HOUSTON — The opening month of the NBA season has been marked by undeniable spells of disarray and even desperation for the Houston Rockets.
The Rockets lost seven of their first 11 games. They lost Chris Paul to a two-game suspension for fighting, then watched James Harden tweak a hamstring. They looked so uncharacteristically lost as a group — at both ends of the floor — that team officials offered Minnesota four future first-round draft picks in a failed attempt at a trade for Jimmy Butler.
Amid all that, Houston spent a month trying (and ultimately succeeding) to convince its highly regarded defensive coordinator, Jeff Bzdelik, to rescind his recent retirement — but only after flirting with Frank Vogel, the former Indiana and Orlando coach, when it appeared Bzdelik could not be coaxed back.
Oh, yes: Houston also brought a hasty end to the Carmelo Anthony experiment by announcing Thursday, after days of public denials, that the sides are indeed “parting ways.”
So there was plenty about the home team to discuss and dissect Thursday night when the Rockets followed up the Anthony bulletin by playing host to the Golden State Warriors in the teams’ first meeting since the Warriors rallied from 15 points down to win a Game 7 here at Toyota Center in May to advance to the NBA finals.
The unforeseen wrinkle: Thanks to last Monday’s nasty sideline spat between Kevin Durant and Draymond Green, Golden State showed up for Thursday’s game soaked in its own turmoil, which turned the whole occasion into something better described as the Chaos Bowl.
“We’re banged up a little bit physically and right now we’re banged up spiritually,” Golden State coach Steve Kerr said after the Rockets rolled up a 32-point lead in a 107-86 pounding on the Stephen Curry-less Warriors. “There is no getting around that.”
Rest assured that the league’s schedule-makers, along with their TNT broadcaster partners, did not conceive this matchup as a pre-Thanksgiving showcase with the idea that we would be asking about both teams: “Are they going to be OK?”
Yet that’s where we are in a bonkers opening burst to the season that, from the moment a fight involving Paul and Rajon Rondo broke out in LeBron James’ first home game as a Los Angeles Laker, has flummoxed those of us who are supposed to do a reasonable job forecasting what will happen in this league.
The Rockets — no matter how much you might have questioned the Melo gamble in the wake of Trevor Ariza’s departure to Phoenix — were never supposed to sink into a 4-7 hole to start the season. The Warriors, furthermore, are supposed to be the surest thing in North American professional sports.
So who would have imagined Houston, so soon after that dreadful start, finding a spark from the unheralded duo of James Ennis and Gary Clark — and now leaving us with the impression that it is the two-time reigning champions who are riddled with problems?
That’s what people want,” said Golden State veteran Andre Iguodala, well aware that the Durant/Green fissures are already being seized upon leaguewide as a potential source of hope. “People whose life existence is based on another team not succeeding.
“But that’s just part of the business,” he added. “I think we have a better sense of dealing with that than anyone else except for maybe LeBron James. There aren’t too many things that rattle us.”
The initial fallout from the confrontation between Durant and Green, though, clearly qualifies. After deciding against a publicly disclosed punishment when Green nearly came to blows with Kerr in the visitors’ locker room in Oklahoma City during the 2016 playoffs, Golden State’s lead decision-making duo of Kerr and general manager Bob Myers felt they had no alternative with Green but to take that step this time.
But that response came with consequences. By suspending Green for a game in the wake of his highly personal verbal attack on Durant, Kerr and Myers also ensured that this topic isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
Numerous members of the Golden State traveling party were actually quite encouraged to see Green and Durant walk into Thursday’s morning shoot-around side by side so soon after such well-chronicled acrimony. The latest report from Yahoo! Sports, in fact, disclosed that Green — who famously led the Warriors’ recruitment of Durant during the summer of 2016 — essentially dared Durant to leave as a free agent next summer during his rant.
But Thursday’s early optimism faded quickly. Perhaps not so surprisingly, given the depths of the discord, Golden State’s on-court performance Thursday night was dismal, to put it charitably, with Curry rooted to the bench in street clothes because of a pesky groin strain. And the postgame mood got downright testy when Durant was asked a solitary question about Green.
“Don’t ask me that again,” Durant said.
Green’s stint on the floor beside Durant was equally icy: 24 minutes without a single point. The Warriors’ starters failed to connect on a single 3-pointer sans Curry to bail them out. That hasn’t happened to a Golden State starting five since March 2013.
Yet Iguodala, for the record, is still proudly sticking with the memorable line he uncorked Tuesday night after Green served his suspension during a Warriors home win over Atlanta. “You can’t climb a mountain if it’s smooth,” he intoned. And Green, defiant as ever, insisted after Thursday’s loss that the 12-4 Warriors are “still the best team in the league” and are “still going to win a championship.”
The Rockets, meanwhile, remain determined to reject any suggestion that they’ve fixed anything significant, even though they’re now 3-0 — with impressive wins over Indiana, Denver (in Denver) and Golden State — since banishing Anthony.
Rather defiant himself over the years, going all the way back to his Phoenix Suns days, Houston coach Mike D’Antoni has rarely indicated publicly that his team’s confidence is so much as dented. So my ears perked up when he told me before Thursday’s game that the Rockets had taken “a good punch” to start the season. “It staggered us a little bit,” he said.
Not that you’ll get Golden State to believe that Houston’s window has closed. Not with Paul starting to look more like himself after dealing with tendinitis in his shooting elbow. Nor with Ennis and Clark looking as though they both fit into D’Antoni’s schemes far better than Anthony ever did.
“This is a different team; it’s not the same as last year’s team,” D’Antoni said. “But we can still be a top-10 defensive team. It should be.”