Burying The Houston Rockets. Also Praising Them A Little.

Say so long to the 2014-2015 Houston Rockets, the most shameless team to ever do it, a team that was, from top to bottom, always looking to juke, game, exploit, and just generally not give one single shit about the noble pursuit of "Sport" in their quest for victory. A team that looked, on many occasions, to be only half engaged in their present activity, mailing in performances at random and exploding into life when they were thrown as far as one could be thrown into the depths of embarrassment. It was gross and it was befuddling, but it was unique.

We come not to celebrate the Rockets' life, nor to wag a finger at their grave: we come to merely contemplate what happened, and try to see what lessons we can learn and apply to our own lives.

James Harden, with his ratty beard and middle distance stare, almost certainly doesn't care what the people of THE WORLD think of him. He knows that 25 years from now, he will be able to take his vast fortune, won from a lifetime of charging the paint and drawing fouls, and build himself a compound somewhere off in the desert, where he will surround himself with earthly pleasures and wear only white tracksuits until he is dead.

He is not concerned with the nattering complains of the masses. His signature move has no relationship with those of great shooting guards past. Harden comes off a pick, drives into the teeth of the defense, holds the ball out, showing it to his defender, in defiance of a thousand years of basketball common sense, "This is the ball, go for it, you will get it." The defender, so sure after a lifetime of stopping someone who is asking them to try, bites. Harden's grip is strong, he creates contact, performs a tip of the head or a flail of the arms. He lets the refs do part of his job for him, without machismo or shame. He makes both free throws.

Is it endearing? No. But Harden does not care. He realizes, better than any other player, that everything that happens on a basketball court happens in context, and that domination is not the only way. Were we all James Harden, the American landscape would not be dotted with the blight of the suburban house, the ultimate vanity of of living in and dominating one's space. We would live in conjunction with the woods and nature, squeezing into the cracks that are there for us. It might not be pretty, but it is efficient, and maybe better for all involved.

When the Rockets looked to improve their roster at the deadline, they made a brazen calculation. They didn't feel that the league-wide trend towards the three-pointer had gone far enough, and believed players still weren't shooting enough from beyond the arc. So they traded for Corey Brewer, fast break artist and career .290 three-point shooter, and signed Josh Smith, multi-talented player and career .285 three-point shooter who had been ignobly dismissed from the Detroit Pistons, who deemed it worth around $30 million not to have him on their team.

And then the Rockets told these new wings to shoot threes instead of twos whenever possible. Smith went from 1.5 three-point attempts per 36 in Detroit to 4.9 Per 36 in Houston; Brewer, from 2.2 per 36 in Minnesota to 5.0 per 36 in Houston. Going from an awful team to a decent one helped their percentages a little bit: Smith went from a very bad .243 to a not-awful .330, Brewer from a totally dismal .185 to a pretty bad .285. But the team didn't care, because those shots were still worth more than the necessary long twos that pad NBA offenses!

The Rockets, with no conventional three-point options left, went hunting for the bottom of the "Bomb threes whenever you can" strategy. There would be bricks, nights of unfathomable horror, when Josh Smith would make the world's heads collapse into open palms. But in every stack of bricks there are GOLD BRICKS—this is not an expression, and also not strictly true, but there were nights like the one in which Smith singlehandedly brought the Rockets back to life in Game 3 of their first round series. They were the only NBA team to dig to the bottom of the well, no shame in their hearts. Desperate people may not quickly enough decide to dig to the bottom until there is truly nothing left.

This life of shamelessness is not without its horrors. The Rockets openly ruined what could have been a pretty nice series against the Clippers by sending DeAndre Jordan to the line over and over. It was obvious and cheap and didn't even seem like it was working. It was as if the Rockets had committed themselves to a life of sweatpants and cheese, a giving-up that went bone deep.

There is a pang, though. Maybe the Rockets aren't really shameless; maybe they are in fact incapable of accessing any emotion without the conduit of a deep shame to inspire them. Certainly, this is the case with Dwight Howard, who is so deeply embarrassing that it is impossible that he is not doing it on purpose to fuel himself. But the relationship between the Rockets and shame is more than just ordinary embarrassment. It's tidal, symbiotic, and weird.

Observe the team in their impressive-but-also-horrifying series against the Clippers. After a close victory in game two, they were blown out twice, fouling Jordan as often as they could to try and regain a foothold; the neurosis of this collection of players turned before our eyes from a stew into a sludge. Down 3-1, a laughingstock, the blessed victim of Chris Paul, the basketball genius finally headed to the Western Conference Finals, the Rockets came home and blew the Clippers away in three straight, with their series-swinging Game 6 win powered by threes and defense from Brewer and Smith. In less than a week's time, Houston went from an imminent teardown to something much more promising.

It seemed so unlikely in the moment that it was difficult to think of it as anything but macro-scale luck. In retrospect, it's something more: the Rockets, gashed open, finally taking the power they needed from the bleeding wound of their own shame, and turning it into the power they needed to dominate their opponents.

Even when that series was over and they were Western Conference finalists, the Rockets sported a minus-1 point differential, which is the cost of doing business this way. In the end, the shame engine had its limits: the Warriors, possibly the best NBA team in twenty years, were so good that the Rockets didn't have time to debase themselves for energy and still comeback. But you saw a flash in Harden's 48 point-performance, a flower born from the rich soil of shame that was their 35-point loss in game three. There was, in his abject 13-turnover performance, perhaps the sort of shame that could power an even greater run next year.

This year, though, the Rockets were not loved, but they were themselves. In their time on the court, they did it their way: their irritating, shameless, or shame-fueled, or maybe both way. For most, there is nothing much to celebrate here. But they did what they did in the way they meant to do it, for better and for worse.