Harden’s farewell looking prophetic
There was no way James Harden was entirely prescient in his farewell address after the Rockets’ previous meeting with the Lakers. But he was not wrong.
The Rockets had been blown out by Los Angeles in consecutive games. More than most, they had come to measure themselves against the Lakers, who are not only the reigning NBA champions but the team that eliminated the Rockets in the second round last season.
Harden declared that the Rockets’ “situation is crazy” and “something I don’t think can be fixed.” By the next morning, he was invited to stay home. That afternoon, he was traded to Brooklyn, ending an era that likely was already over.
He could not have known that in between the Rockets’ meeting with the Lakers that January night and their game in Los Angeles on Wednesday that
Christian Wood would badly damage his right ankle, triggering a 20game losing streak, or that injuries and other issues would be so unrelenting that Houston would use an NBA-record 29 players, starting 22 among 41 different lineups.
The Rockets were so bitterly disappointed to have lost to the Lakers in the postseason that the departures began the next day with Mike D’Antoni’s decision to step down as coach.
That team’s successors never entirely recovered, other than a brief run of relative success soon after Harden was traded and before injuries wrecked the season, never allowing the Rockets to find out what they could have been.
The Rockets are not only locked into the worst record in the NBA with three games remaining, they will finish with the third-worst record in franchise history. The two seasons that were worse, 1967-68 in the first season as the San Diego Rockets and 1982-83 after the departure of Moses Malone, brought Elvin Hayes and Ralph Sampson in subsequent drafts.
This season, with flattened lottery odds, will bring the Rockets a 52.1 percent chance of remaining in the top four of the draft (thus preventing the pick from going to the Oklahoma City Thunder) and a 14 percent chance at the top pick.
That is of little concern to the members of a roster that has changed dramatically and has been filled out with aptly titled “hardship” exemption additions for the season’s final week.
With nearly half of the rotation manned by players on two-way or 10-day contracts, the Rockets have, from one meeting with the Lakers to the next, gone from clinging to the idea they could return to contender status to trying to demonstrate they should stay in the NBA.
The Lakers will not only bring back LeBron James, who has been out for 25 of L.A.’s past 27 games because of a sprained and then sore right ankle, they will mark the occasion with the unveiling of their championship banner.
Title aspirations have not changed for the Lakers, who have reason to take the meeting with the Rockets seriously as they try to avoid a play-in tournament that James has decried.
The Rockets’ goals, to escape the final games of the season without additional injuries that could bleed into offseason training and maybe steal a win on the way out, have changed almost as dramatically as the roster. Of the players who faced the Lakers in those January games at Toyota Center, only one — rookie Jae’Sean Tate — is expected to play at Staples Center on Wednesday. Wood would make it two if he can return from his sore right ankle.
When they met in January, the Lakers led by 27 in one game, 30 the next. The Rockets twice led by one point. Yet as much as the Rockets with Harden and P.J. Tucker — and long before the injuries to John Wall, Eric Gordon, David Nwaba and Sterling Brown — seemed overmatched by the Lakers, the issues at the time seemed to be about Harden’s unhappiness and his teammates’ dissatisfaction with him.
They beat the Spurs in the game after the trade, starting an 8-4 stretch.
But Wall ended up going in and out of the lineup, as did Harden’s successor in the starting five, Victor Oladipo. Since Wood’s injury, and with the cascade of injuries and other absences that have followed, the Rockets have lost 43 of 48 games, making them an afterthought in the Lakers’ party Wednesday.
Yet back in January, when Harden said the Rockets were beyond repair, he was not predicting the fall that would come and would not have suggested such a thing could be possible had he remained and avoided the injury issues that befell the Rockets without him and sidelined him in Brooklyn.
“We’re not even close, honestly, to that team or all the other elite teams out there,” Harden said that night, referring to the Rockets’ chances to contend for the championship the Lakers will celebrate Wednesday.
That does not need to be said now, as if the Rockets needed one more reminder of how greatly things have changed.