RARE BE-TREY-AL
String of errant 3-point attempts allows defending champions to take command
The Rockets had rolled long enough to tease themselves with all that seemed possible and within their grasp.
They more than believed their plan to build the team to supplant the Warriors could deliver what they so obsessively desired, they saw it working. Anyone could see it working until the part of the game they trusted most betrayed them. The dream died.
Ahab never defeated the white whale. Quixote never conquered his windmill. The Rockets could not dethrone the Warriors.
The Rockets built their usual commanding lead, but they never could overcome the Warriors and their sudden inability to make the shots they cherish, falling to a 101-92 Game 7 loss Monday as the Warriors took a fourth consecutive Western Conference championship with one more second-half comeback.
“Devastated,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said.
“Heartbroken,” Rockets guard Gerald Green said.
“It hurts; it hurts bad,” Trevor Ariza said. “That’s pretty … I don’t know … it just hurts right now.”
The pain ran deep, in large measures because the same conviction that drove the Rockets to believe they could supplant the Warriors crushed them when they could not, haunted by the opportunities so apparent when they took double-digit leads into the second half of consecutive close-out games.
The Warriors became the first team to come back from those deficits in games 6 and 7 of a playoff series, but the Rockets were left with the agonizing realization of what could have been.
“They were devastated,” Rockets coach Mike D’Antoni said. “We thought we were so close. We had it. We thought we had it. We had the first half. In the sixth game, we had this half. Guys gave everything they’ve got. I think they’re still proud of the work we did, but at the same time, it hurts.”
Yet, how they lost, with Chris Paul and their shooting touch missing, tortured them with the thoughts of what could have been.
The cruel misfortune of having Paul go out just as the Rockets were taking a 3-2 series lead, never coming close to the impossibly rapid recovery that would have been needed to return for Game 7, especially left the Rockets trying to overcome far more than they could against one of the indisputably great teams in NBA history.
“It sucks because you know you could win this series if we just had one more playmaker,” guard Eric Gordon said. “Chris, if he was out there, we would have been playing on Thursday.”
Instead, they were left to answer not just for one loss too many, but for the style and system that had them take — and miss — all those 3s, with the Warriors’ Stephen Curry and Kevin Durant seeming to feed off every second-half miss.
The Rockets got the ball inside. They had 56 points in the pain with Clint Capela scoring a series-high 20 points. They got good looks. Though James Harden tried plenty of his step-back 3s, the vast majority of the misses were the sort of shots, from corner to corner and wide-open on the wings, the Rockets were built to take. For 24 minutes, they just kept missing.
“It’s just the way we play,” D’Antoni said. “I just look at the fight, the hustle. I couldn’t be prouder. I thought we had good looks. Obviously, not every one was good. Neither was theirs. They just made a high percentage. We did everything well, except they outshot us. They were 16-of-39, and we were 7-of-44. That's kind of the tale of it.”
The Rockets could not overcome that. They briefly reduced that 13-point lead to six with five minutes left, but by then, the Warriors were rolling. After the 3-pointer P.J. Tucker drained from the corner to interrupt the run of misses, the Rockets never put in another.
With that, everything that led to one final showdown with the Warriors, from general manager Daryl Morey’s open obsession to the seven months building the team the Rockets were certain could take down the champions, seemed to taunt the Rockets.
“I’ve been dreaming about this moment,” Green said, speaking for a room full of teammates that struggled to speak. “I feel like I failed myself and the city. I feel like I let everyone down. It’s just not a really good feeling right now.”
He was no more responsible than the teammates who left as dejected. The Rockets had come close enough to that dream to see it clearly, only to be haunted by it when it remained just beyond their grasp.