The Rockets look for their fourth straight win tonight
During the dregs of the previous three seasons, I had a lot of time to think about the ups-and-downs of rooting for an NBA team. One of the things I kept coming back to were the positives and negatives of being a good vs. bad team.
Let’s get this out of the way first before anyone jumps on me: obviously, you want to root for a good team. There are so many benefits involved, including relevance in the NBA discourse, primetime games, exciting games with stakes, and general pride in the product that your team puts on the court. There is a level of satisfaction in having a good team that outweighs anything good that comes in a rebuilding year (winning the lottery aside, which you don’t know about in-season). The trade deadline is the wildest day of the season, and free agency allows you to dream big.
But there are negatives to rooting for a contender. Houston Rockets fans dealt with them aplenty during the James Harden years. Success became defined by rings and rings alone. Unfortunately, only one team hoists the Larry O’Brien Trophy at the end of the year. Yes, there is one winner and 29 losers every year, but more than half of NBA teams are aware that they aren’t championship material in a given season. So the focus turns to the dozen teams truly vying for a title. And when the margins are thin, you have to pick apart teams and find faults with great players in order to separate the contenders even further. And in an era that included a 73-win Warriors team adding Kevin Durant, it didn’t take a huge limb for commentators to climb onto the find fault with every team that wasn’t Golden State. You felt like you were constantly defending your fandom and explaining to people that, no, James Harden does not take WAY more free throws than anyone else. It was an exhausting time, even with all the positives.
So I’ll admit it was a bit refreshing to root for a team with lower expectations. I didn’t love it, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t need a change of pace. When your team is bad, the outcomes are predetermined: you’re going to lose a lot of games, you’re going to (hopefully) develop a couple of key pieces for your next run at contention, and you’re going to live and die by the draft lottery and draft itself. Free agency is a bore, and the trade deadline is just an excuse for fans of contenders to drop gems like “Alperen Sengun, a first round pick, and cash for Talen Horton-Tucker and two second round picks. Who says no?”
Anyway, this season has been a nice start on the road back to relevance. There have been some losses and stretches reminiscent of the past three seasons, but on the whole it’s been a vast improvement. My “realistic” goal coming into the season was 33 wins and meaningful games in March. While Houston isn’t going to make the play-in, technically these games are meaningful. And at 30 wins, the Rockets seem primed to grab three more.
Uh, the Washington Wizards have the worse record in the NBA. That’s quite impressive given that the Detroit Pistons lost like 58 games in a row this season. Also impressive? I’ve attended two NBA games this season, and one of them was one of Washington’s 11 wins over the San Antonio Spurs on January 29. So I’ll be staying far away from Toyota Center today (approximately 2500 miles away, in fact) lest I’m their good luck charm.
Tip-off
7:00pm CT
How To Watch
Space City Home Network
Injury Report
Rockets
Alperen Sengun-OUT (ankle, knee)
Cam Whitmore-OUT (knee)
Wizards
Landry Shamet-GTD
Richaun Holmes-GTD
The Line (as of this post)
Looking ahead because we can
Saturday night in Houston against the Cleveland Cavaliers