In Defense of Hating the Rockets

Maybe there was some latent hatred for the Rockets—some small-scale regionalism from Mavericks or Spurs fans or a hibernating grudge from a Magic fan or Knicks fan from the days of Houston's relevance—but Houston schadenfreude was never really a Thing before the events of this offseason. That is, before GM Daryl Morey and the Houston Rockets struck out on Chris Bosh and Carmelo Anthony in the free agency sweepstakes and let their third-best player, Chandler Parsons, walk away in restricted free agency to those aforementioned rivals in Dallas. So then that all climaxed: Anyone looking for an excuse to load up and blast Morey and the analytics movement as a whole wholeheartedly did so, and anyone else with any festering Houston vitriol enjoyed the suffering with anything from a soft chuckle and a snarky text to a friend to a full-fledged online takedown.

Of course, because this is the internet, and because it needs to feed itself, we were then treated to the backlash to the hatred, in which anyone who had heartily feasted on Houston's suffering was entreated to be civil and rational and see things clearly. Perhaps this, like all the flame-throwing at Morey, is a consequence of the growing popularity of analytics, but the discourse on the NBA has in recent years seen an uptick in a zealous worship of rationality. This commonly takes the form of basketball bloggers indulging in lighthearted mockery of fans for their biased opinions—as if fans of teams should be expected to do anything else. It's a tired gimmick, but Kobe Bryant cultists and fatally optimistic Lakers fans make easy targets.

What those fans are really being mocked for is not any specific opinion, but that they have the temerity to consume their sports with anything but cold, emotionless reason. They may or may not know they're being illogical when they say Bryant and Jeremy Lin will constitute the greatest backcourt in the league, but they almost definitely don't care. They will root lustily for their team, logic be damned. That's not rational, but it's also not ignoble. At worst, it's human.

So this, then, is the backlash to the backlash—the defense of the hatred for Houston. Sports villainy may be an irrational thing, and it frequently leads to things much worse than irrationality, but on its own, it's only another expression of the inherent irrationality of caring about sports at all. Sure, James Harden's worth as a human being has nothing to do with how impressively lazy he is on defense, and Dwight Howard shouldn't be blamed for a public persona that may not be totally accurate. Hating either of those players for either of those things is irrational, and so is hating the entire collective of the Rockets franchise because of some small quibbles with two of its employees. But this is sports, and caring about basketball like this at all is logically indefensible. Wade thousands of words into any analysis-heavy piece on the offensive sets of the Minnesota Timberwolves or the shot selection of the Detroit Pistons' two highest-paid players and that numbing sense of basketball's meaningless will inevitably overcome you.

We all keep on caring anyway though, however powerfully that feeling gnaws at us. Even the most calculating and objective writers have some emotional investment in the game; it's a game, after all, and emotions are what gives it meaning. The game doesn't talk back though, even as we try to speak to it. It's there for interpretation, and even if hating a given team for being some projection of a distasteful reality isn't an especially useful interpretation, it's no different than pretending that basketball has any kind of intrinsic worth. They're both acts of the imagination.

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