A season full of surprises ends with the biggest of all

Shell-shocked. That’s all Mike D’Antoni could come up with to describe how he felt Friday. He wasn’t alone. Even after spending the last several hours thinking about it, the Rockets had no answers for what occurred Thursday night.

They had seen clips from their 39-point pounding by the San Antonio Spurs. They had chatted among themselves. A couple of them barely slept as they relived the game that cut their season short. 114-75. That’s how it ended. A season that pleasant-

ly surprised Rockets faithful, that shocked experts, that put the Rockets on the map as one of the elite NBA teams.

The end of the Rockets’ season was just as surprising as the season itself.

They were supposed to be better this year. But 14 wins better? One of the top teams in the league better? No. 3 in the Western Conference better? Few saw that coming. It didn’t take long, though, to realize the Rockets were onto something. D’Antoni had them rolling. James Harden was one of the top point guards in the league. Something special was brewing.

The way it came to a screeching halt at the hands of Gregg Popovich and the Spurs after a wild, up-and-down, six-game series is a head-scratcher.

On Friday, players met with D’Antoni and general manager Daryl Morey.

They packed their things and went their separate ways for the offseason.

A head-scratcher

Sam Dekker, who was hobbling with a boot on his left foot thanks to an ankle he rolled Thursday, couldn’t wrap his head around the loss.

“It was weird,” he said. “Seventy-five points. We did that in a few first halves this year. That wasn’t us.” It wasn’t. The Rockets overachieved this season.

It’s hard to remember that, though, after they were eliminated in crushing fashion.

The Spurs are moving on to face Golden State in the Western Conference finals starting Sunday; the rest of the basketball universe is talking about Game 6 Thursday night.

It’s not crazy the Rockets lost to the Spurs. It’s crazy how they lost to them. The Rockets had nothing to give. Out of the gate, they were flat, lackluster, off.

It could have been the Game 5 disappointment that carried over.

“They don’t have a weakness you can exploit,” D’Antoni said as he tried to explain what happened to his team. “It zapped us. I think during the long haul when we didn’t win Game 5, we came back and were mentally at zero.”

He was confident the Rockets would learn from it. With good reason, too. The Rockets, starting with Harden, learned from last year. They changed, grew and matured.

They built something worth watching. They were a surprise this season, but they’ll be a target in the next one. It only took one season to get there.

The end was ugly. There’s no way around it, no way to justify it, no way to explain it.

But the body of work — the 55 regular-season wins, the MVP play of Harden, the coaching of D’Antoni, the sparks off the bench, the improvement of Pat Beverley and Clint Capela — is what should be remembered.

“Winning in the NBA is hard,” D’Antoni said. “We demonstrated a lot of the good stuff. But at the end, we didn’t have enough of the mettle. We have to get that and being together, knowing where we fail, knowing the rotations, knowing when to rest or not. Knowing what happened from experience, we got to get better. There is no explaining last night. I wish I could sit here and give you a reason. I got none.”

Simply unforgettable

So Friday, they took a break from sulking to talk.

They looked ahead. They talked about the future, about accountability.

The Rockets’ loss will linger. It will be brought up over and over and over again next season. Harden and Co. will be scrutinized and questioned.

That’s what happens when you lose by 39 points in an elimination game. That’s what happens when you don’t show up at 100 percent ready to take down your opponent.

It’s understandable and they’ll accept it. They’ll also move on. “It surprised everybody and I am still shellshocked, but now what do we do?” D’Antoni said. “We’ve been going all year, it happened. Now what? Are we man enough to admit it? Look yourselves in the mirror and get better. That’s the only thing we can do, and we will do it.

“I guarantee we will be better.”