Track record not too promising for No. 4 seeds, but this one good

While the Rockets managed to win “just” 53 games, 12 fewer than they won in the regular season a year ago, they are not what their record says they are.

The Rockets are the fourth seed in the Western Conference playoffs, and they tied for the fifth-best record in the NBA, but they are not the fourth-best whatchamacallit or fifth-best whatchamathing.

Oh, they earned this middle-of-the-pack standing entering the postseason by stumbling through the first eight weeks of the season with lackluster defensive effort and a hopeless search for chemistry that wasn’t there to be found.

But the “they” we’re talking about isn’t the “they” that will take the court Sunday against the Utah Jazz in Game 1 of a best-of-seven series.

The team Daryl Morey put together to start the season wasn’t anywhere near good enough to be the fourth seed.

The team the Rockets will roll out Sunday is much better than that relative coin-toss position of a No. 4 versus No. 5 matchup. They need to be.

In the last 10 years, the West’s No. 5 seed has beaten the No. 4 seed nine times. And it took seven games the one time the higher seed claimed a series victory.

Not that they can afford to look — Chris Paul said the media may but the Rockets won’t — but Golden State will be waiting in the second round. The defending champions have to take out the Los Angeles Clippers in a firstround series to advance, but unless half the Warriors’ roster comes down with the Mike D’Antoni flu, that’s a mere formality.

In eight of the last 10 years, the team that made it out of the 4-5 test in the West lost in the second round.

That might indeed be the Rockets’ fate, too, but not being better than the Warriors isn’t a crime.

Fretting over not earning the No. 2 seed thanks to a loss at Oklahoma City on Tuesday (or, just as accurately, any of 28 other losses during the season) is a futile pursuit. If the Rockets don’t win it all, especially having posted a franchise-record 173 regular-season wins over the

last three years, does the round in which they lose really matter?

How it happens, if it does, will matter. How they go down. How they stand tall.

A year ago, the Rockets missed a universe-record 27 straight 3-pointers in Game 7 of the Western Conference finals against the Warriors yet were down by just eight points midway through the fourth quarter.

That was a special Rockets squad, with a unique makeup and chemistry that made the sum better than its parts.

This Rockets team is just about as scrappy as that one. It has shown it can maintain mental focus like that one did. Leaning on veteran leadership to pull it through, this group is capable.

Last season, the Rockets proved their mettle from day one. The difference between the two teams in the won-lost columns was set in the first 25 games.

This year’s team made up the difference between them in other areas — especially defense — in the final 25 games. In that stretch, the Rockets have played like contenders.

“Since the All-Star break, we’ve been rolling,” D’Antoni said.

The regular-season

grind determines playoff seeding, but playoff basketball is a different game, almost a different sport.

What makes a good playoff team?

“Being able to go out and impose your will,” D’Antoni said. “When tensions are at the highest, that you perform your best.”

In this series against the Jazz, the Rockets have more players who have proved capable of playing their best when tensions are highest. More players — led by James Harden, the best in the league this season, in fact — who can impose their will.

There have been plenty of teams that roll through the regular season, winning game after game on random Tuesday nights against opponents weary from cross-country trips. The lock-in focus of the postseason is a separator.

This Rockets squad has a playoff build to it. Morey always says he wants to put together teams that improve throughout the year and have special qualities that show even more during the playoffs.

He backed into this team out of necessity. The Rockets were so bad early on that almost any move Morey made was going to be an improvement.

Harden took his game to unforeseen heights out of desperation. Without his spectacular stretch of play in the middle of the season, the Rockets might not have even made the playoffs.

As it is, they finished four games behind the Warriors for the best record in the conference and five out of finishing with the worst mark of conference playoff teams.

Morey started making moves out of desperation. And like Harden, he lifted his game.

Morey somehow stacked veteran contributors like Kenneth Faried, Austin Rivers and Iman Shumpert, who all could play key roles at some point in the playoffs. And he added a valuable pickup in Danuel House Jr., whom every team in the league could have had.

They are the main reasons the Rockets aren’t the fourth- or fifth-best whatevers.

The Jazz probably think the same thing about themselves. Their 18-7 mark after the All-Star break is the third best in the NBA.

Not bad.

In the last 25 games, the Rockets posted the league’s top mark at 20-5.