The Houston Rockets Might Really Be This Mediocre

On paper, the Houston Rockets seem like a trustworthy team. The roster's mix of vets and young guns yields a minutes-weighted age of 27.5—pretty much exactly when the average basketball player reaches his physical prime. That roster arguably goes 12 deep with quality rotation players, five of which shoot the three at an average or better rate. The roster is stocked with long-limbed athletes of the kind that should be able to smother teams defensively. They also have one of the best, if not the most aesthetically pleasing, scorers on the planet in James Harden. For any team, this is more than a good start.

And yet, for all that, the Rockets cannot be trusted. Just when it seems time to believe—say, when they won four straight after dropping three in a row to start their season—they go and lose four in a row (enough to get Kevin McHale fired) and then seven of their next eight in response to that, including three of J.B. Bickerstaff's first four games as coach. They bounce back from that debacle by winning seven of their next nine, only to go and drop both halves of a road back-to-back to the Nuggets and the Kings. They win another four of five, with the last of those being a Christmas day victory over the mighty Spurs, and they still can't hold it together long enough not to lose the next four games in a row. The Rockets are everything they should be on paper, but on the court they are a mess.

I thought I had them figured out for most of January, but the past two weeks or so blew that all up, too. When Houston lost to the Spurs and the Cavaliers while beating the Jazz (twice), the Pacers, the Grizzlies, the Wolves, and the Lakers, it looked like they were settling in as the good but not quite great team that can beat everybody but the league's best. Then against a Blake Griffin-less Clippers team they came back from being 14 down to start the fourth quarter, only to lose, and followed that up with a home loss to the Pistons. They seemed to right the ship by beating Milwaukee, Dallas, and New Orleans, but they got smoked by San Antonio on national TV last Wednesday, and dropped a game to the Thunder in which Dwight Howard got ejected and Russell Westbrook lit them up for a triple-double. Then they blew a six-point lead with three minutes to go against the Wizards after Howard got ejected (again) earlier in the fourth. Some real Rockets shit.

What do you even do with a team like that? A team so consistently inconsistent that it sits at exactly 25-25 after 50 games, a team with five winning streaks of three games or longer and five losing streaks of three games or longer. A team that's been blown out in over 20 percent of its games—they have 11 double-digit losses—but which has managed to win 18 of 29 when the score was within five points at any time in the last five minutes. This is a team that's 12-10 against the top 10 teams in the West and 4-8 against the top 10 in the East. What is there to do other than admit that the Rockets are whatever they are on any given night, and that whatever they are that night will bear almost no relation to what they were the game before or what they might be the game after.

Just about all we can count on the Rockets to do consistently at this point is get to the line—they're best in the NBA in free-throw rate, making this their fourth straight year in the top four—and make impossibly boneheaded defensive mistakes at the most inopportune times. Take this play from their most recent loss to the Wizards, for example:

You can't trust a team that does this. They're down by two with just over 38 seconds left and there's only 2.4 on the shot clock. They have to get a stop. The one thing they absolutely can't have in that situation is a miscommunication that lets somebody spring wide open to get an easy shot. And yet Harden and Jason Terry completely botch what may or may not have been a designed switch, and Jared Dudley winds up with the easiest layup of his career.

The Rockets make these kinds of mistakes all the time. When they play defense, it often seems not only as if they're failing to communicate during that particular play but also like they may not have ever talked to each other in their entire lives. This team is 28th in defensive efficiency, and falling—they've defended at a sub-Lakers rate over their past 10 games—for a reason. The tendency of able defenders like Patrick Beverley and Corey Brewer to gamble, the thermonuclear brainfarts from less able defenders like Harden and Ty Lawson, the physical incapability of Dwight Howard to cover the ground he used to—it adds up to a general discontinuity that creates fissures in their defense in the worst possible places.

The Rockets have become known the past few years for their remarkable commitment to hunting for the most efficient possible shots. This year's version of the Rockets does that as well as any other, but they also graciously allow opponents to do the same without much resistance.

As a percentage of total attempts, Rockets opponents take more threes than all but five teams, and fewer shots from midrange than all but one. On top of that, the Rockets have allowed opponents to convert a frighteningly high percentage—fourth highest in the NBA—of their shots in the restricted area. This despite the fact that Houston has two plus rim protectors in Howard (though he's not been quite as much of a plus protecting the rim as in years past) and Clint Capela indicates that they're simply giving up a ton of open as hell looks right next to the basket. Houston has figured out an efficient and effective way to play on offense, but they haven't yet figured out how to keep the opposition from being able to play the same way.

As it stands, Houston plays the kind of defense that gets a team bounced out of the playoffs with a quickness; more to the point, they play the type of defense that keeps teams from getting there in the first place. A first-round exit would be the third in four years for the Harden-era Rox, and two in three years for the Harden-Howard tandem, and it seems a much likelier outcome than any other as the All-Star break approaches.

A run like that often sends teams running back to the drawing board. Daryl Morey is a perpetual roster-tinkerer under the best of circumstances, and it's possible that Houston will start fresh; Howard, Lawson, Terrence Jones, and Donatas Motiejunas will all hit free agency this coming summer. Given all that and the way the team has looked throughout this season, it's entirely possible we see a very different Rockets team on the floor next year. This one hasn't quite figured out what it is, or what it wants to be. The next one will at least know what problems it needs to solve.