Rockets get one last shot to make NBA Finals
Chris Paul’s availability is a question mark, but challengers happy to be home for winner-take-all showdown
The Rockets would have taken the deal if offered, as they rushed to say amid the wreckage of their Game 6 crash. Even after the most distressing sort of loss, they said they were happy to have one game, one last chance on their home floor, to halt the Warriors’ reign and return to the NBA Finals for the first time since the Clutch City championships.
They would not have imagined it, or chosen it, like this. But that all might make the quest and even the reward within sight greater.
They arrive at that last chance at history off a catastrophic second-half collapse and with Chris Paul, the maestro brought in for times just like these, a long shot to play at all and certain to be diminished if he can.
Paul on Sunday had yet to even test his injured right hamstring, and Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni predicted his point guard’s status would be a game-time decision. Even that was a guess, but no one Saturday expressed greater optimism that Paul would return.
Still, the journey from those offseason minicamps that built goals and resolve to the Game 7 showdown Monday night at Toyota Center, from the 65-win regular season to the spectacular highs and lows of six battles with the Warriors, has delivered the Rockets their opportunity to accomplish what was thought by many to be fantasy.
However significantly the challenge has grown in their final steps, the Rockets have their chance and a sense that the improbability others see is no different from the doubts they have conquered along the way.
“I mean, if you asked us when we were in the Bahamas this summer, this team together, you know, Western Conference finals, Game 7 to go to the Finals, against the Warriors, we'll take that,” James Harden said moments after Saturday’s 115-86 drubbing in Game 6. “So nothing changes for us. We know what we have to do.”
The long to-do list begins where it has throughout the series. The Rockets must defend with consistent, aggressive precision and must take care of the ball reliably, with none of the letups the Warriors exploited so dramatically in Saturday’s third quarter.
Record differential
When the Rockets turned the ball over and came up empty on drives, Golden State found waves of open shots and the shooting touch it lacked in the first half. The more the Warriors scored, the more the Rockets were stuck going at them in the half court, where they repeatedly turned the ball over and came up empty on drives. That cycle led to the Warriors’ 64-25 second-half demolition and a renewed sense of what the Rockets are up against.
Golden State has outscored the Rockets by 54 points in the series, the largest differential in a playoff series tied after three games. The Rockets, however, brought the Western Conference finals to a seventh game by gutting out consecutive lowscoring wins, the sort thought no less improbable against the Warriors than bouncing back while short-handed is now.
“We’re ready for it,” Rockets forward Trevor Ariza said. “It’s Game 7. That’s what we worked hard for all year: to have Game 7 in our building and leave everything on the line.
“We don’t feel any pressure. We’re still confident, and we’re ready for Monday.”
The Rockets cannot rely on home court. They split the regular-season meetings with the Warriors at Toyota Center and the first two games of the series and often said in the past two weeks that home-court advantage was not a factor with teams at this level.
But they also spent the season openly chasing the NBA’s best record so that if there would be a Game 7, it would be on their home floor.
The Warriors cruised through the regular season deeming that possibility not too great a concern. But if home court cannot guarantee anything, as both teams have demonstrated, they each did win two of three games at home to possibly indicate the greater probability that comes there. The Rockets will take any edge they can find, having spent five of the six months of the season to earn it.
“The reason we said it didn't matter is because we know each team is capable of winning on the road,” D’Antoni said. “So in a sense, it matters less. Now we do have home court, and there is a favorability of that. It might not be as high as most people want, because we're playing against the best team in the league. But there is a little bit of an advantage.
“I think that the advantage comes on just the enthusiasm. And when you get on rolls, you can hear the crowd, you can feel the energy. You can do all that.”
The collision course that brought the Rockets and Warriors to this moment will demand all of that and more.
Opportunity at hand
“There’s no pressure,” Harden said. “It’s an opportunity, an opportunity that we all are excited to be a part of. Game 7 at our house. That’s what we’ve worked the entire regular season for, to get home-court advantage. So we’re going to come out and be ready.
“We’ve got the whole city behind us, and they’re as loyal as they come. Game 7 in H-Town. Let’s get it.”