Among the missing ingredients: a will to win, pride, hustle, heart

Are the Rockets waiting on Jimmy Butler to fix all this?

Shouldn’t Chris Paul, Clint Capela, P.J. Tucker, Carmelo Anthony and the remnants of a 65-win team be better than this?

I guess we overrated these Rockets. We foolishly thought all their “championship or bust” talk meant they would start a new season playing with a proud, fiery heart.

Right now, Mike D’Antoni’s 1-5 squad is officially the most disappointing and disinterested team in the NBA.

“We’re playing like crap,” said D’Antoni, after the Portland Commentary Trail Blazers — playing the tail end of a back-to-back and their fourth game in six nights — beat the Rockets 104-85 at emptiedout Toyota Center on Tuesday night.

Oh, the poor, helpless Rockets. Never mind that reigning champion Golden State is 7-1, even though the Warriors changed their roster yet again and still don’t have game-changer DeMarcus Cousins on the floor.

Ignoring the fact that 14 of the NBA’s 30 teams entered Wednesday with winning records.

“We just all have to kind of just hold ourselves accountable and say, ‘Look, we’re not playing the best we can,’ ” said Anthony, the new Rocket who shot just 2-of-12 against the Blazers and too often appeared physically opposed to championship-caliber defense.

At least there was some truth in Melo’s talk.

This is all on the Rockets right now.

Yes, James Harden has missed two games. Yes, CP3 also sat out a couple because of Rajon Rondo’s spit.

“When it goes bad, it goes bad,” Anthony said.

But Tuesday was the worst I’ve seen the Rockets since the end of the dysfunctional Dwight Howard days.

No pride. Zero fight. Little hustle. A missing heart.

Paul was outplayed by Portland’s Damian Lillard and C.J. McCollum and never dominated the hardwood. The normally gritty Tucker was mostly missing in action. Eric Gordon was 4-of-18 from the floor and is connecting on a freezing 30.6 percent of his shots this season. Capela brought it (14 points, 14 boards, three blocks) but missed five of his seven free throws.

Most importantly, D’Antoni appeared helpless on the sideline. He paced, stared and frowned. Then the 2016-17 NBA Coach of the Year simply took a seat, resigned to the fact there was nothing he could do to breathe life into a team that somehow appears broken just six contests into an 82-game season.

“I don’t have a whole lot of answers for you right now,” said D’Antoni, who basically ended his news conference with an apologetic walk-off after acknowledging more talk wasn’t going to fix anything.

In recent years, the Rockets have dressed up their locker room with flashy advanced metrics. More big, bold talk colored the walls post-defeat Tuesday: “2018-19 A Career Year The Rockets Way.”

But this is the only number that really matters: five.

That’s the Warriors’ lead over the Rockets, which is easily fixable if this year’s team actually starts playing real basketball again.

They miss Trevor Ariza, but they weren’t going to overpay him. If owner Tilman Fertitta really wanted to impress someone with big cash, he’d lure former defensive guru Jeff Bzdelik out of sudden retirement.

But let’s not pretend Ryan Anderson made a huge impact at the end of last season. And don’t forget that Luc Mbah a Moute was a shell of his regular-season self in the playoffs, playing in only nine of the Rockets’ 17 games and averaging just 16.6 minutes.

This is a different team. But it’s not that different.

You know what looks even worse than whining about a few missing pieces? The local lemmings who spent the last two offseasons swearing that a suddenly revived Anthony would be a perfect fit in red and white.

Just add Melo, mix it all together and be championship ready. Riiiiight.

Maybe it still works out. But team defense already has disappeared, Anthony is shooting just 37.3 percent from the field, and if there is a miracle at the end of the canyon, it’s clearly going to take time and require major change to appear.

There’s also a reason the Rockets already want Butler so badly: They know they’re a mess as is and would be blown out of the gym if a seven-game series with Golden State started today.

Harden’s return will fix some of this. A healthy James Ennis will help. The Rockets surely will be better.

But home-court advantage and the West’s No. 1 seed? Finally overcoming the Warriors and turning a bad second half at home in Game 7 of last year’s Western Conference finals into this season’s NBA Finals?

The Rockets already are on the verge of stacking their deck so high that simply earning a topfour seed will feel like an April blessing.

“It’s late if you’re in the West,” D’Antoni said. “That’s the problem.”

The Rockets have become their own problem.

The next time this 1-5 team takes the court, it might want to try playing with a heart.