IS IT TIME TO TANK?
Even though tanking may not be the answer, winning right now meaningless for Rockets
Winning meaningless games won’t help the Rockets now.
Something weird happened this week.
Strange.
Troubling.
Off target and off-putting.
The Rockets won a basketball game.
“It changes everything,” Rockets center Kelly Olynyk told reporters after the second-worst team in the NBA won its first game in April. “Winning is a big thing, and it’s not easy to win in this league.”
Look, I could spend the rest of this column ripping, shredding and poking fun at that those words.
It changes everything? Winning in the NBA is hard? Really??!
Those lines were publicly issued by an eight-year starter/ reserve set to make about $12 million this season while playing for a 14-38 team?
But I enjoyed watching Olynyk back when he was with the Boston Celtics. He was Jimmy Butler’s Miami Heat teammate in the NBA Finals last season, and Olynyk’s opinion is just as valid as mine.
Still, it’s funny.
Could you imagine the local and national backlash if James Harden had something similar from 2013-20, 50 games into the regular season?
The simple words also captured the denial that the Rockets are still engaging in, even after Harden coldly and cruelly forced his way to Brooklyn, Russell Westbrook joined the way-below.500 Washington Wizards, P.J. Tucker joined the Milwaukee Bucks and the only thing separating these Rockets from the concrete floor of the Association is the annually horrible Minnesota Timberwolves.
The Rockets’ first win in their last seven games — a 102-93 home victory over a randomly disappointing Dallas Mavericks team on Wednesday — changed nothing.
You’ve been forced to watch
this local NBA team all season. You know this is one of the worst Rockets squads in franchise history. And we’ve all known since mid-February that this best thing for the 2020-21 Rockets is for this 2020-21 campaign to be over as soon as humanly possible.
Bring on the draft.
Cue up the lottery.
Pray for a top-four first-round pick and a couple young franchise changers to link with Kevin Porter Jr., Jae’Sean Tate and whoever returns in red next year.
Tanking has been one of the NBA’s biggest problems for more than a decade. So I’m not going to say tank, tank, tank!
But … acting like winning
three (or four) out of every 10 games during the next month is going to magically transport the Rockets back into the league’s elite class next season?
Please.
That’s the exact type of denial that helped force the Rockets into this broken season.
“We have a competitive group,” first-year Rockets coach Stephen Silas said this week.
“We have a bunch of guys who like each other.”
OK. So then what’s been the real problem since December?
This roster isn’t a few injuries away from being a championship contender. This team, as currently constructed, has nothing in common with the near-annual Western Conference contenders
that Chris Paul, Dwight Howard, Mike D’Antoni, Kevin McHale and Harden spearheaded during the previous decade.
Tank?
Who needs to tank when you can play your best players and officially be just one and a half games better than the last-place Timberwolves?
More fun with numbers: The Rockets’ 7-19 home record is the worst in the NBA, and you have to go all the way back to 1982-83 to find a Rockets team this bad. Silas’ uneven crew is also just as bad on the road (7-19) as it is inside an eerie Toyota Center.
John Wall is making way too much NBA salary-cap money to be shooting a career-worst 40.4 percent from the floor. The 30year-old point guard is also averaging a career-low 6.8 assists, which means that his $41 million payday — it increases to $44 million next year — doesn’t exactly translate into analyticsdriven nightly Ws.
Entering Saturday night’s road game against the Golden State Warriors, Wall had only played in 33 of the Rockets’ 52 contests, while Christian Wood had been limited to just 29 games.
Tate has been the Rockets’ most dependable nightly player this season. Which is great for the 25-year-old rookie, but scary when you remember that even the most dedicated Rockets fans barely knew his name when training camp began.
The Rockets told you they effectively were giving up on 2020-21 when they traded away Westbrook and gave into Harden’s me-first trade demand.
Since then, a franchise-record 20-game losing streak followed and Houston’s NBA team has turned into a local and national afterthought.
Harden’s overloaded Nets now are the team to beat in the Eastern Conference. Chris Paul’s Phoenix Suns have joined the Utah Jazz — once an annual playoff knockout for Harden’s Rockets — as the NBA’s best surprise.
The game after these Rockets beat the Mavs, they struggled to stay on the hardwood versus the Paul George-less Los Angeles Clippers, were outscored by an absurd 41-10 in the second quarter and lost by 17 points.
That was more like it.
It’s been a long time since the Rockets were this bad. But the best thing right now is for the Rockets to keep racking up Ls.
Nailing the draft and making the right roster decisions for 2021-22 are all that matters.
Winning a meaningless regular season game in April won’t change anything.