expectations. After they failed to live up to them, they said they would not forget how they got there, even if that made the loss more maddening.
“That doesn’t erase nine months of what we put in starting back in July,” D’Antoni said. “We can’t do that. Not for me. I’m too emotionally invested. I know for fans, it’s frustrating when you have a game like last night. But we’ll build on this. We’ll get better.
“It’s a good group. I enjoyed coaching them. I told them last night, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.”
D’Antoni’s players said they believe in one another and will grow with another season together. They did not expect to have exit meetings Friday, but how it ended did not change how they viewed the season or the season to come.
“Obviously, it was a tough way to end the season,” forward Ryan Anderson said. “But we had a really positive year, good things we can look back on and build from. I think we have a really, really bright future ahead.
“You just reflect on the negative ending. But it’s one game. It was a bad game. We have to move on. It’s going to take a while.”
Botched opportunity
Still, with the scars fresh, there was a sense the Rockets went from overachieving through the season to dramatically disappointing in the end. The hangover from the Game 5 overtime loss was about as close as anyone came to finding an explanation for the Game 6 debacle. But this time, the Rockets have, Harden said Thursday, “a whole summer” to move on.
“I feel like we missed a big opportunity this season,” Ariza said. “I don’t think there were a lot of teams that were better than us. Although nobody really gave us a chance at the beginning of the year to be where we are at, I still feel that we underachieved.
“I still feel like there is more we can do, more we can give. That’s the encouraging part about it. That’s something that I think we can take into this offseason and look forward to for next season.”